When pop music is good it can be utterly uplifting and bring a smile to the grumpiest of faces. This is very, very good.
For my money The Turtles were the best American pop band of all and possibly one of the best pop bands period. Flo & Eddie grew out of the Turtles founder members – Mark Volman & Howard Kaylan – sojourn with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and the first two albums from this pair have finally been released on CD after contractual wrangles that tied up the bands name for thirty years.

The first of these albums is a sublime piece of west coast pop and there are numbers here that are easily the match of their Turtles output. 'Thoughts Have Turned’ , 'Strange Girl’, 'I Been Born Again’ all feature superb harmonies around melodies that the likes of The Hollies or The Beach Boys would have been proud and show the musicianship that Flo & Eddie learned at the feet of Zappa. To anyone familiar with Zappa, Aynsley Dunbar, Don Preston or Jim Pons will be instantly recognisable – class and quality and capable of creating magic.
The lyrics though are the thing that sets Flo & Eddie apart from the Turtles. In a world of cutesy-poo songs about love and satisfaction they were singing about girls who belonged to everyone and about 'Can I give her to my friends?' or opening a song with 'Think of all the things the we could do today – maybe we could burn down the house today' – there is a twisted side to the lyrics that the boys learned from Zappa, a way of looking at the world through a warped lens; and all within a gorgeous set of songs that can be whistled or hummed and that stick in the memory for ages.
The second album wasn’t released for another two years and by this time they had been playing live and developing the comedy side of their nature as support for Alice Cooper and others and the songs represent the change in their style. Some of the songs are as good as on the first album – 'If We Only Had The Time’ or 'Marmendy Mill’ are divine – but there are also numbers such as 'Carlos And The Bull’ or 'The Sanzini Brothers’ which were big hits live but should have stayed there. But then they also include three covers of classic Britbeat songs that actually match if not better the originals – The Kinks 'Days’, The Small Faces 'Afterglow’ and 'The Best Part Of Breaking Up..’ show what they were still capable of.

Rather than thinking about this as a double CD (and bearing in mind that each CD is only around 35 minutes) buy this for the first disc and revel in the 'bonus’ tracks on the second disc.