Consumer Guide Album

The Flying Burrito Brothers: Burrito Deluxe [A&M, 1970]
The Gilded Palace of Sin was an ominous, obsessive, tongue-in-cheek country-rock synthesis, absorbing rural and urban, traditional and contemporary, at point of impact. This is a skillful, lightweight folk-rock blend, enlivening the tempos and themes of the country music whose usages it honors. Its high point is called "Older Guys," a rock (as opposed to rock and roll) idea by definition, and though songs like "Cody, Cody" and "Man in the Fog"--as well as Jagger-Richard's previously unrecorded "Wild Horses"--obviously speak from Gram Parsons's Waycross soul, they're vague enough for Chris Hillman's folkie harmonies to take them over. B+