1966-1967 (CD) by The Seekers

0724381464229. New condition. CD. As the third part of a five-volume series presenting most of the Seekers' recordings, the 22 tracks on 1966-1967 are actually a simple combination of their 1966 album Come the Day and their 1967 album Seen in Green. However, the big hit from Come the Day, "Georgy Girl," has been excluded (though it's included on another volume in this series, Hits, B-Sides & the 90's). Much more annoyingly, so has another Come the Day track, "I Wish You Could Be Here," a Paul Simon-Bruce Woodley composition that Simon & Garfunkel never put on their records; that cut does not appear elsewhere in the series. Everything else from the albums is here, though, and the disc reflects the group's move from their folk roots to more fully arranged folk- pop. There are a disappointing number of uninteresting cover versions on the material from Come the Day, sometimes with gloppy strings, though that album did also have the uplifting Woodley original "Come the Day," as well as the Woodley-Simon collaboration "Red Rubber Ball," which was a hit for the Cyrkle. The music from Seen in Green is more satisfying; original numbers are in the majority, and the orchestration pushes the sound more toward breezy if slightly bittersweet mainstream pop. There are also a couple of more celebrity songwriting collaborations, these being between Woodley and Tom Paxton ("Angeline Is Always Friday") and Woodley and Simon again ("Cloudy"). 1966-1967 was included as one of the discs in Australian EMI's Complete Seekers box set, which contains all five volumes of the series. ~ Richie Unterberger, Rovi