Детали релиза : The Who - The Who By Numbers (Super Deluxe Edition) (1975/2026) [FLAC (tracks)]

Album Review: The Who - The Who By Numbers (Super Deluxe)

Pete Townshend was on the verge of turning 30 when he was recording 1975's The Who by Numbers, an age of no small significance to rockers who came of age in the 1960s. As a songwriter who was fascinated with the rituals of youth culture (a subject he addressed at length on the Who's previous album, 1973's epochal Quadrophenia), he wasn't taking it especially well. At the time of its release, many fans and critics noticed The Who by Numbers didn't rock especially hard compared to the group's best work, and it didn't help that the LP's hit single, "Squeeze Box," was an amusing but painfully obvious double entendre that was short on the Who's traditional fire and smarts. The Who by Numbers was the album where Townshend began approaching maturity head on, and with much trepidation; he fretted over his drinking and the problems he avoided ("However Much I Booze"), imagined a very different life than his own ("Imagine a Man"), wondered who really cared about him and his life ("How Many Friends"), worried over his problems with relationships ("They're All In Love"), and sought solace in simple pleasures that might have seemed trivial in his youth ("Blue, Red and Grey"). Significantly, the most immediately engaging of Townshend's songs on the album, "Slip Kid," was a semi-funky tale of a teenage revolutionary, and the most rollicking track came from John Entwistle, "Success Story," a jokey number about the travails of rock stardom. If Entwistle wasn't sharing Townshend's angst, both in his writing and in his rich bass work, neither was Roger Daltrey, who sings with plenty of swagger and force, or Keith Moon, whose rolling, tumbling drumming crashes like waves behind the band. The Who by Numbers plays better decades after the fact than it did in 1975; it's a much stronger work than 1978's Who Are You (which brought the Keith Moon era to a troubling end) and 1981's Face Dances and 1982's It's Hard (where Townshend began saving his best songs for his solo projects). If this band's leader wasn't especially happy when he made it, what he had to say about it was intelligent and affecting, even if it was hardly what Who fans wanted or expected at the time. Calling The Who by Numbers their last great album stretches it a bit, but it certainly outclasses the music that followed in their original run.

© Mark Deming /TiVo