The Free Design – Kites Are Fun

Was not expecting this to sound so rich. Good lord it's a beautiful press.

All the copies were sold out at my local store - I waited in line for this too.
I picked this up for $17.99 USD on here - much cheaper than retail. I think it is a must have for people who like some light-hearted easy-listening music.

how's this pressing sound? been thinking about buying an original but to have it on gold vinyl would be nice

The Free Design was a family band backed in spirit and attitude by their father, a noted jazz trombonist from the 1940’s. And to that end, the audience that this group reached in 1967, the Summer of Love, the year The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, Pink Floyd released Pipers At The Gates Of Dawn, Cream with Disraeli Gears, The Rolling Stones had Their Satanic Majesties Request, Jim Hendrix staggered the world with Are You Experienced, along with The Velvet Underground & Nico, certainly established that this shiny easy listening group had an attraction for much older listeners.

Without a doubt, The Beach Boys, along with groups such as The Mamas & Papas, and James Taylor [who was just round the corner], created beautiful mellow productions that were out of this world. But these bands had genuine visionary artistic merit as opposed to Free Design, who had pleasant shifting harmonies, had the hooks, had sophisticated arrangements, but were, as we called acts of this ilk during the day, “plastic people” ... meaning that they were copouts, co-opting the values of the times with the looks and the sounds but not the honesty and the merit. Remember, even The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family where creating music in this style, though reaching a greater and wider audience because of their television shows, yet they were considered still equally as shallow.

Flash forward to this century, and you’ll find bands like The Explores Club and Stereolab who have built on these themes and observations, pointing with reverence to Free Design as being more than instrumental as an influence, while going on to polish their sound even more so ... and while Free Design may come off as the embers of a warm campfire in the night, these later bands, struggle to create anything more than fresh air.

There’s not much to think about when you drop this record onto your turntable, and maybe that’s the point, or “was” the point during the psychedelic 60’s, when the world was at war, where the world was in flux, where drug and commercial sensory overloads battered us like trees in a storm, and we just needed a sunny field, a warm day, and a kite to allow us to forget, if only for a moment, all that was happening around us.

Take it for what it is ... there’s really nothing to love or dislike, it’s all so pleasantly mater of fact.

Review by Jenell Kesler