Inside Out

AMG Review of Inside Out

Richie Unterberger
All Music Guide

The second album of Bobby Darin's brief folk-rock phase also found him sounding at times much like Tim Hardin, although it was poppier and inferior to its predecessor, late 1966's If I Were a Carpenter. Darin again plumbed for material by Hardin and John Sebastian, although he limited himself to two Hardin tunes ("The Lady Came from Baltimore" and "Black Sheep Boy") this time around; there were also three compositions by the Bonner-Gordon team (famous for the Turtles' "Happy Together"). Although there were some elements of folk-rock at play, the album was more properly termed as mature pop/rock, using (as If I Were a Carpenter did) light orchestration. It's not bad, but there are better versions than these songs; the arrangements are a little too syrupy, the singing is okay but not brilliant, some of the songs are too lightweight, and the overall mood is too damned unrelentingly understated. Actually the most interesting track is Darin's own "I Am," with its graceful harp plucks and wistful air. The most unexpected song choice was certainly the Rolling Stones' "Back Street Girl" (which had not even been released in the U.S. yet). And no, it doesn't challenge or redefine the Stones' original; it manages to almost make it into easy listening pop, actually. The album has been combined with an early 1967 LP, Inside Out, on a single-disc CD reissue on Diablo that also adds five bonus tracks, four recorded in November 1967, the fifth (a cover of Van McCoy's "My Baby Needs Me") undated.