Full Title: There's Gonna Be A Storm: The Complete Recordings 1966-1969.
The Left Banke includes: Tomm Finn, Jeff Winfield, Michael Brown, George Cameron, Steve Martin.
Producers include: Steve & Bill Jerome, Michael Brown, The Left Banke, Arthur Schroek, Gene Radice.
Compilation producer: Bill Inglot.
Though it's missing a few rarities -- namely the Steve Martin single for Buddha that reunited him with Michael Brown -- this is the most definitive Left Banke compilation. It features the entirety of their two late-'60s albums, as well as a couple of singles that didn't make it onto LPs at the time (though they later appeared on Rhino's History) and a previously unissued cut, "Men Are Building Sand." Their debut 1967 LP, Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina, is an underrated classic of the time, matching smart harmonies and pop hooks to baroque orchestration. Its brilliance casts a bit of a shadow over the rest of this collection. The group's 1968 album Too suffered from bloated production and, more importantly, the absence of chief songwriter/arranger Michael Brown. In turn, the 1967 single Brown cut under the Left Banke moniker with singer Bert Sommer suffers from the absence of lead vocalist Steve Martin. By the time Brown and Martin tenuously reunited for a late-1969 single, some of the spark had gone. All of the aforementioned highs and lows of this prodigiously talented but strife-ridden group are on this disc. ~ Richie Unterberger
THERE'S GONNA BE A STORM is classically influenced melodic 60s pop at its most gorgeous. The Left Banke was led by keyboardist/ songwriter Michael Browne, whose main influences were the British Invasion (Beatles, Zombies) and the Baroque (his father was a prominent New York City orchestral musician). The band's secret weapon, however, was Steve Martin, whose haunting near falsetto vocal style can bear comparison with the Zombies' great Colin Blunstone.
Although the group is principally remembered for their two big hits--the widely covered "Walk Away Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina"--the reality is they had a lot of top grade material. The two-CD set THERE'S GONNA BE A STORM collects just about everything the group recorded, including "Desiree," the utterly haunting over-the-top masterpiece whose commercial failure essentially ended the group's career (in its day-- 1967--it was reputedly the most expensive single record ever produced). minimize