Consumer Guide Album

The Box Tops: Dimensions [Bell, 1969]
My weakness for lead singer Alex Chilton is admitted, but this really is the group's best album, a goldmine of ambiguities for nascent producer theorists. I have to grant that Chilton's "I Shall Be Released" isn't up to Cocker, Makeba, Simone, or the Band, but that the group should do it at all, as a single, yet . . . Also, dig "Midnight Angel." Charged a notch because Bell didn't even bother to list Chilton, much less provide us with the names of the studio musicians who impersonate the group on those sessions. B