The Yardbirds aka Roger the Engineer. Quite a odd album. Haven't listened to this in years. Still quite don't know what to make of it. The reissue does have Happenings Ten Years Time Ago and it's b side Psycho Daisies. I'd say that the Little Games album is better.
Unlike most first-rate 60s British bands, The Yardbirds never quite made a stand-out album. The closest they were was "
Five Live Yardbirds", and that's just a live recording that documents the band at the peak of their early powers, issued when LPs were little more than 45s comps with hastily recorded filler.
Their later efforts, though bands like the Beatles, the Kinks or the Stones were already showing the way towards albums as an "artistic statements", were uneven and haphazard collections without little care for cohesion or an unifying concept.
From that point of view, it's difficult to choose between "
Roger the Engineer" and "
Little Games", as they both feel as compilations of current Yardbirds' songs more than coherent albums. So it depends on you liking more the songs on one of them above the other.
There are some outstanding songs on both, btw, but to me "
Roger the Engineer" has the edge, in part because it was the first of the two I owned and in part because it's more r&b-oriented (and hence coherent) than "
Little Games", in which the Yardbirds seemed desperate to try anything that put them back in the major leagues.
