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**The Yardbirds - Yardbirds (Roger The Engineer) ★★★★☆**

By 1966, The Yardbirds had already established themselves as the premier blues-rock laboratory of their generation, a revolving door of guitar genius that had seen Eric Clapton flee for purer blues pastures and welcomed Jeff Beck's psychedelic experimentalism with open arms. Their eponymous third album – universally known as "Roger The Engineer" thanks to Chris Dreja's whimsical cover illustration – captures the band at their most adventurous, standing at the crossroads between their R&B roots and the uncharted territories of what would soon be called heavy rock.

The album emerged from a period of creative ferment. Clapton's departure in March 1965, disgusted by the commercial success of "For Your Love," had initially seemed catastrophic. Yet Beck's arrival proved transformative, his willingness to embrace feedback, distortion, and studio trickery perfectly complementing the band's increasingly experimental tendencies. By the time they entered Advision Studios in spring 1966, The Yardbirds had evolved from blues purists into sonic alchemists, with Beck wielding his Telecaster like a mad scientist's ray gun.

The opening salvo, "Lost Woman," immediately signals intent – Beck's guitar slithers and hisses through the mix while Keith Relf's harmonica provides bluesy counterpoint, the rhythm section of Chris Dreja and Jim McCarty locked in a hypnotic groove. It's blues, certainly, but blues refracted through a prism of studio innovation and youthful irreverence. The production, handled by Simon Napier-Bell and the band themselves, captures both the raw power of their live performances and the textural possibilities of the recording studio.

"Over Under Sideways Down" remains the album's calling card, a three-minute masterclass in controlled chaos that sounds like Chuck Berry jamming with aliens. Beck's guitar work is nothing short of revolutionary – those backwards loops and stuttering effects predating psychedelia by months, while Paul Samwell-Smith's bass (recorded during his final sessions with the band) provides the perfect rhythmic foundation for the mayhem above. The song's success on both sides of the Atlantic proved that experimental rock could still move bodies on the dancefloor.

Equally compelling is "Jeff's Boogie," a showcase piece that finds Beck reimagining the traditional blues workout through his unique sonic lens. Where Clapton might have played it straight, Beck transforms the familiar changes into something altogether more unsettling, his guitar tone shifting between crystalline clarity and fuzzy distortion. It's a five-minute demonstration of why Beck would soon be mentioned alongside Hendrix and Page as guitar's new trinity.

The album's quieter moments prove equally rewarding. "Turn Into Earth" showcases the band's folk-rock aspirations, Relf's vocals floating over jangling guitars and subtle orchestration, while "What Do You Want" strips things back to their R&B essentials, proving they hadn't entirely abandoned their roots. These dynamic shifts prevent the album from becoming a mere guitar showcase, revealing a band comfortable across multiple genres.

Yet it's the experimental tracks that truly set "Roger The Engineer" apart from its contemporaries. "Ever Since The World Began" features some of Beck's most inventive playing, his guitar processed through various studio effects to create textures that wouldn't sound out of place on a Pink Floyd album. The influence of Indian music, filtering through the London scene via the Beatles and others, surfaces in the droning, meditative passages that punctuate the more aggressive material.

The album's legacy cannot be overstated. While The Beatles were still primarily a pop group and The Stones remained rooted in blues and R&B, The Yardbirds were pioneering the heavy, effects-laden sound that would dominate rock's next decade. Beck's innovations here directly influenced everyone from Hendrix to Led Zeppelin (not coincidentally, given Jimmy Page's subsequent membership), while the band's willingness to experiment in the studio helped establish the album as an artistic statement rather than merely a collection of singles.

"Roger The Engineer" stands as testament to a band unafraid to push boundaries, a snapshot of rock music's most fertile period captured by its most adventurous practitioners. While internal tensions would soon tear The Yardbirds apart, this album preserves them at their creative peak – a group of young Englishmen who took American blues and rebuilt it as something entirely new, strange, and wonderful. In an