Customer Rating: 
Summary: a almost lost treasure
Comment: I bought the album as a LP many years ago,it's buried somewhere in my garage,thing is Iv'e never forgotten the thrill of hearing some of the tracks, they have stayed in my mind as very few others over the years,and I advise anyone who hasn't listened to Laura to please do so,I admit her voice takes some getting used to ,but it will grow on you..williet
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Artist Near Her Peak
Comment: CHRISTMAS AND THE BEADS OF SWEAT was a critical disaster when it was released in 1970, and even as late as the 1990s ROLLING STONE critics described it as Laura Nyro's single worst recording. But the reassesment of her work that followed in the wake of Nyro's death has now placed the album as the equal of Nyro's earlier ELI & THE 13TH CONFESSION and NEW YORK TENDABERRY--something that Nyro fans could have told the critics all along.In some ways the difficulties in evaluating this recording are understandable. Nyro's ELI and TENDABERRY recordings have a uniquely timeless quality, and it would be difficult for a first-time listener to fix them at any particular year or even decade; SWEAT, however, is very distinctly rooted in the emerging music of the 1970s. But more to the point, the album sounds commercial while it is actually one of the least commercial recordings Nyro ever created: throughout SWEAT, Nyro repeatedly uses pop-music idioms, but she never actually allows them to evolve into anything that could be remotely described as pop music per se, and in the process she repeatedly leaves the listener hanging, waiting for musical phrases that she never creates. The result is a very strange tension between what one expects to hear and what one actually gets.
Of the nine selections on this recording, the two that inevitably take the most heat from critics are "Map to the Treasure" and "Christmas;" oddly, however, they both bear a striking similarity to the most celebrated cuts from the recording: "God Standing on the Brown Earth," "Upstairs By A China Lamp," and "Beads of Sweat." In all of these selections, Nyro constantly plays with dymanics, shifting--sometimes gradually, sometimes with jarring rapidity--between loud and soft, fast and slow, at times pounding the piano and pushing her vocals to strident tones, at times dropping into semi-whispered vocals and the barest of bell-like chords. Her approach certainly takes some getting used to, particularly given her often convoluted lyrics, and unless you are prepared to repeatedly listen to this album in order to fully grasp Nyro's odd aesthetic you might do best to leave it alone completely.
But if you are prepared to think critically about what you hear, CHRISTMAS AND THE BEADS OF SWEAT is a truly remarkably and rewarding recording, and it is particularly noteworthy in the way it builds and falls away then rebuilds and falls away again from selection to selection, playing passion against exhaustion and frenzy against thoughtfulness. Nyro is in full control of her voice, her instrument, and her material here; this is the artist very close to the peak of her talents, working talisman-like and ritualistic lyrics into a seamless blend with her kaliedscopic piano-based fusion of funk-folk-freeform. The recording desperately needs to be remastered--and since many of Nyro's 1960s and 1970s recordings are being remastered, there is hope. But remastered or not, this is an essential. Strongly recommended.
GFT (Amazon Reviewer)
Customer Rating:
Summary: One Of The Greatest Albums Never Heard?
Comment: Cutting a decidedly esoteric figure amongst the plethora of singer songwriters to emerge in the late sixties,(something best exemplified by her being booed off stage by the tie-dye hippy audience at the legendary Monterey Music Festival in the summer of '67) Laura Nyro is still to achieve the critical and commercial following her talent so clearly deserves - something to which Christmas & The Beads of Sweat, her most wonderously ambitious album, bears clear testament. In contrast to the super sweet FM-radio friendly melodies of her Laurel Canyon folk-rock contemporaries (interestingly, compare her fragile version here of Carol King's Up on the roof), Nyro's filtering of elements of jazz, gospel and Broadway musical into the basic folk idiom, and her always deeply personal, often melancholic, overtly political("Christmas in my soul") and frequently feminist inspired compositions set her apart as an intellectual and musical class above. Despite remaining to this day something of a cult figure, Nyro's musical influence streches far and wide. Never losing sight of her post-Spector New York roots, you can detect Nyro's fingerprints all over Bruce Springsteen's early albums (most notably 1973's "The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle"), and in the music of new wave true believers like Mink De Ville (for example, his Le Chat Bleu, 1980). Most obvious, however, is Nyro's clear influence on the art-rock romanticism of Kate Bush (check out The Sensual World, for example) and on the baroque techno-pop of Bjork (especially on Post), both of whose vocal styles she unwittingly anticipates. (Check out too Victoria William's Happy Come Home, 1987, for a Lilith Fair take on the Laura legacy.) Only aged 24 at the time of this album, and with three other absolute gems (most notably Eli & The Thirteen Confession) already behing her, Laura Nyro is perhaps the forgotten genius of the era. This album is a quite fantastic expression of it. Buy this (and everything else she ever put her name to). It'll do you good!
Customer Rating:
Summary: a summer of love album
Comment: everybody has their own set of autobiographical albums and this is one of mine.....the first notes of "brown earth" and i am back in that place when everything seemed simpler, less hurried a place where there was more time to just be and listen to that voice and that piano. many thanks Amazon for keeping that freeway open!
