Eric Burdon & The Animals – Inside Out (comp. 1993)

The title is a bit of a misnomer; this double CD only includes the complete sessions that the Animals recorded with producer Mickie Most in 1964 and 1965. The 40 songs capture the band at their peak, including most of their best and biggest hits: "House of the Rising Sun," "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," "Bring It on Home to Me," "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," "I'm Crying," "It's My Life," and "Boom Boom." Most of the rest of the tunes don't match the excellence of these smashes, though they're solid. The great majority of them are covers of vintage R&B/rock tunes by Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and the like, which aren't quite as durable as reinterpretations from the same era by the Stones and Yardbirds.

Recorded December 8th, 1963 at Craw-Daddy Club, Richmond and at the Club A Go Go, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England on 30 Dec. 1963.
Sonny Boy Williamson was, in many ways, the ultimate blues legend. By the time of his death in 1965, he had been around long enough to have played with Robert Johnson at the start of his career and Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Robbie Robertson at the end of it. In between, he drank a lot of whiskey, hoboed around the country, had a successful radio show for 15 years, toured Europe to great acclaim, and simply wrote, played, and sang some of the greatest blues ever etched into Black phonograph records…

Darkness Darkness is an album by the former vocalist from The Animals, Eric Burdon. It was recorded in May 1978 at Roundwood House, County Laois in Ireland, using Ronnie Lane's Mobile Studio. The album was released by Polydor in 1980…

This double-disc, 41-track collection does what the title promises. It runs through the Animals' – and the subsequent Eric Burdon & the Animals' – singles, A- and B-sides from March 1964's "Baby Let Me Take You Home" till January 1969's cover of "Ring of Fire." By representing both the early- and late-'60s Animals incarnations, it's a relatively comprehensive summation of the band, at least as embodied by their singles. It's not complete since there is nothing from the band's excellent 1977 reunion album Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted. Also, the dreadful 1983 second reunion track "The Night" is incongruously and non-chronologically tacked on as the last cut of the first disc, making the omission of Rudely material that much more frustrating.