Disraeli Gears

1	Strange Brew 2:50
2	Sunshine of Your Love 4:13
3	World of Pain 3:05
4	Dance the Night Away 3:36
5	Blue Condition 3:32
6	Tales of Brave Ulysses 2:49
7	Swlabr 2:34
8	We're Going Wrong 3:29
9	Outside Woman Blues 2:27
10	Take It Back 3:08
11	Mother's Lament 1:47

Barnes & Noble

Disraeli Gears, Cream's second recording, contains the riff that started a thousand rock 'n' roll bands. "Sunshine of Your Love," featuring Jack Bruce's pounding foundation figure (co-writer Eric Clapton cooked up the chorus) came to define late '60s hard rock, and, much to the band's chagrin, pointed the way to heavy metal in the next decade. In Cream's hands, however, even the bluntest of hard-rock devices were delivered with grace and precision, thanks to Bruce's inventive bass work, Ginger Baker's sophisticated drumming, and Clapton's gorgeous guitar playing. As perfectly meshed as this trio was, it is Clapton's thick-toned, supremely melodic picking that can't help but draw the most attention. To hear his cutting solos on "Outside Woman Blues," "Sunshine of Your Love" (with its "Blue Moon" quote), "Tales of Brave Ulysses" (featuring a startlingly effective use of the wah-wah pedal), and "Strange Brew" (where Clapton reinterprets an Albert King solo note-for-note) is to understand why he caused a sensation in the rock world, establishing a guitar-god reputation that has yet to fade. Steve Futterman

All Music Guide

Cream teamed up with producer Felix Pappalardi for their second album, Disraeli Gears, a move that helped push the power trio toward psychedelia and also helped give the album a thematic coherence missing from the debut. This, of course, means that Disraeli Gears gets further away from the pure blues improvisatory troupe they were intended to be, but it does get them to be who they truly are: a massive, innovative power trio. The blues still courses throughout Disraeli Gears -- the swirling kaleidoscopic "Strange Brew" is built upon a riff lifted from Albert King -- but it's filtered into saturated colors, as it is on "Sunshine of Your Love," or it's slowed down and blurred out as it is on the ominous murk of "Tales of Brave Ulysses." It's a pure psychedelic move that's spurred along by Jack Bruce's flourishing collaboration with Pete Brown. Together, this pair steers this album away from recycled blues-rock and toward its eccentric British core, for with the fuzzy freak-out "Swlabr," the music hall flourishes of "Dance the Night Away," the swinging "Take It Back," and of course, the schoolboy singalong "Monther's Lament," this is a very British record. Even so, this crossed the ocean and became a major hit in America as well, because for no matter how whimsical certain segments are, Cream is still a heavy rock trio and Disraeli Gears is a quintessential heavy rock album of the '60s. Yes, its psychedelic trappings tie it forever to 1967, but the imagination of the arrangements, the strength of the compositions, and especially the force of the musicianship make this album transcend its time as well. Stephen Thomas Erlewine