Album Review: Eternity’s Children – Timeless

For their second album, Mississippi’s Eternity’s Children upped the ante. While the first album’s production team of Curt Boettcher and Keith Olsen was gone, in their place came Gary Paxton et. al, who would do a fine job as well. The music on Timeless is a notch or two more polished and arranged; it’s the kind of thing one wold have expected to see and hear on Hollywood Palace or the Smothers Brothers’ show. “I Wanna Be With You” has all the hallmarks of classic sunshine pop.

The album seems to have been guided more by the producers, less by the artists than the debut, but that’s not a problem. There’s even less rock – and more MOR stylings – on this record, but accepted for what it is, Timeless is a wonderful collection of songs. Tasteful in the extreme, the album isn’t as mawkish as some entries in the sunshine pop style. Imagine the space between Cowsills and Carpenters and you’ll have a sense of what the music sounds and feels like. Slightly old-fashioned (even for then), showbizzy and slick, Timeless is a lovely distillation of the qualities that make sunshine pop fondly remembered in some quarters (including this one).

Steve Stanley’s excellent essay included in High Moon’s reissue of the first LP picks up right where it left off, bringing the Eternity’s Children story to its conclusion. Original copies of Timeless are quite rare; as Stanley writes, “to this day, none of the members of Eternity’s Children have ever seen an original copy.” According to discogs, it wasn’t even released in the U.S.. Canada, maybe. A used copy will set you back around $750, and with things as they are (fault ours not theirs), shipping from Canada means you might not even receive the records.

But the former members of Eternity’s Children – and I, and perhaps you – can luxuriate the finely-wrought soft-pop textures of the album in this new reissue of Timeless from High Moon.