Younger Than Yesterday - Release and Reception

Release and Reception

Younger Than Yesterday was released on February 6, 1967 in the United States (catalogue item CL 2642 in mono, CS 9442 in stereo) and April 7, 1967 in the UK (catalogue item BPG 62988 in mono, SBPG 62988 in stereo). It peaked at #24 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, during a stay of 24 weeks, and reached #37 in the United Kingdom, spending a total of 4 weeks on the UK chart. The album's front cover featured a composite multiple exposure photograph of the band, taken by Frank Bez. The preceding "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" single was released on January 9, 1967 and reached #29 on the Billboard Hot 100 but failed to chart in the UK. Two additional singles taken from the album, "My Back Pages" and "Have You Seen Her Face", reached #30 and #74 on the Billboard chart respectively but again missed the UK chart. The "My Back Pages" single is notable for being the last single release by The Byrds to reach the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100.

Upon release, the album received mostly positive reviews from the music press, with Billboard magazine predicting that "The Byrds will be riding high on the LP charts again with this top rock package." Pete Johnson in the Los Angeles Times was more cautious, noting that "The group is musically adept and the album is a good one, but it would be sad if it served as a monument, marking the end of The Byrds' development. There is little to distinguish it from their previous LPs in terms of creativity." A resoundingly positive review came from the pen of Peter Reilly, writing in Hi-Fi/Stereo Review, who described the record as "an enjoyable and well-made album which, if listened to closely enough, explains a good deal about what is going on around us." However, the burgeoning underground press in the U.S. was less complimentary, with Richard Goldstein, writing in New York's The Village Voice, noting that "There is nothing new or startling on Younger Than Yesterday." A slightly more positive review by Sandy Pearlman in Crawdaddy! expressed some reservations but praised the album's musical eclecticism, while noting "This sound is dense, but not obviously and impressively complicated. That is, it is very coherent. It works because of its unity, not out of an accumulation of contrasting effects such as volume changes and syncopations."

In the UK, journalist Penny Valentine, writing in Disc magazine, described the album as a return to form for The Byrds, before declaring that the band were "back where they belong with a sound as fresh as cream and sunflowers." Melody Maker was also enthusiastic about the album, commenting "if you ignore this album you are not only foolish - but deaf!", while Record Mirror awarded the album four stars out of five. Allen Evans of the NME also praised the LP: "This is an exciting album, at times brash and noisy ('So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star', 'Have You Seen Her Face'), spooky (the science-fiction outer-space sounds on 'C.T.A.-102'), folksy ('Everybody's Been Burned'), weird (the irritating, monotonous backing to 'Mind Gardens'), and pleasant (the soft swinging of 'The Girl with No Name'). A lot of thought has gone into this album and it's good because of it."

Although Younger Than Yesterday was somewhat overlooked by the record buying public at the time of its release, achieving only moderate chart success as a result, its critical stature has grown substantially over the years. Richie Unterberger, writing on the Allmusic website, described the album as one of "the most durable of the Byrds' albums" and noted rock critic Robert Christgau, writing in 2007, called it "the Byrds' first mature album, a blend of space-flight twang and electric hoedown infused with the imminent glow of 1967 yet underlined with crackling realism." In 2003, the album was ranked at #124 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Younger Than Yesterday was remastered at 20-bit resolution and had three of its tracks remixed as part of the Columbia/Legacy Byrds series. It was reissued in an expanded form on April 30, 1996, with six bonus tracks, including "Lady Friend" and "Old John Robertson", which had both been issued as a non-album single in July 1967. The remastered CD also included the David Crosby penned track "It Happens Each Day", which had been omitted from the original album, and "Don't Make Waves", a song that had been written for the Alexander Mackendrick film, Don't Make Waves. The final track on the CD extends to include a hidden track featuring the guitar parts from "Mind Gardens", which were heard on the album playing backwards but are presented here playing forwards, as they were originally recorded.

In 2011, the audiophile record label Audio Fidelity released the original mono mix of Younger Than Yesterday on CD for the first time, remastered by Steve Hoffman.