As previously with The Byrds, I defer to you — and many others. If you played me this album without telling me who it was, firstly, I wouldn't guess who it was (aside perhaps from One Hundred Years From Now), and secondly, I'd switch off after a track or two and tell you it's not my kind of thing.
To get more out of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, I think I need to be led into it. More context, more narrative about the band, the personalities (McGuinn, Hillman, Parsons and all that), and what else was going on in 1968. I got the beginnings of that when Stuart Maconie featured the album in the first run of The Critical List. As it happens, Wikipedia has many of the details I'm asking for — I just haven't read them all yet!
Many was the time, early in this decade, when I'd hear something on The Critical List, and, despite not being impressed initially, I'd be sufficiently intrigued that, when I spotted it for a fiver in Fopp, I'd figure it was worth taking a punt to see if it grew on me. Gene Clark's No Other is another example that springs to mind. The problem with that tactic is that, if you do it more or less every week, you end up with so many new CDs that none of them have a hope in hell of growing on you. And so it has proved with Sweetheart of the Rodeo and No Other, among others.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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