Sic Semper Tyrannis

A Humble Musical Recommendation

Dear Readers-

I’m unwittingly discovering that the mid- to late- sixties were an awesome time for popular music. I’ve been a fan of Zappa’s Freak Out! for many years, as well as The Beatles’ music from Revolver and Rubber Soul all the way through Abbey Road. And I’ve been amused by Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But recently I’ve heard a couple more albums from the era that probably captured the zeitgeist just as well.

Coming out of nowhere for me was The Zombies’ Odessey (sic) and Oracle. I have come to an appreciation for sunny brit-pop over the years and it doesn’t come any finer than this album. The music on here harkens back to a time when songs were melody-driven and the piano was expected to lay down a beat as regularly as the drums were. The band is best-known for their massive hit “Time of the Season,” an admittedly infectious driving, funkish song that closes out the album. However, it may suffer from the old axiom that “familiarity breeds contempt,” due to it’s ubiquity on oldies radio. It sounds like an anomaly among the rest of the tunes on this album. Everything else on the album, I would classify as “baroque pop.” (Think: The Beatles “Penny Lane.”) There are thick background vocals, lots of piano and organ, the aforementioned highly singable, catchy melodies…all within twelve songs, each encompassing a world all it’s own. You know how a lot of albums kind of start to sound the same after the first couple of songs? This isn’t one of those albums.

And I forgot to mention one of the coolest elements…lots of mellotron! At the time, the mellotron was still a new-fangled device. For the uninitiated, it was an electronic keyboard instrument in which each key played a tape loop of its corresponding pitch. (In many ways, it was the precursor to sampling synthesizer technology.) It went on to be used all over the place in 70’s prog-rock and the two sounds you hear the most through the years are the strings and flutes. (Think: the beginning of The Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever.”) One of the interesting limitations of the instrument that affected how musicians composed for it was the fact that the tape loops were only a few seconds long and they had to reset, so you couldn’t play very long notes. Which reminds me of the scene in Gigantic, the They Might Be Giants documentary, in which John Flansburgh relates how in the early days of the Dial-a-Song service they would have to use a lot of staccato sounds when recording songs onto the answering machine, because long notes would make the machine shut off as it heard those long notes as if they were a dial-tone. Interesting how the state of the science affects the state of the art…

Anyway, the string voice on the mellotron is an absolutely beautiful sound, bringing to my mind the sound of an electrically-charged magnetic ocean that has become strangely self-aware and has decided to create musical art. And The Zombies’ tasteful usage of this hip new musical instrument, (for the time), makes this collection of music, which lies somewhere between The Beatles, Beach Boys and The Kinks, that much cooler. For simultaneously you get instantly accessible melodic gratification AND experimentation with new types of sounds.

I deem this album an absolute classic, which doesn’t happen very often, and I highly recommend that you check this music out, but only if you like things that are cool!

I will be back shortly with another great album from the end of the sixties.

posted by Mike @ 7:01 PM