Week of November 19, 2009, Issue #735
ALBUM REVIEWS
Old Sounds: The Zombies
Odessey and Oracle
David Berry / david@vueweekly.com
The Zombies tend to get vastly overlooked in the pop cultural consciousness. Sure, music critics and such will occasionally put Odessey and Oracle, the group's only real album—Begin Here and the self-titled disc were just singles collections, and it's not worth counting anything after the early '90s reunion—on best-of-all-time lists, but in the general consciousness, the band barely rates a mention, stuck down on the British Invasion list somewhere between Cream and Herman's Hermits.
The injustice of it all. Though the group occasionally dabbled in fairly straightforward rock of the type that, had it done it more often, surely would have catapulted the Zombies up the charts a bit ("She's Not There" would be the best example) what it's really, really good at—like, probably just below the Beach Boys/Beatles good-at, if we're talking '60s bands—is simple, pleasant pop songs.
Actually, pleasant is probably a bad word: as crisp and effortlessly catchy as it can be, there is a kind of confounding sadness that runs through a lot of the music, and is probably really the only thematically unifying thing on Odessey. For instance, "This Will Be Our Year," one of the album's highlights, though a pretty explicitly happy little love song (it opens up with "The warmth of your love / Is like the warmth of the sun," which sounds awfully romantic out of the mouth of the breathy Colin Blunstone) also points to much of the crap that has proceeded it, a nice little reversal that really helps the song earn its sunny refrain.
It's more explicit elsewhere. "A Rose For Emily" and "Brief Candles" are piano-driven meditations on lovelorn misery, the latter the kind that will eventually end, the former nothing so simple. "Maybe After He's Gone" is even more pleading, the harmonized "ahhhhs" and "lalalas" trying to lift our spirits but failing miserably against Blunstone's futile dreams that his girlfriend will return when the new man in her life takes off.
But being masters of three-minute concerns, the melancholy moments have plenty of counterpoints. However longing "Maybe ... " is, "I Want Her She Wants Me" is the kind of song new lovers sing, blindly ignoring everything for the full-on appreciation of having someone to hold hands with. "Care of Cell 44" and "Friends of Mine" are also sunny enough for soap commercials, one a love-letter to an inmate and the other just an excuse to list off friend's names, but hard to resist nonetheless, with its bouncing piano and smiling harmonies.
Of course, the best song on the album doesn't fit into this thread at all. "Time of the Season" is a lupine come-on that points ahead to white soul, and isn't really happy or sad so much as horny. The bass line moves with the hungry rhythm of a circling shark, the "ahs" sound like they could be taken out of a bedroom, the electric piano noodles around like good foreplay, and by the time Blunstone soothes out lines like "What's your name? / Who's your daddy?" you have to wonder if there's really any point in talking. It's a testament to how incredible at pop music the band was, and the perfect cap to a sorely underappreciated album. V
<p><b>The Zombies</b><br />
<em>Odessey and Oracle<br />
(CBS)</em><br />
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