Slaying the Sacred Cow: The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle

Just kidding. But I've always felt that O&O was one of the finest pop albums of all time. Better than any Beatles or Beach Boys album. Maybe a hair or two behind Radio City, but only a hair.

What I like about "O&O" is the vocal overlay; some of the songwriting is a bit too Beatle-esque at times, and "Rose for Emily" although beautiful certainly is a bit lyrically precious. "Changes" and "Beechwood Park" and, pretty much the whole thing, works for me on a musical level, though, and "Time of the Season" is surprisingly tough like a lot of the Zombies' work. As a conceptual entity it works too as an LP about loss, I suppose, so while the Chris White song about WWI isn't the strongest thing on the record, it fits (kinda like the often-derided "India Song" off of "#1 Record; I like that one too). I don't see it as hippie at all, more schoolboy, though. I certainly listen to it more than I do any Beatles record, or Love, "Pet Sounds" or "Radio City" for that matter. I went thru a big re-appraisal of the Zombies recently after seeing Blunstone and Argent play, and I have to say that they're one of the very few '60s groups with basically no weak tracks, even their r&b covers work (there are a few things on that boxed set recorded live at BBC I don't think are quite up to standard). For me nothing is really sacred when it comes to pop but I find a resonance and a heart in "Odessey" that keeps me comin' back to it...

i liked this album more when i was younger, i think i played it to death, but i still think beechwood park is wonderful; grave and elegiac. hung up on a dream is feverishly gorgeous. the rest i can take or leave, but y'know hardly any albums reach the heights of those two songs.

friends of mine is a fun song too.

P.S. I &hearts "Butcher's Tale".
P.P.S. I prefer Third to Radio City, and Odessey and Oracle to Third. Moo.

that guitar break that shifts from a slightly threatening, foreboding beginning, then lets the tension ease, then moves again within a few notes to a feeling of restlessness, then back to calm again. the mood never resolves itself, which is what makes the song so feverish, so oneiric. And try working out how they played it! the key changes are very tricky.

I'm surprised no intrepid hip hoppers have sampled Beechwood Park's organ riff yet. Timba could probably make me cry with that one.

Yep, these days I feel the same way. "Third" is the greatest thing Chilton ever did.

I still disagree about "hippie" in those Zombies songs. They're pastoral, they're English Romantic, but they don't have anything to do with "hippiedom." "Hippie" doesn't ="'60s" in my book. "Friends of Mine" is about people who're getting married, which doesn't seem very hippie to me. I myself have zero use for that hippie shit altho I am quite fond of the Sir Douglas Quintet's "Mendocino."

I once figured out how to play most of the songs on "Oracle." They're actually pretty simple.

the songs on odessey and oracle are NOT easy to play at all - try working out the chords of 'hung up on a dream' - weird key changes a go-go

So many highlights on it and I can only wonder what I'd think of it if I wasn't sick of Time of the Season by now.

Oh wait, we're supposed to be slaying it... Like I said, I don't think Butcher's Tale is as strong as the others.

not half good at slaying, me.

but I like the Zombies though! they have pretty songs! I'm biased cuz "This Will Be Our Year" was one the song me and my wife dance to at our weddin'.

Also the "Animal Collective 30-years before Animal Collective" impression on "Changes".

Only "Time of The Season" doesn't do it for me. Perhaps it's years of FM radio overexposure, perhaps it's the heinous lyrics (how can you chastise "A Rose For Emily" but ignore "What's your name? Who's your daddy? Is he rich like me?"), but it feels out of place on the album and anticlimactic as an ending.

this album is great.

"Time Of The Season" meanwhile just feels like an update of "Summertime", total sleazy swinger stuff (hippies sure wouldn't brag about their wealth.) "Time of the season for loving" pretty clearly means "time of the season for fucking", and yeah I know plenty of hippie songs do that too, "Revolution" and "Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love In)" and all that, but the song's just totally devoid of revolutionary rhetoric and mysticism and the other stuff hippie bands used to embelish their baby-let's-fuck songs. The lyrics being so dreary works for me too, because again it fits in with the schoolboy thing - not so much a real swingin' party, but more a lonely early teen's idea of what that might entail, gleaned from James Bond and such.

It's still a great record by any standard; and yeah, I probably oversimplified it when I said above that the songs are easy to play. I mean they are, but it's more a matter of grasping the harmonic tricks that they use over and over than any really complex stuff they do with those tricks; once you get the descending bassline of "Cell 44" you get it, and what's difficult about the record is the way it's actually very simple ideas that are jammed together in somewhat unexpected ways. In other words, classic pop music.

"'Rose For Emily' is for impotent milquetoasts! Who listens to this poncey shit?"

You know, um, throwdowns and stuff.

But, wait: Is it my faulty memory, or did the label (Epic?) reissue and re-release Odessey with "Time Of The Season" moved from last song to first? (Just the sort of thing American record companies routinely did to Brit artists, back in the old days, of course...)

-- Dan Selzer (danselze...), July 13th, 2005 8:55 AM. (Dan Selzer)

yeah except, I had a bit of interest in teh Zombies before that 'Zombies Heaven' thing even came out. Which is why i bought the Repertoire editions of the two albums, w/ the copious bonus tracks ... still works for me. I don't really need the BBC session version of "I'm A Roadrunner". between the two 24-track Repertoire CDs (the O&O one includes all the outtakes/b-sides/etc), screw that box..

Still can't get over "I Want Her She Wants Me".

I think it probably does, because tracks like 'Gotta Get A Hold Of Myself', "I'll Call You Mine", "If It Don't Work Out" and "Don't Cry For Me" are the Zombies at their absolute best : less ornate than O+O, tougher than the early stuff.

However, sifting thru their output, I find virtually nothing substandard at all--unlike many Brit beatgroups, they didn't much go in for those lame-ass covers of blooze and soul; their version of "Summertime," not a blues song but so what, is just superb. And as is pointed out above, stuff like "I'll Call You Mine" and "She Does Everything for Me" is great--they could've gone in that direction, a bit less ornate than their obviously "Sgt. Pepper"-influenced "Odessey," and it would've been fine. So, I think their pretensions mostly are earned and sound good today, and as far as I know "Odessey" was never re-issued with a different track order; once "Time of" became a hit, that record got reissued with a diff. cover, in 1969.

xps

Agreed. The stuff just after O&O (which might not have been the full line-up) feels like the reconciliation between the more driving, early stuff and O&O's precious psych with a dash of new found adulthood in the music. Everything from the playing to the production is amazing on those tracks. Those piano lines on "I'll Call You Mine" are gorgeous.

...which is redeemed by Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.

you know what; FUCK THIS THREAD

have never heard this album, is it good?

'this will be our year' was the recessional at our wedding~

lol

those holes in my face well up when I hear that song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flUjhGoHVq8&feature=related