The Zombies- Odessey and Oracle (1968)

Ok acerola. The duel is on. I am about to hit you with some serious pop right now. This is a forgotten blade buried deep within pop culture, an example of how fleeting fame can be to a group of ninjas that were known solely for a single technique, instead of being appreciated for the vast catalogue of skills and limit breaks they produced in their heyday. I give you The Zombies.

A British band who reached their high water mark with one hit song from a otherwise ignored yet absolutely stunning album, these dudes were serious. They were a five piece band that all sang, focusing instrumentally on keyboard, bass and drums, and featuring their skills with vocal harmonies and hooks; these dudes fully embraced choral vocal styles and interesting song structures, especially so for 1968. The only other band at the time that wrote pop songs and did not incorporate the guitar predominantly in their music were The Doors†; The Zombies were unique, smart, and catchy, and had the skills and imagination to separate themselves enough from being pigeonholed solely as "pop music". This is surely a reason they were not given more acclaim. It was not as adventurous a time for their kind of music, with classic albums from The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones dominating the airwaves†, and they were never shown the proper spotlight for their work. The one small spotlight they were given came from their 15 minutes of fame with the release of Time of the Season.

Time of the Season is great enough to be a #1 hit song, yet it never rose above #3 on the Billboard charts. If you haven't heard it in a while, it is so great that you might not realistically remember how good it actually is. I only stall on sharing it with you to bide time for a quick reflection.

People unfamiliar with Odessey and Oracle may not have heard the second to last track of the album: Friends of Mine came in at track 11, right before the epic last track of the LP, Time of the Season. It is a very lovely combo of songs to feature at the end of an album, and specifically back to back. Friends of Mine is a harmless love song about being a third wheel, hanging out with various couples that you totally give props to for finding each other. It is a hopeful song, upbeat and positive, relating their awesome relationships back to your own hope of finding the right person yourself. Here you go:

And how do you follow up a super poptastic appreciation of love? You offer up the most pimptasticly smooth song about looking for summertime romance, of course. You're young, its hot outside, you want to find someone interesting, and naturally you play it super cool. For good measure, you add in some ridiculously great keyboard solos. Time of the Season:

And that is just the end of the album; the download I have linked to also includes an EP released soon after Odessey and Oracle, and that in itself is an utterly dusty blade. It was made and then no one ever saw it; it just sat in a studio and hardly saw the light of day. The entire package is full of greatness: Odessey starts the show off with Care of Cell 44, a hugely upbeat love letter to the girl for whom you are waiting to finally get out of jail and come back home to resume your relationship together. It is dark in the lightest possible sense: the EP is full of other blades that are just as pop-tastic, such as Don't Cry For Me, or the criminally unknown If It Don't Work Out.

One last song: this one you may recall from the cover of it in Kill Bill Vol 2, after the Bride puts her daughter to bed in Bills house and walks down the hallway on her way to kill him. Its a neat scene, and a neat cover, but this original is some great old school pop.



Check it, or I get a +5 bonus to all stats AND a limit break.

odessey and oracle

†These four tracks by The Doors, The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones (respectively) are all taken from their 1968 releases, Waiting for the Sun, The White Album, Smile , and Beggars Banquet.

Harsha Iyer- Curious Toys (2011)

*BUMP UPDATE*

After listening to Harsha a bunch, and talking to him from india to Boston over the facebooks chat, i have come to realize how wide a range of music this dude digs on and ends up subtly and at times overtly adding to his own songs. My initial review favored the comparison between Overcautious as a pop song to songs by The Kinks and OTC. But that is the tip of the iceberg; Overcautious is one song in the style of Pop Music this dude enjoys writing. And needless to say, dude is prolific. Hes working with a lot of different musicians while writing solo stuff. Hell yeah. Tracks like Not Yet Dead really blew me away in listening to Curious Toys: it is moody and sparse, dark, with excellent vocal melodies, guitar work and string arrangements.

Below Not Yet Dead is my initial review of Overcautious, with a link to his bandcamp page for his 2011 album, Curious Toys:

Harsha Iyer - Curious Toys - 06 Not Yet Dead by ninko

Olivia Tremor Control- Dusk at Cubist Castle (1996)

To me, Olivia Tremor Control, and the two albums they have put out, are a rare musical gem hidden from so many people that finding someone who knows about it and loves it (as most are wont to do) is just as rare a specimen as their musical output is. The only fault in their amazing pop music is that certain spans of the album devolve into exceedingly psychedelic experimental tracks, more noticeable on their 2nd album Black Foliage, but certainly undermining a fair amount of their overall work. But that is just hindsight speaking; the overall flow of both their albums fit in these extended outbursts between track upon track of solid, Beatles and Beach Boys- influenced pop rock that dominates anything else currently pursuing this style of music.

That very very small negative aside, Dusk at Cubist Castle is an album to rival the likes of Sgt. Peppers in catchy tunes combined with psychedelic experimentation. A majority of the album, most notably the first half, flows wonderfully with tune after tune of nostalgic, classic pop realization, with hints of the madness to come in the later sections. And even through those sections of experimentation, moments of vocal harmony and melodic dedication shine through to let you know something cohesive is certain to take center stage, as Gravity Car does at the very tail end of Cubist Castle. Tracks like Jumping Fences really stand out though, that particular song serving as track 3 in the amazing run of songs in the first half of the album. It is just so fucking catchy and direct (just as the rest of the songs in the first half are): no its, ands or buts about it, this track is solid pop gold. I mean, damn, check out those harmonies. They just dont stop:



dusk at cubist castle