“And from that nameless changing crowd,
A sweet vibration seemed to fill the air.”
Seeing the Zombies perform Odessey and Oracle in its entirety was one of the highlights of my college years, a period in which I discovered most of the music that I still listen to regularly. You always have to approach seeing the living legends with tempered expectations, but I vividly remember the moment of utter delight my roommate and I shared after ‘Care of Cell 44’ concluded. Colin Blunstone didn’t sound a day older than when he recorded the song in 1967—it was 2015! I’m not sure that I’ve ever been to another show where such well-loved songs were performed to such a rapt audience.
Composed of superlative baroque pop songs built around memorable melodies and melancholy lyrics sung by Blunstone and Rod Argent and dressed up with gorgeous backing vocals and crafty Mellotron, it’s an album that is best taken as a whole. There were some revolutionary songs on the band’s debut Begin Here and a few brilliant standalone singles that sometimes get tacked onto deluxe editions of it, but no one would ever hold that album up as an all-time great. Certainly not with all those obligatory blues covers on it that sound decidedly uninspired when set against similar fare from the Stones, the Animals, and the Yardbirds. By contrast Odessey and Oracle is a coherent collection of original, well-composed love songs with a magnificent sense of songcraft. And the arrangements are impeccable. It’s not as self-consciously majestic and open-armed as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, with much less of the layered orchestration that makes up that album’s “wall of sound,” but then that makes it much easier to throw on even if you’re not in the mood for a musical event.
An exception to the claim that the album’s songs fit together perfectly must be made for bassist Chris White’s WWI-inspired psychedelic folk song ‘Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914)’ which is a memorable tune but only seems to fit with the rest because it’s been heard in its context so many times. (Side note: not a single thing on the album is as psychedelic as its cover.) And yet as ill-fitting as it is, it provides the album with a touch of diversity without which the rest of the songs might seem too similar. Strangely, the album’s most enduring track, ‘Time of the Season’, which is the second least cohesive song on the album and should have been an obvious hit if the band were marketed properly (and maybe not named after necrotic creatures that have no plausible association with gentle piano-and-Mellotron chamber pop) is tacked onto the very end of side B, causing the listener to falsely remember the album’s worth of gently haunting pop songs as bright and sunny and blissful.
Given its current status as an all-time classic and a harbinger of the so much of the lush indie pop scene, the album didn’t sell as one might expect, which sadly meant that the Zombies took a long hiatus instead of competing with other British acts of their day, each of which they were capable of beating in certain arenas. It was only through the sheer zealotry of Al Kooper that the album got promotion in the U.S. and turned into a rediscovered classic twenty-some years after its release. As recently as autumn 2023 the band has continued to tour, and although they’ve ceased playing Odessey and Oracle cover-to-cover, its songs still dominate the setlist.
Favorite Tracks: Care of Cell 44; Brief Candles; Hung Up on a Dream; Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914); Time of the Season.