Omen And Illiad - The Zombies

This is a rethink of an album featured here a couple of times. A reshuffle, cuts, and surgical razorblade edits. Voilà. This is as sweet as I can make it. If the mood or the production didn't quite fit, it didn't make the cut. The album runs a little short, eleven songs, but better that than too long, a common failing of this type of exercise. This is consistent quality all the way through, with no compromises in the name of completeness or "authenticity".

You can play this right after Odessey & Oracle and you will not be disappointed!

A note about the title: I mis-spelled Iliad to mirror the mis-spelling of Odyssey

Perfect Pop Now! Dept. - The Lemon Twigs

Cleveland Jeff has a nice write-up of the new Lemon Twigs album, which had mysteriously passed me by. However, after spending a frustrating week-end going blind trying to find a StealthLink© over at Like Dancing About Architecture, I decided to make the album available to th' Four Or Five Guys© in a special edition. Why is it special? Because, like last time, I've gone the extra yard for them and replaced their dull, stoopid cover with something that doesn't look like an Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark album. I like to think the new design [above - Ed.] taps into that whole Saturday Morning TV vibe.

Their previous album [left, whoopsie, I mean, like, above - Ed.] got a drooling review here, which I can't now find. Perhaps I dreamed it? So here it is again, for possibly the first time! They're both absolutely primo First Tier harmony pop albums, with incredibly hooky songs, sparkling production, and I can't recommend them too highly, and now they have great covers, they get the coveted Perfect Ten award!

You certainly won't regret downloading today's Deliverables O' Excellence™!

THIS JUST IN!

From 2020, and surprisingly fun.

This post fluffed and folded by Lucy Lastic's Laundromax de Luxe©, LA

Just Don't Call It A Playlist! Dept. - The Beatles

The Beatles Aloha album includes all the songs they issued in '68 that didn't appear on official Beatles albums. Aloha means both hello and goodbye. It's a complete, cohesive and unissued album from the aching void between Pepper and the White Album.

It doesn't include Magical Mystery Tour ep tracks because that's a Beatles-created side project. It does include tracks from Yellow Submarine and the US Magical Mystery Tour album, because these were label-led marketing projects to which the band only contributed signatures on a contract.

All these songs bundled together make for a perfect 37 minute album, programmed naturally into two sides. Play this after Pepper, and see if you don't agree it's a stronger piece of work. It sounds and flows like it was conceived and recorded as an album. The band at the top of their game (and I'm not the world's greatest Beatles fan). Packed with hits, too, which is more than can be said for the albums to either side of it.

I'm kind of surprised that, as far as I know, this rather obvious project hasn't occurred to anybody else (if it has, I missed it). Imagine it as a vinyl release. It would generate millions and BILLIONS of bucks and rekindle excitement for the band's back catalog, before they're all dead. It could be remixed by Giles Martin, and they could use the contemporary Richard Avedon portraits. Why haven't they? They haven't thought of it. Never occurred to anybody in the Beatles camp that there is a huge fucking 1968-shaped hole in their album discography. Incredible, really, and everybody's loss.

Here's a lo-res back cover, using the Avedon portrait that was thrown away in the gatefold to the crappy 'Love Songs' cash-in. Paul was originally off to the left. I had to beef up the color and contrast to Paul's psychedelic mugshot on the front, because Avedon deliberately bleached it out to have less impact than the others. Not his favorite Beatle!

I've shilled this album before, but perhaps inventing a whimsically humorous story around it did it no favors, so this is for those who missed it or didn't understand what it was. This download is a tad improved on the previous - it's "unbanded" - continuous play, closely edited, and tagged so the individual songs don't get confused with versions you already have. And the very welcome new fade to Hey Jude has been smoothed out. Also included is The Compleat Pepper, so with these two non-existent albums you have a complete Technicolor portrait of them in 67/68, when they wus fab.

The Myra Nussbaum Memorial Lectures Dept. - Why The Blues Music Is Shit

Mrs Nussbaum invites you into her lovely home, yesterday! Note tasteful Siegheil & Roy memorial statue, youthful ward Clynt readying for bikini wax session! 

Editorial note: previously, Mrs Nussbaum has made award-winningly persuasive cases for Why Classical Music Is Shit, and Why Jazz Music Is Shit. Such is her unquestioned authority, a tearful Zubin Mehta of The Los Angeles Philharmonics snapped his baton in half after her takedown, sobbing "I can never wave this stupid stick at a bunch of fiddle-scraping penguins again." After exhaustive research and consultation with the finest musicologists, Mrs Nussbaum now presents her devastating critique of yet another sacrosanct musical genre, The Blues Music.
(Although we are honored by her patronage, Mrs Nussbaum's opinions are her own and do not necessarily represent Fabulous False Memory Foam Island©, its subsidiary companies, shareholders, or creditors. Take it away, Mrs Myra!)

"Thank you, my esteemed friend Farquhar Throckmorton III! Yes, the Blues Music is shit, and I'm here to tell you why! It's just a bunch of old bums complaining and whining, and I had enough of that with my late husband Melvin may he rot in hell bless his soul. My fuggin' bursitis, these fuggin' accountants, those New York fuggin' Mets, your fuggin' charge account, yadda-yadda ... with the kvetching, enough already! So the last thing I want to hear while Clynt attends to a woman's intimate needs is my baby done left me, lawdy I'm broke and drunk, got no shoes grunted over an out-of-tune guitar! Who wants to listen to some self-pitying toothless bum groaning on about how he can't get it up no more?!? Oh, excuse me, boo-fuggin'-hoo! Do you hear me complaining about my life?  My message to you? Cheer up or shut up!

And that just about wraps it up! Any questions? You, at the back, sir?"

This post crowd-funded by Millennial Snowflakes For More Kittens.org

Perfect Tens Dept. - Strange Days

A Perfect Ten is awarded to albums with no weakness, including the cover and the title. Which disqualifies Pet Sounds! Crazy system, I know. I don't make the rules. Strange Days is note perfect, from the cover to the spindle hole.

 

THE COVER

Art directed by the great Harvey S. Williams, who was responsible for the Elektra house style, which included the use of the Rockwell font. There may have been a pun in there? The photograph, by the equally great Joel Brodsky, has some futzery happening - note building at end of alley, repetition and slicing and change of scale. What the actual? Don't think about this, because it will drive you nuts. I had to undergo weeks of counseling.

Sniffen Court, 36th St, between Lexington and Third, yesterday. No, you can't afford to live here. You can't afford to know anyone who can afford to live here. You can't even afford to look through the gates. G'wan, beat it, ya bum!

 

Jimbo didn't want his mugshot, or the band's, on the cover. Pretty extraordinary, really. If you were a sultry Dionysian sex god (that if is doing a lot of heavy lifting) you'd want your picture on the cover. Brodsky suggested Fellini-esque strangeness, and the band went for it. The Short People are twin actors, the juggler is Brodsky's assistant, the trumpet player a passing cab driver (hat - driver's own), the weightlifter a bouncer, and only the acrobats are professional performers. The hippie chick, I can reveal, is Velda Kowznofski, and her phone number is BIGELOW 472-1906.

 

DIEGETIC

You'd of thunk that would be enough to bestow significance on what is one of the greatest album covers, like, literally, ever, but there's more! It's very likely the first example of diegetic design on an album cover. And we're going to take a hinge at that word diegetic, because you don't know (or care much) about what it means. It's probably the first time it's been used in the context of rock music album cover analysis. You can look it up, practice it in front of a mirror, and casually drop it into the conversation with your lowlife pals at the dog track.

The name and photos of the band, and the title of the album, appear in posters on the walls. So - not on the cover at all! This, as well as being diegetic, is unprecedented awesomeness.

 

CHARIVARI

Your second Snob Vocab du jour! It behooves you to look the fucking word up, because if I tell you, it'll pass straight through like that Chipotle burrito you floated on a keg of Coors last nite.

Charivari, or the later US variant Shivaree, is exactly what's going on here, and it's perfect.

 

THE MUSIC

You know how highly this album is rated. You may even rate it highly yourself, although, fascinatingly, a little lower than YOUR FAVORITE HERE. It was recorded on a sumptuous 8-track console, like those in-car tape players [Eh? - Ed.], and unlike the live-in-the-studio approach of the debut, used the sophisticated production facilities available at LA's prestigious Sunset Sound to achieve a consistent, although shifting, mood of strangeness, like no other album before it. The cover and the music act in perfect symbiosisness. Symbioctivity. Whatever. Unlike The Soft Parade, the studio never gets in the way of the music. Everything is a whole, ya dig? It's like this, uh, whole thing, man. Beautiful. Oh wow.

 

 

This post funded in part by the Eschewal Of Obfuscation Society, Pork Bend, AK. My thanks to Zebedee Veeblefetzer.