Review #243: Odyssey and Oracle, The Zombies
#243: Odyssey and Oracle, The Zombies
Genuinely, every time I listen to the Zombies, I forget who the Zombies are. I know “A Rose For Emily” (didn’t you read Faulkner?) but their name just falls out right out of my head. It’s like it’s too good a band name.
Maybe I’d remember them better if their song titles didn’t remind me so much of other songs. “Hung Up On A Dream” = Tom Petty, “I Want Her She Wants Me” wanted to be Cheap Trick, and “Friends of Mine” made me wish I was listening to the Grateful Dead.
Fortunately I found another way to connect to the Zombies’ British Invasion heritage: pop-punk. “Changes” and “Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914)” have a My Chemical Romance-type bloody theater kid energy to them, and “This Will Be Our Year” was pure Motion City Soundtrack.
“Time Of The Season” is the one you know even if you don’t think you do, and is the perfect closer to contextualize the rest of this very weird set of songs. I was talking to someone recently who confessed to me that they almost never thought about the order an album was arranged in. Is that true for you, too, or are you crazy like me, and wrote/deleted several paragraphs about this?
This was the Zombies’ last studio album before they broke up in 1968, and I’m not going to pretend that this is an album that I think I’m going to “fall down a rabbit hole” with. Maybe I’ll eat my words.
Songs I Thought Were Boring And Not Worth Talking About: “Care of Cell 44,” “Beechward Park,” “Brief Candles,” “Maybe After He’s Gone.”
