The Beatles' Sgt Pepper album. There has been so much retrospective criticism of this thing, that I think these days it would actually qualify as underrated!
Yes, there's lots of trippy, whimsical, celebratory fun to be had, but the album always keeps one foot firmly planted in the real, far-from-utopian world: the narrator of "Getting Better" remorsefully admitting to being a wife beater, the eerie ambiguity among the already exquisite melancholy of "She's Leaving Home," and, of course, the masterful final track, "A Day In the Life," where the average citizen stays willfully blind to the weird chaos surrounding them.
Finally, let's not forget that one the Beatles' best non-album double A-sides, "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" was a product of the Pepper album sessions!
I'd even daresay that the Beatles should have broken up after Sgt Pepper. The best songs from the later Beatles albums would have shown up on their solo recordings.
One thing I will say about the Beatles is that whoever is responsible for the standardization of their discography is an unsung hero. With pretty every other British invasion band, having to worry about the British/American/Canadian/etc. versions of their albums is really annoying when you are trying to listen to or collect everything.
RIP to Mike Pinder, last of the original lineup of the Moody Blues and a key player in the classic lineup that produced their "Core 7" albums. He didn't write the hits, but his songs were usually the deepest and most interesting. He's also notable for introducing John Lennon to the mellotron, which resulted in "Strawberry Fields Forever".
And thanks for that bit of data about introducing Lennon to the mellotron -- I absolutely LOVE "Strawberry Fields Forever" (and, in fact, I've been spinning my CD of "Magical Mystery Tour" once a day since last weekend! Synchronicity!)
Originally Posted by Eryk Davis Ester
Yeah, "Om" was his. His Wikipedia page has a complete list of his songs.
I should also have pointed out that he was usually the one who recited the poetry written by drummer Graeme Edge ("Breathe deep the gathering gloom...")
This brief discussion from a couple of weeks ago has prompted me to reevaluate the Moody Blues catalog. I've now finished the "Core Seven" albums spanning 1967 to 1972.
While I haven't changed my mind that Justin Hayward wrote the catchiest tunes and had the most accessible voice, I do have to say that Mike Pinder now stands revealed as the band's best lyricist.
On to the later, post-hiatus works now, starting with 1978's Octave (the last one to feature Pinder.) Let's see what I think.
For me what makes the early albums work as albums is the contrast between the different writers. Hayward definitely writes the most accessible songs (and he's no slouch as a lyricist; there's a ton of turns of phrase by him that I absolutely love) but combine that with Pindar's deeper and more ambitious ("proggier", perhaps) instincts, Lodge's more rock-and-roll tendencies, Thomas's whimsicalness, and Edge's poetic and conceptual ambitions, and you get something that's more than the sum of its parts. The more it becomes Hayward as the dominant writer, with some contributions from Lodge, the less interesting the albums become as a whole. You're still getting two or three good singles per album, but the rest starts to sound more like filler. Or at least that's always been my impression. It's been a while since I've spent a lot of time with the later albums.
The last time I listened to the late 80s "comeback" albums in their entirety, I came away with the exact same impression you described towards the end of your post -- good singles, but too much filler.
I'm about to listen to Octave right now. I'll report on it tomorrow.
Yeah, I think that's the general consensus about Octave, which is why it's never included with the "Core Seven", despite being the last gasp of that line-up.
Fortunately, they do recover quite a bit with Long Distance Voyage, which I think most fans consider a much more worthy comeback, and the strongest album outside the Core 7, even if it features Moraz rather than Pindar.
^^Long Distance Voyager gets off to a glorious start:
"The Voice" ticks off every box for me, now and as it always has, since I first heard it on the radio as a 7-year-old. With Hayward's guitar and Moraz's keyboard blending smoothly, and topped with Hayward's velvety singing, it is musical comfort food at its finest!
Although nothing else on the album dazzles me quite as much, I do enjoy Side Two, especially the concluding three-track suite.
Side One, "The Voice" excepted naturally, is problematic for me for the same reasons as Side One of Octave -- disco rhythms and slide guitars are not bad things in and of themselves, but they do the Moodies no favors! The songs probably sounded great as demos, but once they were put through the trendy cheese processor, well...I know that's just the reality of the music biz, but it still makes me a bit sad.
I think Present is very much in the same mold as LDV, but without anythng as memorable as "The Voice".
A little while ago, I was looking over the track listing for The Present, and it certainly seems like they were trying to replicate the song sequencing on LDV.
While I would agree that The Present lacks a standout song like the previous album's "The Voice," I actually enjoyed it from start to finish, and found it to be the most consistent Moodies album since A Question of Balance! Every Good Boy is, in my opinion, erratic, and Seventh Sojourn, while magnificent in its bleakness, is not a fun listen.
Next: The big MTV friendly comeback, The Other Side of Life. I'm (cautiously) excited!
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