New - The Zombies - Odessey And Oracle - LP

Odessey and Oracle features fan favorites “Time of the Season” and “This Will Be Our Year” and is the resurrection story that keeps on giving. This new edition is the first time the band’s original mono mix has appeared on LP since the record’s British issue in April 1968 and it’s the first time ever in America.

Odessey and Oracle, The Zombies’ second album, has been named as one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and has been dubbed “a psych-pop masterpiece…decades ahead of its time” by Pitchfork. The newly remastered in mono album now has new liner notes by the brilliant David Fricke – an edited excerpt is below.

Odessey and Oracle is very much of and about its time: songs of youth and love – the lucky strike of attraction (“I Want Her She Wants Me”); flickering memories held tight (“Brief Candles”); longing that defies the odds (“Maybe After He’s Gone”) – from pop’s high season of amour, a crowded nirvana of landmark debuts (Pink Floyd, the Doors, the Jimi Hendrix Experience) and definitive accounts of Britain’s psychedelic bloom: The Who Sell Out, Procol Harum, Disraeli Gears. That’s John Lennon’s mellotron, a signature sound of the age (left behind at Abbey Road after the Sgt. Pepper sessions), played by Argent in “Changes” – the rippled bursts of Gothic church framing the full band’s English-Beach Boys vocal cascades – and the love-in memoir “Hung Up on a Dream,” the mellotron dancing with Atkinson’s bell-tone guitar as Blunstone (in the verses) and Argent (in the bridge) reflect on a new age that was fast becoming past tense.

“Time of the Season” was, of course, the entrance to everything, a million-selling U.S. single and the first song most people heard from Odessey and Oracle. The double-tracked organ solo was a fortunate accident in the mixing, like Argent playing in a hall of mirrors, while the studio tensions over Blunstone’s vocal belie the elegant, whispered spell of the outcome, the dramatic climax of an album that is (as I once wrote in Rolling Stone) “the closest Mother England ever came to its own Pet Sounds.”

But it’s earlier on Side Two, in “This Will Be Our Year,” that the Zombies summed up with compact pop-soul bravado – and uncanny prophecy – the odyssey and miracle here. “This will be our year/Took a long time to come,” White wrote and Blunstone sings with feathery certainty in the chorus. The song is about enduring faith and devotion on a record that has become one of the most acclaimed and adored of all time. It wasn’t always this way. It is now – and again in mono. – David Fricke