The Rock Songbook began with several posts on The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, an album widely accepted as one of the pinnacle achievements of 60s rock. While we can understand why many label its music as “psychedelic,” given its mind-blowing beauty and the LP’s flowery cover-art, The Zombies themselves have said that it has nothing to do with hallucinogenic drugs. What listening actually hears is a blending of their reworked Beatles-music with classical techniques and instrumentation. That is, it stands as one of the exemplars of what some have labeled “Baroque Rock,” the category I sketched in No. 44, “It Was the Dawning of the Age of the Harpsichord.”
Most of the album’s songs concern sentiments of romantic love and/or nostalgia. The line about her sadness that makes her smile in “Brief Candles” captures the predominant emotional key being sounded and explored throughout. And the album’s most moving evocation of a nostalgic feeling that is simultaneously sad-yet-grateful, disillusioned-yet-longing, probably occurs in this song. The song is also among the album’s handful (the others are “Changes,” and “Time of the Season”) that comment upon the unfolding Culture Revolution of the 60s. So, the feeling it conveys is a kind of wistful-yet-wise “nostalgia” for the 60s dream, felt just as soon as its impossibility was glimpsed.
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