stevesunusual…music and more

In the heat of every August, I hearken to my days walking the close corridors of the U of IL’s Armory, bursting out into the glancing sun and high summer blaze, The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle pulsing in my head. This album was released posthumously yet lives on, more than most.

“Time of the Season” was the big hit, and it occurred to me the other day, that notwithstanding this sometimes dubious distinction to album connoisseurs, that it could be the best song of the 1960s, one that captured its decade and pushed forward into future ones as well as transmitting a feeling of great scenery and poetry.

What’s more, the music, the music. Each part grabs me, and it is my favorite fade-out of all the songs I play. Blunstone’s usual breathily menacing vocals, Argent’s backup vocals and his scintillating keyboard jabs and stabs, the flourishes calling to mind late summer city hazes and streamside mists rising over the morning fields. Atkinson’s cicada-drone guitar line and jabs and ehtereal strums, White’s bass rather quiet but starting things off and looping underneath it all.

And then, the king of all of it, grabbing you at the beginning, and bringing it all home—Hugh Grundy’s percussion parts. The initial exotic combination of sounds that permeate the whole song, the heavy, bracing drum fills, and foremost of all: the syncopated ride cymbal driving everything, rearing its head in the instrumental moments especially. Like I said, it’s my favorite fade-out I can think of, and one I turn up as loudly as I can, although my car speakers are old ones in an old car. As it goes along, the song gets better and better, and so it does in my mind too, each time I listen.