Among the wave of bands that seismically changed rock music during the British Invasion of the 1960s, The Zombies were the odd duck from across the pond.
The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, and The Kinks wrote largely guitar-based songs, using power chords and swagger to tap into that timeless witch’s brew of adolescent hormones and rebellion. The Zombies, contrary to their gruesome namesake, eschewed the knuckle-dragging primitivism of most of their peers. Rod Argent’s keyboards formed the band’s sonic foundation, and Argent and bass player Chris White composed pop songs from a more sophisticated place where jazz, classical music, and show tunes intermingled with a rock backbeat.
Despite their incongruity, The Zombies hit the international pop charts right out of the gate with one of the British Invasion’s most enduring early hits, “She’s Not There.” A sense of unease thrummed beneath the melodic hooks of the song, thanks to Argent’s faintly menacing keyboards and lead singer Colin Blunstone’s distinctive voice. It was the closest thing that era produced to goth pop, a song that was as haunted as it was haunting.
That quality informed much of the band’s work. Like a lot of their peers, The Zombies could swing like no one’s business, with a combination of original tunes and well-chosen covers that could definitely fill a dance floor. But their two-minute pop songs were often infused with an almost intangible sense of melancholy. It’s an atmosphere due in large part to Argent’s and White’s use of minor chords, and most especially to Blunstone’s delivery. Blunstone’s alternately soulful and eerily spectral tenor sounds like testimony from a ghost being haunted in its own right by the specter of doomed romance, even on some of The Zombies’ most upbeat tracks.
Odessey and Oracle (that’s not a typo, BTW: Cover artist Terry Quirk accidentally immortalized the misspelling of the title on the cover art), The Zombies’ 1968 magnum opus, preserves the sound of a band with nothing to lose. After two hitless years–an eternity by sixties rock standards–Argent and White went for broke, indulging the whims of their respective influences with a series of distinctively British songs that cherry-picked from English folk music (the gorgeous madrigal, “Changes”), trebly psychedelia (“Beechwood Park”), and stately classical flourishes (the appropriately luminescent “Brief Candles”). A distinctive sense of melancholy suffuses much of the album, but the unerring loveliness of its melodies and production renders it achingly, irresistibly beautiful.
The breathy, heady “Time of the Season” remains one of the most sensual blue-eyed soul songs of all time and Odessey’s calling card, but the entire album’s packed with amazing material. “Care of Cell 44” opens the record bouncing like The Beatles at their most Paul McCartney-peppy, until you realize the song’s a darkly-funny love letter to a woman in prison. Elsewhere, “Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914)” paints a bone-chilling anti-war portrait, with a lone pipe organ wheezing darkly as White sings from the POV of a young soldier horrified by the fly-ridden corpse of one of his fallen comrades (“If the preacher, he could see those flies, wouldn’t preach for the sound of guns”).
The result remains one of the greatest rock records of the 1960s, entirely deserving of idolatry right alongside the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Its sheer sonic genius, and its odd history–Odessey became The Zombies’ biggest hit a year after apathetic early sales spurred the band to break up–only add to its mystique. It’s also one of those albums that’s influenced a metric crap-ton of other artists: If you dig Nick Drake’s rain-spattered gothic folk (and, by extension, Elliott Smith’s dark poetry), or the more baroque moments of local acts like The Posies and Tomten, you’re spiking directly into Odessey and Oracle’s combination of beauty and sadness.
All of this is, honestly, just a long-winded preamble to the fact that 1) The Zombies play Benaroya Hall tonight, 2) through some miracle there are a few tickets available here, and 3) you really, really should go.
The Argent-and-Blunstone-led touring version of The Zombies has played Seattle a few times over the last fifteen years, and they’re an unfailingly great live act in their own right. What makes this particular gig special is the presence of Chris White and original drummer Hugh Grundy. Both men have only played with their old bandmates a handful of times over the last four decades (and never, to my knowledge, in Seattle). So, yeah, the entire surviving original line-up of one of the great British Invasion bands plays their masterpiece, in its entirety, tonight. At the risk of rampant hyperbole, you’d be nuts to miss it.
