The Zombies Revive ‘Odessey and Oracle’ at Triumphant NYC Show
Early in that set, Blunstone gave the adoring crowd a lesson in the peculiar arithmetic of Odessey and Oracle, the Zombies’ commercial Waterloo. Made in the summer of 1967, in the inspiring wake of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album — with its charmingly misspelled title and iconic cover art by Terry Quirk — was released in Britain and America in 1968 to virtual silence. When it was reissued in the U.S. in 1969 — as the final track, “Time of the Season,” became a belated two-million-selling single — the Sixties quintet had already split in frustration.
Argent, Blunstone, White and Grundy first played Odessey and Oracle in its entirety in Britain in 2008. The church-like propriety of the Society for Ethical Culture, complete with pews, suited the holy aura of the record’s live, delayed arrival in New York. The acoustics, particularly the room’s boxy reverb, were a little less welcoming to Odessey‘s choral subtleties. At times, the expanded band’s sunny din in “Maybe After He’s Gone” and “I Want Her, She Wants Me” — the Sixties four with extra voices, guitar and keyboards — overwhelmed Blunstone’s lower range.
But that was a small drawback to the greater lesson of Odessey, in performance: the compelling restraint in its enriched-pop drama and the earthy romanticism of the writing. “Care of Cell 44” was a jaunty delight ringed with shadows — a relationship torn apart by prison; “Maybe After He’s Gone” was devastated pining, Blunstone’s voice hanging like stranded devotion in the falling-harmony chorales. “Brief Candles” seesawed between plaintive intimacy and arch, British–Beach Boys grandeur, with Argent, White and Blunstone each taking a verse, against nothing more than Argent’s baroque piano, before the payoff chorus. In “Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914),” Argent and White evoked harrowing carnage with striking minimalism: Argent on an antique pump organ and White on vocals, not quite on pitch and a little back from his mic, perfectly capturing the shy horror of a teenager in the trenches.
Either half of this night would have been exhilarating in its own right. Together, they were a story still busy being told — in classic-pop history, psychedelic monument, continuing aspiration and enduring friendship. “There is not another place that I would rather be than here,” Blunstone sang in “Chasing the Past,” a song from Still Got That Hunger about not living in yesterday yet ringed in the Odessey-like echoes in Argent’s stalking piano and throaty-organ break. Tonight, the Zombies proved that the right band can have it both ways.