The Pretty Things, S.F. Sorrow (1968)

It wouldn’t be right exactly to call 1968’s S.F. Sorrow by UK psych rockers The Pretty Things a lost classic. It’s never really been lost. The album had the misfortune of being released the same week as The Beatles‘ self-titled double-LP (aka The White Album), and while it’s sonic and conceptual breadth is remarkable, it languished commercially as did much of The Pretty Things‘ work since they got their start in the early-’60s, vocalist Phil May and guitarist Dick Taylor founding the band in London concurrent and in relation to membership changes in what would become The Rolling Stones. S.F. Sorrow is the fourth album by The Pretty Things, and bears many of the hallmarks of the psychedelic era in its clever twists of language, lyrical characterizations, Mellotrons, swirling guitars and vocals, and expansive feel. Listening through the tripped-out “Baron Saturday” and “The Journey,” one hears shades of Sgt. Pepper, released just the year before, and an experimentalism that early Pink Floyd is often credited with creating out of thin air.

At very least, The Pretty Things were right in the thick of the psychedelic era’s peak, but S.F. Sorrow is distinguished from its contemporaries both by a prevailing sense of cohesion — say what you want about The White Album, it’s disjointed as hell and too long — and by its musical and lyrical narrative, which takes its central character from birth through a downtrodden life of factory work, war and loss, through an inward spiritual journey that seems only to reveal the emptiness of it all and into the bitterness of old age. It is hardly mild fare, the feel-good hit of Sept. 1968, but S.F. Sorrow has enough scope in its arrangements to match its conceptual heft, the band — May, Taylor, organist/sitarist Jon Povey, drummers Twink and Skip Alan (one, then the other), bassist/pianist/etc. Wally Waller — working under producer Norman Smith and engineer Peter Mew, whose work includes the likes of The Beatles and Pink Floyd and so on. So it is that “Bracelets of Fingers” turns once, twice and again before its three-plus minutes are up without losing its direction, or that “Balloon Burning” bursts with melody to contrast what’s actually happening in the lyrics — the title character’s fiancee is burning alive in a Hindenburg-type disaster — while “Old Man Going” presages both heavy rock grit and progressive inflections in the guitar.

No question the record, which caps with the guitar/vocal “The Loneliest Person” as if to underscore where our hero ends up, is followed by a host of bonus tracks in the video above, is of its era, but it remains distinct within that context. The Pretty Things lineup disbanded by 1970, but have continued throughout the decades since in various forms and at various times — they played Roadburn in 2013 at the day curated by Jus Oborn of Electric Wizard — and released an album in 2015 that was their first in eight years called The Sweet Pretty Things (Are in Bed Now, Of Course…) on Repertoire Records that remained true to May and Taylor‘s commitment to an organic and progressive vision of psychedelic rock, recorded analog through vintage amps and so on.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

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And if you celebrated, I hope you had a good holiday. The Patient Mrs. and I spent a relatively quiet Xmas Eve at home, which was a pleasant first in the 11-plus years we’ve been married, and the hightailed it down the oh-so-familiar I-95 to New Jersey, first to my family on the 25th and then to hers about halfway back north in Connecticut on the 26th. If I had a quota for Xmas, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t, it’s been met.

I’m expecting a quiet week. I have some reviews I’d like to get done before the year ends — Deville, Dirty Streets, a couple tapes that don’t start with the letter ‘d’ — but the bigger idea is to get everything ready for the Readers Poll results, which will go up on Jan. 1. I also have a list of the year’s best EPs, demos, splits, 7″s, etc., that will be up before Friday, so keep an eye out for that. Should be tomorrow, actually. And anything else that comes along, we’ll see how it plays out. Quarterly Review will be next week. Yeah, it’s after the quarter ends, but pushing it back a week makes life easier for me. I’m willing to wager nobody’s going to break out their wall calendar and file a grievance.

It’s a short week, work-wise, which suits me just fine, but I’ll have at least two posts up on Friday and there’s still way too much to do before 2015 ends, so please stick around. I hope you have a great and safe week, and while you’re bored kicking around with nothing do to over the next five days because it feels like everybody and their cousin is off celebrating the holiday season and you’re stuck in your drab, undecorated, fluorescent-lit office killing time while you wait for a piano to fall on your head — oh wait, sorry, talking about myself again — please check out the forum and the radio stream.

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