The Zombies - Into the Afterlife 2007

Maravillosa recopilación de singles post Zombies (post Odessey & Oracle) y demos y rarezas. Compiladas por Alec Palao (sí, el de los Sneetches, catedrático mayor del reino Zombie). Una joya. REEDICIÓN DEL AÑO, sin discusión. He pagado dos textos; uno de Mark A. Frumento (Cherry Hill, NJ USA), sacado de amazon.com y que según dice, lo escribió para Shindig Magazine (http://blog.shindig-magazine.com/news.php). El segundo corresponde a Alec Palao.

MARK A. FRUMENTO   

The Zombies may have one of the few catalogues in the history of 60s pop music to be treated with the full and proper respect it deserves. This comes down partially to the fact that the band themselves own the material but it's largely due to the caretaking abilities of compiler, writer and Zombies historian Alec Palao.

Alec made it easy for both super-fans and novices to collect the Zombies when he dreamed up Zombies Heaven, the 4 CD set of all of their studio recordings. There are side trips along the way with releases containing alternate mixes and rarities but owning the band's complete output is as easy as that one purchase. Now, 10 years since the release of Zombie Heaven Palao has given us one of the finest encores we could have imagined with Into the Afterlife.

Compiling 20 post-Odessey & Oracle tracks, Afterlife, like the box set before it, is another carefully compiled and well documented package. In this one collection you get the complete recorded output of Colin Blunstone's alter ego Neil MacArthur, a handful of excellent Rod Argent and Chris White demos, alternate mixes of later Zombies recordings and a few other oddities.

The proceedings kick off with the Neil MacArthur recording of She's Not There. The liner notes tell us that producer Mike Hurst coaxed Colin Blunstone away from his day job as an insurance salesman to make a return to the studio. The first number they tried together was this trippy version of the old Zombies hit. Luckily for us Blunstone stayed with Hurst for two more excellent singles, the Billy Vera penned blue-eyed soul track Don't Try to Explain, Nilsson's Without Her and the big production of 12:29 and It's Not Easy. We're also treated to a few rare MacArthur recordings including a breathy version of Stephen Stills' Hung Upside Down. The MacArthur tracks alone make this CD worth the price of admission.

Rod Argent and Chris White are represented by 6 demos, the highlights being Unhappy Girl and To Julia (for When She Smiles). Both of these demos would have fit nicely on Odessey & Oracle and are easily up to the standards of that album. Telescope (Mr. Galileo) is another fantastic number, very much in a pop psych vein. A completed studio recording of Telescope by an early incarnation of Argent is also included.

Rounding out the collection are 3 Zombies tracks, Walking in the Sun, I Know She Will and If It Don't Work Out, all remixes of tracks that appeared on Zombie Heaven. The mixes on Afterlife highlight the orchestral bits that were added as an effort to eek another hit out of the band. If anything could be considered filler on this CD it would be these tracks. More than anything the orchestrations prove to be bloated and overbearing when they are separated from the Zombies' original recordings.

Finally, we are presented with a rare live recording of the Zombies from 1966. On Going to a Go Go we get to hear just how much the band could rock in front of an audience and it's a shame more of these performances aren't available. While the not so excellent sound quality on this track breaks the mood it is among the most interesting artifacts on the CD.

Afterlife is packaged with the same quality we've come to expect Big Beat/Ace. A nice, fat booklet, filled with all the necessary details, band quotes, photos and memorabilia is housed artfully in an Odessey & Oracle part 2 cover. It may have taken 10 years to round this material up into one package but the wait was worth it. Palao and Big Beat have produced a Zombies collector's dream and one the best 60 reissues so far this year. 

 

 

 

ALEC PALAO

· "Ten years is a long time for a compilation to come to fruition, but at Ace Records we firmly believe that it is well worth the wait to do things properly. Such in the case with Into the Afterlife. I had originally planned this collection of post-Zombies odds and sods to come out shortly after the release in October 1997 of Zombie Heaven, almost as a sort of adjunctal fifth disc. Some tracks on Afterlife had in fact at one time been contenders for inclusion on the box. However, one learns that not everything in life is quite so simple, and thus it has taken the best part of a decade to gather the appropriate clearances for the contents of Afterlife. I think you will agree, though, that it has indeed been well worth the wait.
This is technically not a Zombies album, though it does contain performances by Colin Blunstone, Rod Argent, Chris White, Hugh Grundy and Paul Atkinson, together and separately. In their seven years together, the St Albans quintet had gone from rags to riches to rags again, both literally and metaphorically. As 1968 dawned, with an imminent dissolution of the five friends’ partnership, it seemed that for some of the participants at least, the Zombies had been a magical but ultimately fleeting adventure. Rather, Afterlife is, essentially, what the members of the Zombies did next. It documents the relatively brief but murky period between the end of the group, and the establishment of long term music careers by its main protagonists: two years that were also highlighted by the sudden re-emergence of the Zombies brand as a major commercial force, thanks to the belated and quite unexpected American success of the final single Time Of The Season and the group’s brilliant swansong, Odessey & Oracle.
It is thus a fascinating, if fleeting chapter, that draws from three different sets of repertoire: Rod and Chris’ initial demos on the way to the formation of Argent, pop experiments that on the one hand are markedly different to what these two exemplary writers had done in the past, yet bear the classy hallmark of the Odessey songbook; the augmented Zombies material that the duo prepared for the aborted R.I.P album; and the small cache of recordings Colin made as Neil MacArthur, including his revamp of She’s Not There which charted in the spring of 1969.
Virtually everything on Afterlife has not been reissued before, and over half has never been available anywhere.
The demos provide a chance to hear fabled lost songs such as Unhappy Girl and To Julia, which were deemed inappropriate for the direction the band Argent would take, as well as the embryonic versions of much-loved tunes like She Loves The Way They Love Her. The personnel utilized for the demo sessions was a dry-run for Rod’s planned new group, including Jim Rodford on bass and Hugh Grundy on drums. We also hear a rare Chris vocal on the legendary track Mr Galileo. The enviable harmonies of messrs Argent and White are also to the fore on the orchestral mixes of vintage Zombies outtakes redressed for R.I.P., remixed so as to showcase both the overdubbed vocals and Mike Vickers’ expert string and horn arrangements.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Afterlife are the Neil MacArthur sides, which are rarely discussed even by diehard fans of Mr Blunstone. Though they were unrelated to Chris and Rod’s concurrent activities and, as Colin himself explains in the liners, it was a most uncertain period in the singer’s career, this material nevertheless features some great and overlooked performances from one of the most distinctive voices in British pop. Overseen by producer Mike Hurst, we feature all six tracks originally released on three Deram singles in 1969, including exemplary versions of Nilsson’s Without Her and Billy Vera’s Don’t Try To Explain, and Hurst’s own World Of Glass. A special bonus was the discovery in the producer’s vault of two unreleased cuts from the sessions, including Colin’s absolutely gorgeous rendering of the Buffalo Springfield’s Hung Upside Down. The arrangements are all late 60s British record-making at its classiest.
Last but not least, there are a couple of continentally-flavoured bonus cuts: the super-rare Italian language version of She’s Not There, and Going To A Go Go, as performed live by the original Zombies on French TV in late 1966.
Though it consists of live rave-ups, bare-boned demos, or ultra-commercial items aimed squarely at the charts, Into The Afterlife actually hangs together in an oddly satisfying manner, a cohesion that could be expected of few others in pop at the time. As the last Zombies single of the 60s postulated, If It Don’t Work Out: a lot of what’s here indeed did not work out, but most other artists should be so lucky as to have ephemera of this calibre to throw away.
Alec Palao