1. Stephanie Knows Who
2. Orange Skies*
3. ¡Que Vida!
4. 7 and 7 Is*
5. The Castle
6. She Comes in Colours*
7. Revelation
B
Now hang on a minute. According to Wikipedia this was released in 1966. Is the Book only using UK release dates? I don't know. At any rate, this is where it is. So lets deal with it.
One interesting thing about doing this project is that it's forcing me to examine my own relationship with music, and where my preferences actually lie. And one thing I've discovered is that I tend to prefer more direct, easily comprehensible lyrics which tell a story or sketch a character or contain strong imagery. Not that I can't enjoy more impressionistic stuff - I just no longer feel much of a desire to puzzle out the intricacies of obscure lyrics, and I'm too much of a stick in the mud to engage in elaborate flights of fancy. Which is a long way of saying that this album left me cold. Arthur Lee's lyrics are esoteric to say the least, and not always in a good way. What does "When I was invisible I needed no light, but now you see through me, am I out of sight" even mean? And what about the opening lines to "7 and 7 Is"? "When I was a boy, I thought about the times I'd be a man - I'd sit inside a bottle and pretend that I was in a can. In my lonely room, I'd sit my mind in an ice cream cone. You can throw me if you wanna, 'cause I'm a bone and I go oop-bip-bip, oop-bip-bip, yeah!"
Sure, Arthur Lee. Whatever you say. It's telling that Love's best song ("Alone Again Or"), was written by Bryan MacLean, who also wrote the lovely "Orange Skies". Then again, maybe these lyrics were an attempt to capture a fractured psyche? If so, I hope someone gave Arthur Lee a hug.
In any case these lyrical excesses are a pity, because the music on the first half of this album is pretty impressive. There hasn't really been anything like it before on the list. There are jazz influences, in the use of flutes and saxophone, and odd time changes, but everything flows neatly from one idea to the next, without the deliberately jarring juxtapositions of prog. This is a folk rock album, but only in the loosest sense that there's a lot of accoustic guitar and intelligent (if barely intelligible) lyrics. It's really quite hard to categorize. "Stephanie Knows Who" lurches from heavy rock to jazzy folk and wanders through several time changes. "Orange Skies" is pretty folk pop. "¡Que Vida!" is a melancholy latin-tinged number that features the sort of gentle flute accents one associates with a bossa nova recording. And "7 and 7 Is" is a complete monster - a track anchored by a driving drum beat so complicated it took countless takes to nail, and with heavy guitars and a forceful vocal, all climaxing in a literal explosion. It really sounds like nothing else from the time, and in some ways it's kind of like post-punk ten years before that was even a thing.
Unfortunately, while the first half of the album is pretty good, and certainly very experimental in an engaging and accessible way, side two consists of a single interminable jam. "Revelations" is just terrible, and I'm not even sure what it's doing here. The band would have been better served just releasing the songs on side one as an EP.
Poking around on the internet, a lot of people seem to rate side A of this album as possibly Love's best work. I don't personally see how anyone who's heard Forever Changes could think that, but then what do I know. This is a strange jumble of an album, lurching from song to song with little internal logic, and while it's very beautiful musically the lyrics veer from wide-eyed optimism to incomprehensible druggy paranoia and back again with such abandon that its jarring. Still, this was obviously an important album in the development of experimental pop. I don't personally buy into the notion that Love could have been huge with the right promotion - I think their music was too weird and idiosyncratic to ever find more than a cult audience. But Da Capo is a good listen. I just rated it a "B" because "Revelations" singlehandedly dragged the grade down from an A-.
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