1. S. F. Sorrow Is Born
2. Bracelet of Fingers
3. She Says Good Morning*
4. Private Sorrow*
5. Balloon Burning
6. Death
7. Baron Saturday*
8. The Journey
9. I See You
10. Well of Destiny
11. Trust
12. Old Man Going
13. Loneliest Person
B+
When I was a kid, I lived off and on in an incredibly boring country town. One of the highlights of my existence was trips to the nearest thing you could call a city to do the weekly shop. On the way there and back, we'd sometimes listen to a battered old cassette of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, which I loved and still love. So I'm not one of those people to dismiss a rock opera out of hand. In fact, the idea is a pretty good one. I've just rarely heard it done well.
S. F. Sorrow can lay claim to being the very first rock opera. Perhaps inevitably, this means that it's both ahead of its time and dated, and not all the kinks have been worked out. It's a good listen, but deeply strange and kind of all over the place. I can't help but take my hat of to the Pretty Things for the ambition they display here, even if I was often left scratching my head.
Musically, there's a diverse range of styles, but the most obvious debt is owed to the Beatles (this album was, perhaps not coincidentally, recorded at Abbey Road). There's also a bit of Pink Floyd in some of the weirder tracks. The experimentation is all anchored by the band's background in blues and R&B, though, so it seldom gets too weird. The singer's John Lennonisms get a bit much at times, though, and sometimes I felt like I was being subjected to an extended variation on "I Am The Walrus".
The plot, such as it is, I found quite difficult to extract from the lyrics. I have heard that the album was originally issued with liner notes which provided a great deal of context, but I haven't been able to find them online. So in the end I was left with a sort of bricolage consisting of my impressions from listening to the album mixed with exegeses by various rock critics. The basic outline, though, is that a guy is born, has a happy childhood full of imagination and play, gets sent to work in a factory, falls for a girl ("She Says Good Morning", which is a kick-ass rocker), and then gets sent to fight in WWI. After being demobbed, he moves to New York and sends for his love, who dies in the Hindenburg disaster. After that I don't really know what happens, except that things go from bad to worse for poor old Sorrow, as his world collapses around him. Then for some reason he meets the Voodoo deity Baron Samedi (here called "Baron Saturday", and this song is another highlight, being particularly heavy and weird). After that the album lost me, although the music was pretty cool.
So I guess this is a good album musically, but it doesn't really achieve its intended purpose. If you got high and listened to it I imagine it would be a profound (if exquisitely depressing) experience. I'd definitely recommend it, just because it has a few killer songs, is admirably strange, and shows the occasional flash of brilliance. Then again, I remember a guy I know saying that there's a point in every rock opera where the artists lose control of the story and things devolve into aimless self-indulgence. That's true of S. F. Sorrow, but then again it's also true of The Wall. Definitely check this album out (your mileage may vary, after all).
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