Emotions (The Pretty Things, 1967)

Well, I'm all cashed out on the Pretties. If there are going to be more posts I'll just need to buy more of their albums. As I previously mentioned, Emotions is a flawed album. Looking at the cover and the title, you may think this is a really crazy psych album, but it isn't. You may think that its placement between the R&B inspired Get the Picture? from 1965 and 1968's S.F. Sorrow make it the perfect "bridge" album between them, which isn't really true either.

The band had expressed a desire to get beyond the basic R&B material of their first two albums, acknowledging that the scene was pretty much running its course. While the lyrics and vocals show signs of greater expansiveness, the music is still rooted in the older sound. A lot of this is due to the elements of the "revised" Pretty Things not quite being in place yet. Wally Waller (bass) and Jon Povey (keyboards) had joined mid-session and their vocal contributions (a vastly different style from lead singer Phil May) appear on only a few of the songs. John "Twink" Alder wouldn't join until the next album. To make matters worse in the music department, the producers hijacked the sound, adding a lot of mostly grating orchestrations to make it sound more "out there". A couple of the bonus tracks ("The Sun" and "Photographer") strip out the horns, revealing a awfully bare sound, but this is due to the band leaving out their own fills so the orchestration could step in. The end result is a weird mix of rock and jazz renditions of pop songs all piled together.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of moments in Emotions that work and anyone who likes the other pre-Freeway Madness albums will probably be just fine with the album, warts and all. From the jaunty opening of "Death of a Socialite" to the stuttered vocals and mandolin of "Tripping" this album still gets plenty of listening at work, home, and in the car. Like all of the reissued albums, there's a nice helping of bonus tracks - almost more than the 12 tracks of the original album. Probably most interesting is the unusual cover of the Kinks' song "House in the Country", probably the most overt tribute to the band they were coming to admire more and more, one that was also making the transition to a different kind of sound.