pearls before swine • balaklava (ESP-DISK, 1968)

My absence is unbecoming, and please accept my most humblest of apologies. Where have I been you may ask, I wish I could say that my travels have taken me to the exotic shores of Nebulae 12, with the natives neither wholly plant or machine. Or even that of the molecular with trapdoors awaiting with every ignorant turn. No, nothing as harrowing was the cause of my disappearance. My terrestrial employment had relocated to Long Island City, and the commute was not conducive to writing, I am sorry to admit.

Let us not dwell on such unpleasantness. The world can do that on it's own and it doesn't really need our help. We are seekers of sound new and old. That is our concern.

One of those Old and New sounds would be Pearls Before Swine's late 60's masterpiece - Balaklava. This jewel of folk melancholia was introduced to me by I. Vale in the mid 80's. From the spoken word opening from Trumpeter Landfrey, one of the last surviving trumpeters of The Charge of the Light brigade followed quickly by a song that sounded unlike anything that was labeled "the 60's". What was this sound? A acoustic guitar bathed in reverb, spoken word philosophy couplets, and heavy breathing. We were hooked.

Early in my listening carrier I was not a huge fan of acoustic music, it just seemed so empty. Thankfully this record set my ear afire with it's simplicity. This is not to say that it's all plain song, quite the opposite. Songs are often cradled by sound effects, and it is these effects that add to rather than flesh out the compositions. Guardian Angels, the stunning closer of side one would be nothing without the addition of 78 RPM scratches and drop outs. Could the gorgeous I Saw The World work without the shoreline sounds. It most likely would, due to the strength of the lyrics, but without it the song would be lacking. If I am stressing here the use of sound effects, it is by way of compensation. While the Pearls are now somewhat revered when remembered, at the time of my discovery most contemporary rock encyclopedias would list them as trivial LSD soaked oddities. These were the same books that heaped praise on the likes of the Almann Brothers and the Knack...and who says that that those books weren't ghost written by the staff at Atlantic or Epic...

All of the Pearls records were pretty much the vision of Thom Rapp (seated). He was most certainly responsible for the clever inward looking lyrics, but musically that's where it gets a little questionable. On this, their second record, not unlike the first, the music has a out of century quality. Just as Nico's The Marble Index could be songs from the 1500's with modern 8 track additions, the same could be said of Balaklava. The songs move with a air of American troubadour, but the whole section of backwards music smells of patchouli and modern technology.

The follow up record for Reprise, "These Things Too", continued with the Medieval art motif, but the original band was gone and the music reflects this. While never coming close to Singer Songwriter, every album after Balaklava has a creeping normality about it. This is not to say that James Taylor had anything to worry about, but the better tracks were getting few and far between. For every song like The Jeweler or Stardancer, you had Charley and the lady, or almost all of The City Of Gold LP.

Click on the review title for I Saw The World.