The Pretty Things - Midnight To Six 1965-1970 (2014) 
DVD9: 720 x 480 (NTSC 4:3 ) at 29.970 fps | PCM, 2ch, 1536 Kbps, 48.0 KHz
Blues Rock, Psychedelic Rock | Snapper Music | Covers Included | 01:59:40 | ~ 7.69 Gb
Part from The Pretty Things - Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky Box Set It is a hefty box in every sense: 13 CDs, supplemented with two DVDs, accompanied by a
gorgeous hardcover book and a variety of tchotchkes, including a poster
that traces the twisted family trees and time lines of the band and,
just as helpfully, replicas of legal documents that explain why the
group didn't retain rights to its recordings for years. Such explicatory
details are necessary because the Pretty Things do indeed have a long,
convoluted story, a story that is told in its entirety on Bouquets from a
Cloudy Sky, released to commemorate the band's 50th Anniversary. Every
one of the band's studio albums is here, beginning with 1965's brutal
eponymous debut and ending with 2007's surprisingly sturdy Balboa
Island, all presented in good remasters dating from the late '90s and
supplemented with bonus tracks that have been in circulation on previous
reissues. The only major things missing are the complete sessions they
recorded with French bon vivant Philippe DeBarge and the trippy film
library music they recorded under the name the Electric Banana, although
both are sampled on the two discs of rarities included as enticing
collector bait.
These two CDs function as footnotes to the main text, offering a handful
of raw and furious early cuts -- BBC sessions, rough mixes, and demos
that underscore the Pretty Things' early savagery -- and then filling
out the latter years with introspective demos, the odd stray song
("Spider Woman," a 1972 song that never made it to an album but probably
should have; a new wave reggae piss-take called "Monster Club" from a
mock horror film of the same name from 1980; "Cause and Effect," the
lone studio song from 1988's live reunion Out of the Island), and some
cuts from the '90s pre-reunion project the Pretty Things & the
Yardbirds Blues Band. Much of this is interesting, at times even
riveting, and helps bring to life the narrative told well in the
hardcover book and DVD documentary, but there's a compelling arc told in
the main discography this box set so lovingly preserves.
Like so many British rock bands of the '60s, the Pretty Things both
anticipated and followed trends. They were at ground zero for the
British blues explosion and wound up with trailblazing concept albums
like 1968's S.F. Sorrow, but they usually seemed a year or two behind
the times, arriving a hair too late to ride the zeitgeist. This is best
seen with 1970's Parachute, a piece of lush psychedelia accomplished
enough to earn legendary status, and named Album of the Year by Rolling
Stone, but it sounded as if it belonged to a year or two earlier, which
also could be said of the Baroque middlebrow pop of 1967's Emotions or
the massive arena rock of 1976's Savage Eye. Such a flair for delayed
fashion certainly hurt the Pretty Things commercially but looking at
their career as a body of work, it's rich and restless, one that
continually evolved. The acknowledged high points still shine brightly
-- the debut is as nasty as rock & roll got in the '60s, while Get
the Picture? adds some style to that swing; S.F. Sorrow is a gorgeous
yet tense psychedelic masterwork but it may be trumped by the expansive
Parachute -- but the revelations arise in the neglected corners of their
discography. Emotions may have been heavily tweaked by the record label
but it's an effective hybrid of the Kinks and Beatles; Freeway Madness
has pastoral touches that belie its title; the two albums for Swan Song
-- Silk Torpedo and Savage Eye -- feel assured in their road-conquering
heaviosity; the New Wave reunion Cross Talk is shockingly sharp, and the
latter day comeback records are no-nonsense affirmations of the deep
rock & roll roots of Dick Taylor and Phil May. By the time of their
last album in 2007, the Pretty Things had come nearly full circle and
the great thing about Bouquets from a Cloudy Sky is that it vividly
illustrates what a wild ride those 50 years were.
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AMG The Pretty Things at Wiki |
The Pretty Things at Discogs |
The Pretty Things at Allmusic ***********
Tracklist: 01. Opening Montage
02. Big Boss Man
03. Big City
04. You Don't love Me, You Don't Care
05. Road Runner
06. RosalYn
07. Don't Bring Me Down
08. Honey I Need
09. Midnight To Six Man
10. Come See Me
11. L.S.D.
12. Children
13. Talckin' About The The Good Times
14. Private Sorrow
15. Death
16. Baron Saturday
17. Balloon Burning
18. Cries From The Midnight Circus
19. In The Square/The Letters/ Rain
20. Walking Through My Dreams (Credits)
Bonus:
01 The Pretty Things. On Film documentary
02 Rosalyn (Promo Video)
03 Eve Of Destruction (Promo Video)
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