1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 135. Pretty Things – S.F. Sorrow (1968)

 

Since I’m going into these albums blind, with no notion of why they were included in the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, sometimes it’s a fun guessing game as to why they were included. Some are obviously examples of a well-known artist, or an early form of a particular genre, sometimes I think the compilers just liked it and felt it was overlooked.

And so it was a bit of a guessing game for this one. The Pretty Things, when I looked them up, are another of those bands that are pretty much still around with constant changes in personnel, although off the top of my head I couldn’t name what their biggest chart hit was (if any). This album feels like what is by now standard, if pretty good, raga-rock/psychedelia/baroque pop kind of a mix such as we’ve seen on many prior albums.

There’s a throughline concerning the character SF Sorrow, from his birth, through experiences in war (with a very moving piece where the names of the fallen are spoken underneath the music), and then later loneliness. In the end I looked it up and this is arguably the first “rock opera”, before The Who’s Tommy. Sadly the overall story of SF Sorrow isn’t abundantly clear because the music and lyrics are quite abstracted. When, for example, the track Baron Saturday comes up, is this Sorrow being bought back to life by voodoo, or is it him musing on death and wishing to reconnect with his dead war buddies?

Don’t get me wrong, I liked this one, and I think I’d go back to it to listen more closely to pick out the themes. It wasn’t a great commercial success, apparently, which is a shame, but also compared to the later narratives by, say, Roger Waters, perhaps the “opera” theme didn’t really come through, and without that it is musically not any more remarkable than the albums around it at the time.