Reviews: An expanded Heatmiser; the Zombies in mono

Vinyl reviews of Heatmiser's Mic City Sons and the mono version of the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle.

We're doubling up today, with not one but two vinyl reissues in this newsletter. First up is an expanded 2-LP reissue of Heatmiser's 1996 album Mic City Sons, courtesy of Jack White's Third Man Records. Then we've got the mono reissue of the Zombies' 1968 classic Odessey and Oracle, which just came out on the band's own Beechwood Park Records. Both albums turned out to be final albums for each band before their breakups, although the Zombies went on to reunite decades later and release new material. Sadly, Heatmiser never could, following the death of Elliott Smith in 2003.

• Review: Heatmiser - Mic City Sons, expanded edition
• Review: The Zombies - Odyssey and Oracle, mono mix

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Heatmiser: Mic City Sons (Third Man Records)

Review by Robert Ham

A bell you're going to hear us constantly ringing at The Vinyl Cut is forged from our frustration with record labels, large and small, that reissue an album with little or no context. Take Third Man's expanded re-release of 1996's Mic City Sons, the third and final album by Portland-based melodic indie rockers Heatmiser. There's a solid foundation for the decision to re-release it. The band was, after all, co-founded by adored singer/songwriter Elliott Smith. And this reissue is a nice bookend to The Music of Heatmiser, the 2023 2-LP compilation that rounded up a batch of early material originally released on cassette in 1992 with demos and other rarities.

But what Music had that this reissue sorely lacks are details. Included with a remastered version of the original Mic City Sons album (handled by Mark Chalecki at LA’s Little Red Book Mastering) is a second LP of material the band self-produced at the home studio of Heatmiser drummer Tony Lash. That, unfortunately, is all we know about those 12 songs on the second disc. Hell, they don’t even print the titles of those songs anywhere on album packaging. The only way to know which song is playing is to look at the labels on the vinyl itself.

The Music comp had the benefit of contextual liner notes written by novelist/screenwriter Jon Raymond. For Mic City Sons, we are at the mercy of the press release that accompanied the announcement of this reissue and what search engines provide us. Internal tensions were yanking at the quartet, fueled in no small part by Smith’s ascendent solo career and the pressures of signing with Virgin Records (Mic was originally issued on their “indie” subsidiary Caroline). With new bassist Sam Coomes (also of Quasi) in the fold, they settled into a studio built in drummer Tony Lash’s home to track new material. As those self-produced sessions stalled out, they brought in Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf to get the record to finish line, with the LA-based team helping Smith’s folkier side (“Plainclothes Man,” “Rest My Head Against the Wall”) nestle more comfortably with co-frontman Neil Gust’s slicing rock. But before the album even hit the racks in 1996, the group was essentially done. (For a truly deep dive into the making of the album, check out this episode of the podcast Life of the Record.)

The second LP of this recently released set mirrors the original album in that way, with an equal balance of Gust and Smith’s musical intentions at the time. The instrumental “Rocker in C,” likely a Gust original, has a fangs-bared intensity that would likely have been tempered by his keening voice, while Smith fans get a chance to hear “Christian Brothers,” a favorite track from his 1995 self-titled album, given the full-bore rock treatment. (NB: The latter tune was previously included on the 2016 soundtrack to the documentary Heaven Adores You.) 

As for the sound of this reissue, I’ve seen some complaints online about the quality of the pressing, which was handled by Third Man Pressing in Detroit from a lacquer cut by Third Man Mastering's Warren Defever, but I have few complaints myself. The sound on the black vinyl edition I was sent to review was even more dynamic and fuller than the original pressing I once owned and regrettably sold. Smith and Gust's guitars tangle with a clarity that was slightly muddled before, and the snap of Lash's snare pokes through the mix with a sharp report. I will admit to a stray pop through my first spin of the second disc, but it disappeared upon subsequent listens. And there is a marked fuzziness that creeps into the final track on Side 1 (“Eagle Eye”), but I’m chalking that up to flaws in the source material that Chalecki was working with. 

Like most vinyl projects that Third Man has a hand in, the powers that be spared no expense when it came to the sonic aspect of Mic City Sons, but pulled up short when it came to giving curious listeners and longtime fans the deeper dive into the music's creation that the album also deserves. A true missed opportunity.

Third Man 2-LP 33 RPM (Third Man Pressing; mastered by Mark Chalecki, lacquer cut by Warren Defever) • black vinyl (pink translucent/blue opaque variant also pressed)

Listening equipment
Table: Cambridge Audio Alva ST
Cart: Audio-Technica VAT-VM95E
Amp: Sansui 9090
Speakers: Electro Voice TS8-2

The Zombies: Odessey and Oracle - mono (Beechwood Park)

Review by Ned Lannamann

When the Zombies’ swan song Odessey and Oracle was released in April 1968, the stereo revolution was well underway. And by the time the album’s closing track, “Time of the Season,” became a belated hit close to a year later, the album’s mono mix—released only in the UK and a couple other countries—had more or less disappeared entirely.

Now the Zombies have re-released Odessey in original mono, claiming it’s the first time it’s been on vinyl since its original release. That isn’t exactly true; German reissue label Repertoire put out a mono Odessey on vinyl in 2015, but that was from an unknown source and was not an entirely satisfactory-sounding release. The source for this new mono Odessey isn’t totally clear, either, which is a shame, because it is a terrific-sounding and fully authentic recreation of what those small numbers of British record buyers would have heard in 1968. Short of an all-analog release from the original master tape, it’s the best we could have hoped for.

The oft-told story goes that the Zombies—or rather, their chief songwriters, Chris White and Rod Argent—produced Odessey and Oracle themselves, with the majority of tracks recorded at Abbey Road’s Studio 3, where Pink Floyd had just finished recording Piper at the Gates of Dawn and portions of Sgt. Pepper had also recently been tracked and mixed. When the time came to submit the album to their new label, CBS, the band was informed that they’d need to include a stereo mix in addition to the mono mix they had painstakingly crafted.

The irony is, of course, that the band’s hastily prepared (and self-financed!) stereo mix has been the enduring document as the album’s reputation has grown exponentially over the years. A failure upon its release, Odessey and Oracle is now considered a singular masterwork of both baroque pop and psychedelia, without quite belonging to either genre. Simply put, it is one of the best albums of all time, and very few people have heard the mono version as the Zombies originally intended.

I think it’s safe to assume that a digital step was involved in the making of this new mono Odessey. At various times in the past, the master tapes were pronounced lost, but it sounds like a new master was re-created—from the session mixdown tapes, perhaps. No less than four individuals are credited on the re-release with “archive and restoration,” those being longtime Zombies archivists Alec Palao and Nick Robbins alongside Matthew and Jamie White, sons of Chris. In a recent interview with Goldmine, Jamie offers this simultaneously illuminating and cryptic explanation of the new mono version’s pedigree:

Matt and I were tasked with collating and providing the masters. Matt did all of the audio work. The Zombies tape catalog is in remarkably good shape, considering the age of the work; it is rich in source material…. We carried out fresh transfers of the tapes from the Odessey and Oracle sessions, collating a new mono master, but it was such a delicate and important job that we brought Alec Paleo and Nick Robbins into the team, [who] were vital in identifying the correct versions of the songs.

Meanwhile, Reuben Cohen of Lurssen Mastering in Burbank, California, is credited with the remastering, while Jeff Powell (of Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis) has his name etched in the vinyl deadwax. One assumes that once the Whites & Co. had compiled their new transfers, Cohen did the mastering of the high-resolution digital file that was then used by Powell to cut the vinyl lacquer. Cohen’s work probably then went on to the CD, streaming, and downloadable versions.

So if a new mono master was indeed created by the Whites, Paleo, and Robbins, they deserve high marks, as this new version is not just great-sounding but fully accurate, down to the correct, shorter version of “Care of Cell 44” and the funny little edit that results in an unintentional grace note kicking off “Changes,” both of which were incorrect when Paleo and Robbins released a mono Odessey on the 30th anniversary CD in 1998.

That’s the technical mumbo jumbo, such as it is. Taken as a musical experience, the new Odessey is glorious. The shorter “Care of Cell 44” is the same as the single version, and it’s superior, as the stereo take has that wonderful soaring chorus repeated one too many times. The band’s backing vocals are fully integrated with Argent’s Mellotron and Colin Blunstone’s unforgettable lead vocal, with White’s bass driving the melody in a way that can only be described as McCartneyesque. Indeed, the increased presence of White’s bass is one of the pleasures of this mono mix, as it anchors the album far more tangibly than in the stereo mix. This is best exemplified on “Maybe After He’s Gone” and “I Want Her She Wants Me,” where the bass is out front in a thrilling way.

The other differences are subtle but a treat to discover. The ending piano of “A Rose for Emily” no longer dissolves into echo. Paul Atkinson’s guitar plucks at the beginning of “Maybe After He’s Gone” sound more muted. The organ chord at the end of “Beechwood Park” lingers after the voices fade away. And of course, there is the famous horn overdub on “This Will Be Our Year,” which was tracked live to the mono mix so that it could only ever exist in the mono form, resulting in a fake stereo version plaguing various editions of Odessey over the years (a new true-stereo mix made in the ’90s meant that, for many newer listeners, the horns were gone altogether). Here’s the original mono mix, un-mussed-with.

I could rhapsodize about the music on this album for another thousand words, but presumably those interested in this new mono version are already well ensnared in Odessey’s grasp. What I can say is that the mono mix fully captures the album’s themes of youth, nostalgia, coming of age, and the intertwined hope and disappointment that's intrinsically fused to all of those things. Paired with the perfumed atmosphere of the Summer of Love that must have been in the air as these songs were being committed to tape, it’s a wonderfully sanguine look at the world—all the more remarkable, as the Zombies were, for all intents and purposes, coming to a somewhat defeated end during Odessey’s making.

But the music endured, driven in large part by the massive success of “Time of the Season,” a perfect single that still beguiles me even as I’ve heard it probably more than a thousand times. And that endurance led us to this overdue mono reissue—of not a forgotten obscurity of British pop but one of the most well-regarded pieces of music of the 20th century. The album’s making and impact is diagrammed in David Fricke’s welcome liner notes on the back cover (which, oddly, push the album’s original back-cover essay onto an insert that also includes a wonderful in-the-studio photo and the reproduction of a tracking sheet). 

The actual pressing itself is slightly less worthy of praise. The record comes in a basic paper sleeve rather than a polylined one. Little flecks of noise pop up here and there, including a particularly loud crack just before “Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914),” and the disc does not lie perfectly flat. I can’t figure out where it was pressed, and the deadwax doesn’t contain any telltale clues, so any frustration must be directed vaguely at the vinyl gods and not at a particular pressing plant, even though one is to blame. Furthermore, the reproduction of the wonderful psychedelic front cover is oddly dark here, noticeably lacking in the colorful vibrancy of the original.

But the music is as wonderful as ever, and the mono sound is a perfect example of why vinyl nuts get so worked up about these old mono mixes. What's not there in terms of stereo dimensionality is not missed; what is there is punch, vigor, cohesion, and complete authorial intent. This was one of the last important albums to be released in mono, and its autumnal hue of nostalgia can even be abstracted as a requiem for the format, if one is feeling so generously minded. For the rest of us, it’s simple: Here’s Odessey and Oracle in its most direct, honest form. Took a long time to come.

Beechwood Park 1-LP 33 RPM (unknown source; mastered by Reuben Cohen, lacquer cut by Jeff Powell) • black vinyl (indie-exclusive orchid and Zombie blue variants have also been pressed)

Listening equipment
Table: Technics SL-1200MK2
Cart: Audio-Technica VM540ML
Amp: Luxman L-509X
Speakers: ADS L980