Pearls Before Swine is one of those legendary bands that is considered
legendary mainly because far more people have heard about the band than
actually have heard its music. Pearls Before Swine frontman, Tom Rapp, has
become a cult hero mainly because of the increasing obscurity and scarcity
of his musical output. He once complained that in the pre-CD era, he had no
way of hearing his own music because he would have to pay more for a vinyl
copy of a Pearls Before Swine album than he made for recording it. With the
first two Pearls Before Swine albums, One Nation Underground and
Balaklava, now available on this handy single disc collection, maybe
Pearls Before Swine's output can now be heard rather than imagined through
the misleading hype of Mojo magazine (who included One Nation
Underground as part of their "Ultimate Record Collection") and the
countless champions of minor league psychedelic-era bands.
The first misconception about the band lies in how supposedly "crazy"
Pearls Before Swine was. Certainly, the 20 songs on this compilation
show that Pearls Before Swine never really sounded much like its
contemporaries. After all, this is the band that notoriously put out "(Oh
Dear) Miss Morse", a single that was banned from the radio because it typed
out "fuck" in Morse code. Still, Pearls Before Swine is more folk-rock,
than the proto-freak folk act that it is made out to be. There are a few
psychedelic freak-out moments on the album, notably the frenzied organs on
the chorus of "Drop Out" or the frenzied, remote-control flipping randomness
of "I Shall Not Care" which is made up of pieces of other songs. The
majority of the album is low-key, in fact depressing, folk songs highlighted
more often than not by woodwinds rather than electric guitar.
These gentler songs, although perhaps not as "interesting" as the more
psychedelic numbers, turn out to be the moments where Pearls Before Swine
live up to the "forgotten classic" reputation. "Another Time" is an oblique
tale of resurrection that takes on the aura of myth: "Did you follow the
Crystal Swan? / Did you see yourself / Deep inside the Velvet Pond". On
paper, the lyrics sound like progressive rock hoodoo, but when Rapp sings
them to the downright apocalyptic instrumentation, the words strike a chord.
If the somewhat fanciful lyrics foreshadow any later progressive rock
moments, I could only point to the softer tracks on King Crimson's In the
Court of the Crimson King, which featured a similar doom-laden tempo to
match its fantastic tales.
Not that Pearls Before Swine is all about being a downer, despite the
fact that the cover of Our Nation Underground is the disturbing
"Hell" portion of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. "Regions of
May" is absolutely bucolic both in its flute-filled arrangement and in the
near-poetry of lyrics like "My mind / Is all entwined / In fragrant fields
of flowers". Rapp, of course, ducks out of any charges of naivety with the
following rack, "Uncle John", a vicious blues rock assault on religious
hypocrisy. Our Nation Underground's concluding track "The
Surrealistic Waltz" lives up to its title, it perhaps being the track that
made people treat Pearls Before Swine as a crazed-out hippie-rock
freak-for-all. The track is a strange combination of swirling organs, a
waltz-esque beat, and surreal poetry: "She stays with Timothy / In black
vibration's alley / Love makes statements / In the closet mouths of cloth".
Beat that, Captain Beefheart.
Balaklava, the second and final album Pearls Before Swine recorded
on ESP-Disk, is a much more uneven, and dour, affair. Rapp replaced the
horrific but wild and psychedelic Bosch painting from the band's debut and
replaced it with Bruegel's brutal and to-the-point Triumph of Death.
History can forgive Rapp, at the height of the Vietnam War, for treating the
horrors of war with a certain amount of gravity, but the concept album
itself grows weary. To drive home the difference between war-in-theory and
war-in-reality, Balaklava begins with an ancient recording of one of the
surviving trumpeters of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade, blasting a
triumphant fanfare that contrasts sharply with the fate of the majority of
that battalion. This ironic trumpet blare is basically the only piece of
music on Balaklava which is truly uplifting.
Beyond the depressing subject matter, there is a bit of pretension that
mars Balaklava, with Herodotus and Tolkien getting co-credits on
songs, and would-be-deep lines like "You know that your guardian angel is
dead" ("Guardian Angels"). Balaklava, which stays closer to the
unmixed folk rock, not too far off from what the Incredible String Band was
doing at the time, works the best when it strays from its main themes of the
horror of the war and the corrupting nature of hate, especially on "Images
of April", a semi-sequel to "Regions of May" that is equally as beautiful.
Perhaps by the second album, Rapp was already losing interest in his musical
career, as there are few of the inspired moments that appear on the tracks
from One Nation Underground. There is nothing really awful on these
later tracks, but there is enough that seems half-baked (the sound-effects
and string section clogged "I Saw the World") and downright dull (a listless
version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne") to make it an uneven listening
experience.
The Complete ESP-Disk Recordings is not a "treasure trove" reissue
from a forgotten-but-great band. Pearls Before Swine is little more than a
unique footnote to the psychedelic era, a dead end experiment that yielded
some minor revelations and more than a few good songs that really sound like
nothing else recorded during that time period. If they approach The
Complete ESP-Disk Recordings with this caveat, this collection will
surely please folk-rock and psychedelic rock fans who are willing to
appreciate a band both overlooked and over-hyped.
— 5 August 2005
