Odessey & Oracle And The Casiotone Orchestra
Album: Odessey & Oracle
Label: Folkwit
Tracks: 17
Website: http://www.folkwit.com/artists/odessey-and-oracle

This French trio's debut album is optimistically described as a wonderfully inventive example of baroque pop, and while I can hear where the writer is coming from that's only half the story. The disc's spirit of inventiveness is certainly influenced by that of 1960s psychedelia and experimentalism, but also seems to inhabit another dimension over and above (or filtered through) that of mere baroque pop styling. A bit like one of those late-60s/early-70s Dr Who adventures, where uncontrollably cheesy sci-fi gestures and conventions are layered onto intriguingly sophisticated ideas, the bridge between tentative philosophical mystique and futuristic commentaries - it can be great fun or grossly sinister, and sometimes it's hard to tell the joke. Alice is falling deep into her Wonderland, and all's right with the world when it's refracted through the latter-day looking-glass - or is it?…

This record's like a long strange trip that holds a distorting mirror to the Zombies' cult album of whose title it's a deceitful simile. Beginning in the year 2016, an onwardly pulsing electro-cacophony where the cosy small-town world of Smiley Smile has strayed by mistake into A Clockwork Orange, the Bachian baroque switched-on to an excessively distorted electric-shock that galvanises into the first of a series of "musical inventions" (as much in homage to Walter Carlos as to J.S. Bach?) that are interspersed amongst the disc's lengthier tracks. These range from fragile, enigmatic recorder-fuelled medieval-psych-folk fantasy (The Unicorn) to Esprit Du Ciel's gloriously incongruous melange of rustic banjo, analogue synth gestures, delicate Kevin Ayers-style vocal and florid autumnal string arrangement, the latter also extending through into the contemporary-classical Invention 5 (Palindrome).

Night Of The Tacky Toys gets right into the scary sub-B-movie scenario, and The Cat With Lipstick puts a Zappa-esque gloss on an impenetrable lyric, contrasting with the insouciant electro-pop of Alphabet and V.I.A.G.R.A., whereas Fixing The World could have strayed off Penny Lane into the Beatles' White Album via Give Peace A Chance and I Saw My Mother is infused with the spirit of vintage Magazine or Bauhaus while paying more than a passing nod to Soft Machine/Robert Wyatt along its sprawling six-minute course. Odessey & Oracle is a mad, maverick and kaleidoscopically wilful disc, one that's perhaps not all that easy to fully assess on even a half-dozen plays, but it nevertheless reaps considerable rewards for me. Geddit!

David Kidman