Love

Although it has all the orchestrated trappings of a sunshine pop record, Forever Changes is far from a tiptoe through the tulips. The album is as harrowing as it's beautiful to listen to, and Arthur Lee's confusion and paranoia come through in every song. When coupled with the baroque, psychedelic arrangements, it turns into a nearly perfect album.

The third coming of Love, heralded on Elektra's Sunset Strip billboard last summer, is upon
us. The group has dropped its sixth and seventh members, originally added to sophisticate
their music, and they have, in the end, produced their most sophisticated album yet,
Forever Changes. The hard Beatle-Byrd sound of their first album, which turned arty in
their second (Da Capo), has been smoothed out quite a bit. Large scale orchestr... More >

"Art-rock," sneers my wife, who's never heard it before. "Movie music," Greil Marcus recalls fondly. "I just played it this week," R. Meltzer tells me--and then places its release in early 1968 because it came out the day before a well-remembered abortion. All wrong. It came out November 1967, and neither art-rock nor movie music, no matter how fondly recalled, will permit a song that begins with an elegantly enunciated "Oh, the snot has caked against my pants/It has turned into crystal." Arthur Lee was always too oblique for his own good. Here he counterposes a background-music feel and a delightful panoply of studio effects against his own winning skepticism and the incipient Jaggerishness of his pseudo-Johnny Mathis vocals. Perhaps because it retains so much humor, his battle cry--"We're all normal and we want our freedom"--hasn't dated, the melodies really hang in there, and only Steely Dan has ever attempted a record so simultaneously MOR and anti-MOR. (Grade - A-)