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The Pretty Things started as a sub-Rolling Stones type of dirty blues band, and seemingly reinvented themselves with each album. Perhaps the best that can be said is, they were filled with ideas – thought without fully-functioning quality filters. But, even without the most prodigious talent, they managed to produce an ambitious collection of songs: S. F. Sorrow, which burgeons with energy and experimentation, if not coherence. The album tells the life story of a sad-sack who goes to war, whose girlfriend dies, and then a Haitian loa shows him that life is filled with disappointment and he becomes disconnected from the rest of the world.
This is a pretty dumb story, although it's the same sort of thing The Kinks, The Who, and Pink Floyd (formerly The Pink Floyd) found compelling enough for their own concept albums. A collection of songs is rarely the best vehicle for telling a story, but what makes concept albums worthwhile is their consistent sense of atmosphere. And, for all The Pretty Things' deficiencies, particularly their weirdly literal lyrical sense ("Balloon Burning" is about a balloon burning, "Trust" is about not being able to trust people, "Old Man Going" is about an old man going about – this literalism is a trait of almost every Pretty Things song except for the exemplary single "Deflecting Grey," which the CD of S.F. Sorrow includes as a bonus track)...Sorrow is still listenable. Were these grouped singles, it would be of much less interest. But that's a ludicrous measure to judge an album by. This isn't that thing, so the fact that it doesn't do that thing well is no knock against it.
2009-10-06 - Kent Conrad
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