Customer Reviews

Imaginos

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4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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Blue Oyster Cult are no strangers to bombastic camp. Their quirky lyrics and musical style marries harmoniously to intricate, unique hard rock and heavy metal that no other band seems able to imitate. After a string of highly successful albums which peaked with 1981's 'Fire Of Unknown Origin,' BOC began to stumble a bit with the Aldo Nova-inspired 'The Revölution by Night' and 'Club Ninja,' two records which tried to duplicate past success by streamlining the music. Proving they were no one-trick ponies, BOC fired back with 'Imaginos,' an absolutely thrilling and majestic heavy metal album with more surprises than any band should be physically capable of throwing.

'Imaginos' is a concept album, but don't let that scare you. The complexity of the album's lyrics and setting makes it almost impossible for most people to grasp just what the band is going on about. Imaginos is actually a superhuman child who has been granted his powers by "Les Invisibles," a mysterious and ancient race of unknown origin who have been manipulating him down through the years to pave the way for his journey to Mexico to find a long lost artifact, the Magna of Illusion which ends up corrupting the minds of various European leaders. This sets up the brooding turmoil and eventual onset of World War I.

BOC bit off quite a mouthful with this record, but you wouldn't know it. In typical BOC tradition, the first song on the album, "I Am The One You Warned Me Of" is not the strongest. It prefers to set an average groove for the rest of the record to build on. "Les Invisibles" is as typical of mid-80s hard rock as you can expect, laying down a 1-2, 1-2-2 drum beat alongside chugging, reverb-drenched guitars and processed vocals with some clever lyrical timings thrown in for good measure. "In The Presence of Another World" conjures thoughts of Dio-inspired dark fantasy rock with high speed guitar solos and synth-piano bridge sections. From there, things take an infectious pop turn with "Del Rio's Song," quite possibly the best track on the entire album with a sing-along chorus and feverish pitch that is sure to set lead-foots everywhere back a few hundred dollars in speeding tickets. It only gets better with the oddly named "The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein's Castle at Weisseria," complete with the one and only Joe Satriani picking up lead guitar duties. A more thorough and slower song, "Siege" brings back memories of "Heavy Metal: The Black and Silver" with snarl-howl vocals and more heavy attack which softens in the last act with an almost tear-jerking vocal crescendo and beautiful atmosphere. It just keeps getting better with "Astronomy," a galloping rising force epic driven by an infectious, "Hey! Hey Hey!" and speed-blues guitar soloing that you just want to hear go on forever. "Magna of Illusion" gives the listener a breather, telling a story while focusing on precise instrumental arrangements which dodges predictions with a snappy half-chorus and electric piano, and quirky lyrics in tow (..."taken from the jungle by crime!"). "Blue Oyster Cult" is an interesting take on the band's namesake, and "Imaginos" wraps up the album with a slightly quieter pop approach to straight laced metal. The chronology of events in the story of the album makes the order of songs somewhat ambiguous, but all this can be taken with a grain of salt.

'Imaginos' comes dangerously close to falling into the same pop-rock mold of the mid-80s that other bands like ZZ Top did. There's more reverb here than you can shake three sticks at, and that 80s metal guitar tone won't sound any newer this time 'round, but the band uses their songwriting expertise to rebound from the edge just in time. It's intense enough for headbangers, intelligent enough for prog-rock fanatics, and accessible enough for the average ear to be an excellent all-around record. It may not be the best album for first-time Oysters (that privilege is reserved for 'Fire of Unknown Origin') but one could do far worse. At its worst, 'Imaginos' is a metal album with a sound that is permanently fixed in a particular time period. At its best, it's a perfect reminder of what can happen when vigorously inspired musicians cram into a studio and decide to let all their crazy ideas out to play around with. Music like this doesn't exist anymore, and that's the ultimate tragedy.

Albert Bouchard was Blue Oyster Cult's best songwriting secret.
It's a shame that this band's worst infighting and conflict happened during this time. This is easily the album that many B.O.C. fans including myself, wanted to see them make. A little hard to fully understand, this album boasts a pletora of soaring guitars with axe heavyweights such as Robbie Krieger and Joe Satriani and Jack Rigg. I wished that all of us could have heard the long lost demos of this album, originally slated as an Albert Bouchard solo project. The Lovecraftian quality of the album as well as its front and back cover easily suggests that this group overdosed on horror films a long time ago.

I LOVE BOC and this CD didn't disappoint me in the least!If you like BOC get this CD. I highly Recommend it!

This is an album the Blue Oyster Cult fans will really get into, a concept album that showcases the bands unique song stylings. For the casual listener, or sometime BOC fan, stick with "Agents of Fortune" or "Fire of Unknown Origin". "Imaginos" is a heavy album and features a great remake of "Astronomy", the best song on the CD. But unless you are prepared to invest some time, deciphering the story, and songs you won't get much out of the album. I picked up "Imaginos" on CD after hearing "Astronomy" late at night (the best time to play the CD), and there was a narrative about the "Imaginos" myth read by Stephen King as the song opened. I heard this only two times on the radio, and picked up the CD because I was a huge Stephen King fan, and enjoyed some of BOC's earlier albums. Needless to say, the Stephen King narrative is not on the album. I was disappointed, but played the disk a few times. I enjoyed "I Am The One You Warned Me Of", a pretty straight ahead rocker, and "In The Presence of Another World" which is a more down-tempo song. Actually most of the songs are good, and you will find yourself humming the chorus for hours after listening. The only track that I found lacking, was the title track "Imaginos". For some reason, most likely the background singers: "Oooohhhh Imaginos, Ooooohhh Imaginos, Oooooohhhh, ooooohhh, ooohhhh Imaginos" the song sounds like fanfare for a two bit magician about to perform in Vegas or something. Once I got that image stuck in my head, I just kept picturing Imaginos The Great performing card tricks and turning newspaper into doves. If you see a copy of this disk used for under $10 pick it up, but I don't think it's worth the $20 used price I see here.

I actually have this album on CD and it's superb; I don't think the band did anything comparable over the rest of their career, tho Cultosaurus Erectus has its moments (first track great, the rest less so). I originally bought this album on blue vinyl and to my shame sold it for a pittance to a sleazy shop, and spent the few resulting coppers on food.

Should have starved instead.

Having been a huge B.O.C. fan from the first album on, I found myself decreasingly interested in their output after the third album "Secret Treaties" (although I have come to love "Agents" much more than I did initially over the years). The subsequent albums, listenable and enjoyable at the time, were nevertheless devoid of the mystery, the darkness, the other-worldliness of the first three. I recently went back and listened to all the mid-period albums again, from "Spectres" through "The Revolution by Night", and found myself skipping more songs than I sat through. I mean, really...Godzilla?? Joan Crawford has risen from the grave?? All of "Club Ninja"?? A far, far cry from "Transmaniacon MC", "Mistress of the Salmon Salt" or "Subhuman". Then, I went back and put on the long-forgotten, out-of-print "Imaginos". Loved it at the time, and like it even more now! Sure, I've never really known how much of a true band effort this was, the entire opus having been pretty much directed by Al Bouchard and producer Sandy Pearlman, but damn, if it doesn't sound like the album that could have come out after "Secret Treaties". The lyrical question-marks, the dark riffs and spacey keyboards, the killer Dharma leads and soaring vocal harmonies - this is the one album of their end-period that SHOULD be in print, and instead, I must rely on my old, scratchy 1988 vinyl. If you are unaware of this album, the last with the entire original band involved (at least, to some degree) then pick this up if you find it. The awesome, early incarnation of the B.O.C. sound returned for this forgotten gem!

This is possibly B.O.C.'s finest hour. Seven years in the making (although the germ is arguably twice as old), 'Imaginos' signified a group healthily obsessed with its own identity.

By 1987, heavy metal had transmuted into something that B.O.C. simply couldn't justify their identity to (notice the difference between that and simply being a 'has been' - they were not 'has beens', they were just mature enough to have to make serious decisions about the way onward). The players had all changed since that mercurial '72 / '73 season - no more Deep Purple, no Led Zeppelin, Cactus, Captain Beyond or Bloodrock: Black Sabbath had become a swirling, amorphic mess that only sometimes worked around the nucleus of Tony Iommi, while acts like Bad Company had evaporated, groups like Mountain barely keeping their heads above water, and Kiss had taken off their makeup.

Where other hard rock acts had simply to fall back on their musical muscles, B.O.C. had always possessed an Ace up the sleeve in the form of literary & mystical prowess. Enter 'Imaginos', a concept album with a difference, catapulting the listener back to 19th Century America, when many things occult were harder to disprove than today, when epics could still unfold around the identity of a single individual, and when a rock band ostensibly from the last half of the 20th Century could inject a mythos that just had to be taken on board in the minds of fans and curious listeners alike.

But it's not just about that. Every single track here is a winner and at least 2/3rds of the album could have been slipped over the airwaves by a tasteful Disc Jockey. 'I Am The One You Warned Me Of' is easily the hard rock afficionado's song of choice, but there's so much more here with which to raise the listener's eyebrows, notwithstanding the remakes of 'Astronomy' and 'Subhuman' (AKA 'Blue Oyster Cult').

Personnel-wise, we have guest appearances by many heavyweights, including Joe Satriani. 'Imaginos' might look esoteric and unfriendly to casual rock fans but if you just can get past the gloomy, Hitchcockesque album cover and stay with it for two listens, you'll understand that it was the most underrated BOC album of all and unfairly so.

In the Oyster Cult's long catalog, there are only a clenched handful of albums that carry one hundred per-cent tunage. This is one of them. Incidentally, the story continues on 'Curse of the Hidden Mirror', itself some thirteen years futurely distant from this release.

I was never that into BOC back in the day. I was so sick of hearing their "hits" (Reaper, Godzilla, etc) that it kept me from ever exploring their stuff. Then I stumbled onto this album...freaking unbelievable. I don't give a crap who's playing what or wrote what. Start to finish this album is an EXPERIENCE. I too had this on tape and I literally wore the thing out. And I'm still listening to it almost 15 years later. One of my fav albums of all time.