Customer Reviews

The Singles Collection: A's & B's, 1964-1969

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's hard to choose between "The Singles Collection" and the one disc "Absolutely the Best." TSC may be more than than a casual listener wants of this group. If you need all the forgettable B-sides here, you're a candidate for the "Zombies Heaven" box that has everything they ever did. On ATB you get three of the very best Zombies songs that are NOT on TSC: I Want You Back Again, If It Don't Work Out and Nothing's Changed. (That is, the best songs before their great "Odessey & Oracle" album - get the 30th Anniversary Edition!)

I feel that this update of the See For Miles version of "The Singles A's & B's" is a bit flawed. The sound is amazing in mono (where the original was issued in stereo) but the material can already be found in the 4 CD Box Set "Zombie Heaven." PLUS, the omission of the US Only Single "I Want Her Back Again/I Remember When I Loved Her" really hurts the difinitive-ness of this set. If you want the complete set of mono mixes stick with the box set...it's not as streamlined as this CD but it gives you everything you want from the Zombies. Big Beat has done a great job so far with upgrading the Zombies' catalog for the digital age and what I'd really like to see next is a singles set featuring newly remastered stereo mixes (including the US Only single).

The Zombies were a thoughtful group of musicians in the 60s, who upped the scale of great pop music. Though they only made a few albums and a string of singles, they have a memorable collection with the tops of their era.

If you want the collection of the best of the best, I recommend this Singles Collection. If you want everything, I recommend The Anthology. The Odyssey and the Oracle is their art piece though you can get those songs on both these collections.

"She's Not There" and "Time of the Season" were their big hits.
Also, "Tell Her No" did well. These showed their vocal and musical complexity. Other songs that have great musicality are "She's Coming Home", "I Love You", "Remember You" (featured in the Otto Preminger film "Bunny Lake is Missing"), "She Does Everything for Me", "Friends of Mine" and "I'll Call You Mine".
I also recommend "Summertime", but you will find it on Anthology.

Colin Blunstone's vocals and Rod Argent's keyboard playing are the signature factors that make their music stand out. Argent, along with guitarist Chris White wrote most of their own songs.

The Zombies, which was a poor selection of a name for them and their music, were pop at a very high level - good musicians with thinker lyrics. They weren't really Mersey Beat, but certainly British Invasion.

For further interest, several years after they broke up, Argent came out with a band with his name and they produced the Zombiesque song - "Hold Your Head Up".

It's hard to choose between "The Singles Collection" and the one disc "Absolutely the Best." TSC may be more than than a casual listener needs of this group. If you need all the forgettable B-sides here, you're a candidate for the "Zombies Heaven" box that has everything they ever did. On ATB you get three of the very best Zombies songs that are NOT on TSC: The Way I Feel Inside, I Want You Back Again, and Gotta Get a Hold of Myself. (That is, the best songs before their great "Odessey & Oracle" album - get the 30th Anniversary Edition!)

A very enjoyable Zombies collection. Almost a complete overview of their whole career in one disc. This contains all their singles of The Zombies work from 1964 to 1969. The Zombies broke up after the release of the "Odessey & Oracle" album. The group was out of the spotlight for three years until 1969 when a radio disc jockey found a single by The Zombies called "Time of the Season." The "Imagine the Swan" single is the beginning to the band "Argent." So to sum this up better, this is a great collection for a low cost. Buy it and enjoy the mystical jazz, R&B, and pop by one of the best bands ever!

I bought this CD not knowing exactly what to expect - my best Zombies knowledge came from what I heard on the radio stations - only their biggest hits. This however, is a great compilation - there are no boring lulls or dull moments, i.e. no need to fast-forward to a good track, unless of course, you have a favorite! Also, I think the choice to present the songs in mono was a great one - I feel like I'm experiencing the recordings the way they were meant to be heard. Aside from their bigger hits, some of the choicest songs are "Woman", "Care of Cell 44", and "She's Coming Home" This record is actually persuading me to dish out for the box set... it's looking more and more promising. To have been alive when this British Invasion band, the most underrated of them all, was around!

It all started with the soft voice and engrossing organ of "She's not there" lost on a tape of 60's Best Of. Digging a little in the hope of finding more nuggets I found this Singles Collection. What can I say? Pure gold and probably one of the most underrated 60s act, which is just plain incomprehensible considering the consistant qualities of the singles that the Zombies produced during their brief carrier. I guess they might have seemed a bit too nice at a time when other bands were busy adding Sex and Drugs to Rock 'n Roll (nothing wrong with that either), and competing for public attention with the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Yardbirds, etc. just can't have been easy. Still the Zombies' songs remain, pure pop gems.

She's Not There, Tell Her No, Time Of The Season, I Love You, and ...

If you were around in the 60's waiting for the year you would be drafted to "better serve your patriotic duty" in Southeast Asia, you heard many of these songs on the radio numerous times as you watched others leave for Vietnam. You also knew every group on the radio, as you might have been a teenager living on an AM diet and only experiencing the "elite" FM for the first time in the late '60s - most car radios only came with AM until the 1970s. If you were truly a convert after "FM" mobile, you also had an 8-track tape player for an even better play of favorites. In '68, "I Love You" was rendered by the group "People" - from where the song became best known across the USA radio charts, even though the Zombies published it years before.

If you were at least five years old or more, you couldn't help but remember the top chart Zombies songs as they were often played - and this CD has them. As I recall, the Zombies were one Hell of a big step forward from the so-called King, Elvis - the Elvis I even once liked in the 50's for "Jail House Rock" and "Hound Dog". You could also hear the Zombies (and Elvis) in Southeast Asia and most anywhere on shortwave radio, or while on R&R - usually butchered by some foreign group trying to imitate them to entertain the masses and soldiers. Yeah, you know what R&R was also - if you were there. Daily it was a nasty memory to live, so I often retreated to music to stay sane, even if it was only hearing it in my mind. While this music awakened memories of almost 40 years back, many I would prefer to forget, it awakened more of the better ones stateside as a youngster still in school.

Actually, there are more than a few of the songs on this CD that could compete with popular songs of today. I'm almost surprised there aren't groups today that are adopting some of these songs into "new" hits - just as the "People" did in 1968 with "I Love You". On the other hand, maybe they have and I just haven't heard about it. I seldom can stand listening to radio very long these days - without inserting a good CD like this one or plugging my ears, even in heavy traffic. With Digital AM and FM, more groups should be getting exposure using the new radio formats - but then, good local DJs like we had in the 1960s are few and far between now. Most of them now are un-hip, hop-head, Be-Bops drowning in a deep drumming old fish barrel. They don't know how DJs and station managers were successfully promoting groups and making money in the 60's. The really cool people today don't know what they've missed - military action aside. That loss tends to make them a distortion of what cool really was - and still is. The Zombies were a cool group - and their music still is.

This CD is made from original master tapes and the songs on it sound every bit as good as they did on vinyl in the 60's - better in fact, as media players of today reproduce sounds much better. In comparison, to early AM and FM or vinyl, this CD gives a better distinctive "pop" to the music and vocals - making the music a much cleaner studio sound.

To say that The Zombies were not among the most prominent of those identified with The British Invasion would be understating the fact. In 1964/65 they had just four North American hit singles for the Parrot label: She's Not There (# 2 Billboard Pop Hot 100 in December b/w You Make Me Feel So Good); Tell Her No (# 6 in February 1965 b/w Leave Me Be); She's Coming Home (# 58 in May 1965 b/w I Must Move), and I Want You Back Again (# 95 in July 1965 b/w Remember When I Loved Her).

When nothing else worked by 1967 they had decided to disband but, before doing so, spent some considerable time putting together the album Odyssey And Oracle for CBS (# 95 in April 1968) which included the track Time Of The Season. With "I'll Call You Mine" on the flipside it was released as a single at the same time without success. Someone must have had faith in the song, however, because it was re-released in February 1969 by the Date label, this time b/w Friends Of Mine, and it rose to # 3 in March.

Because of that unexpected success, and with original members Rod Argent [keyboardist and the author of all their hits), vocalist Colin Blunstone, guitarist Paul Atkinson, bassist Chris White, and drummer Hugh Grundy scattered to the four corners (Rod had already formed the group Argent), a number of bogus groups began calling themselves The Zombies leading to legal actions.

Strangely, they had even less success in their native U.K. where just 2 of their over 20 singles released by Decca made the charts - She's Not There (# 12) and Tell Her No (# 42). Even so their music was appreciated by the likes of Santana who would take She's Not There to # 22 in 1977, and Juice Newton who would have a # 27 with Tell Her No in 1983.

This compilation, despite being billed as "the Singles" collection, leaves off I Want You Back Again and its flipside and for that reason I had to deduct one star. Everything else of significance is here, though, and the sound quality is excellent.

What makes The Zombies so interesting is that they produced three oddly syncopated, jazz-infused and wonderfully different singles: "She's Not There", "Tell Her No" and the beautifully atmospheric "Time of the Season"... so good that no 60s collection is complete without them... plus two further "you really should have them" singles in "Whenever You're Ready" & "Care of Cell 44". Problem is how do you find them on the same CD. Well here's one of a couple of compilations that include all five, surrounded by several other equally distinctive tracks and a large amount of intriguing, but probably "destined to be played only a couple of times" stuff. Worth the money?... well that depends on how many of their "classics" you already own.