Moody Blues on the Threshhold of a Dream Sacd Reviews

The Moody Blues – On the Threshold of a Dream

August 6, 2020

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10):  9

I don't believe we've ever had a proper discussion on the importance of an album cover.  Kids these days (and this is how I know I am old, because I say things like "kids these days") don't have a proper appreciation for the importance of an album cover, because it's just pixels on a little smartphone screen to them.  Most of them experience the music without hardly even seeing the cover.  But back in my day (again, I guess using that phrase means I'm old) you couldn't miss the album cover when you took the lp or cassette or CD out, it was right there in front of you.  And at their best, album covers told you exactly what kind of experience you were going to have when you listened to the album.  The amount of care taken with the cover told you something about the amount of care taken with the music inside.  There was a time when the cover was an integral part of the album listening experience, when the whole perception and ambiance of the artistic package relied heavily on having just the right cover.  It was a time when the music and cover became inextricably linked in the listeners mind.  If you ask me, in the age of music streamed through smartphones we have lost an importance piece of the experience of truly enjoying and appreciating an album as an artistic experience.

Dark Side of the Moon is one of the most obvious examples, one look at the cover and you know the album inside it is going to be sleek, stark, striking and sophisticated.  And so it was.

At the other extreme, for their stripped-back morning-after-the-psychedelic-period-hangover album, the cover the Beatles chose for their 1968 self-titled double lp actually ended up giving the album its commonly used name. We can't even refer to The White Album without referencing its cover.

Or take a lesser known example from the mid 80s, if you've ever heard Arcadia's So Red the Rose (which I simply must review some day, it's always been a favorite of mine), the suave and stylish cover perfectly represents the suave and stylish music contained inside.  I can hardly listen to it without seeing splashes and streaks of red and black in my mind.

I'm not the only one who thinks this way about album covers, an interviewer for Guitar World once told Jimmy Page

"As absurd as this may sound, "Houses of the Holy" will always be an orange-sounding album in my mind."

To which Page replied

"Actually, I tend to agree with you".

(Gotta love the way some helpful soul on the internet spared me the moral dilemma of whether I was actually going to put pictures of naked kids on this website.  Thanks internet stranger!).  I agree too – for the most part ("No Quarter" excepted, obviously) it is an extremely orange sounding album – it has a very bright sound, far brighter than the typical Zep album.  "The Song Remains the Same" and "Over the Hills and Far Away" and "Dancing Days" and "The Ocean" are all very much orange-sounding to me.

Every so often a re-release of an album changes the color of the cover for whatever reason (probably carelessness or incompetence in most cases), and it throws off those who are familiar with the album in its original color scheme.  As an example, the following Amazon review of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks is one of the best album reviews I have ever read:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too much purple

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2003

There is too much purple. I like purple album covers, but this is not a purple album. The music does not have much to do with the color purple. The original was definitely more red. Dylan did not have purple hair at this stage in his career. If you are thinking of buying this because it is purple please be aware it is really not a purple record. Moby Grape made purple albums with purple covers. Tell your kids this was not a purple record. They may think this was originally purple.

Genius review, absolutely brilliant.  This guy or gal should be the one running this website.

Just one look at this album cover should have been enough to tell potential listeners what a schlocky pointless unmitigated crapfest this was going to be:

And is there even any question what kind of an experience you are going to have if you listen to an album with a cover like these?

The award for worst album cover ever, though, probably goes to Billy Joel's pre-fame band Attila.  Because nothing says B.A. like dressing up like you're headed to the Renaissance Fair and having your picture taken in a meat locker.  Not nearly as intimidating or as threatening as they probably thought it was going to be in their minds.  The guy is damn lucky his career didn't end right then and there (and we are lucky too, because I love me some Billy Joel from time to time).   Besides, Attila was doomed from the very beginning, not just because they majorly sucked, but also because Billy Joel stole his bandmates' wife, and while the same thing didn't end the working relationships between Eric Clapton and George Harrison (or George Harrison and Ringo Starr for that matter), in most cases it tends to put a damper on dynamics between a couple of musicians.

Which brings us to the point of all this blathering on about album covers, which is this: I am not sure any album cover has ever captured the mood and atmosphere of an album quite like the cover for the Moody Blues' 1969 classic On the Threshold of a Dream.

I mean, just take a look at it:

Just look at those mysterious melancholy swirls of blue and purple – when has an album cover so accurately portended the mysterious melancholy swirls of blue and purple music that would be found within?  All awash in the colors of the night sky, and in the center a few brown leaves clinging to what's left of a bush that has been cut down.  And what is that vacuum cleaner doing in the bottom left corner?  Mystery abounds on this album cover.  A supremely dark and moody cover for a supremely dark and moody album.  Music for a foggy, moonlit night.  Great title too – On the Threshold of a Dream.  A lot of the album's music is in fact very dreamy, I've always thought that the Mellotron gave the Moody's music a very dreamy feel.   And this album has that patented dreamy Moody Blues sound in spades. So, yeah, I'd say the ambiance of album cover aligns perfectly with the overall atmosphere of the music on the album.

Unlike 2017 and 2018, 2019 came and went with no 50^th Anniversary edition of a Moody Blues album, I guess it's too late to hope for deluxe versions of On the Threshold of a Dream and To Our Children's Children's Children.  Which is a real shame, the latter is my fave Moody Blues album, I would have loved to have a remixed version of both of them. The old 2006 SACD versions sound spectacular though if you can find them, so we really aren't that deprived. If you gonna listen to this album, that's the version I recommend.  Particularly if you're smart enough to have an SACD player – that's a format that should have caught on.  Plays on a regular CD player, but also has a layer with hi-fi stereo and 5.1 surround sound!  How did that not catch on?  Because people are morons, that's how.  The emergence of SACD technology just happened to coincide with the rise of the mp3, and given the choice between unsurpassable audio quality and convenience the sheeple will always choose convenience, and so it was that crap sounding mp3s took over the market while SACD died a quiet and mostly unnoticed death.  As a result, seeing a release in 5.1 surround today is a rarity.  In the early 2000s there was an explosion of classic albums mixed in 5.1 surround in anticipation of an SACD revolution that never happened, and since that time there has inexplicably been little interest in surround sound listening, which in my opinion is why God created music in the first place.  Thanks for nothing crappy mp3s.  Anyway, enough ranting, but if you can listen to this album in 5.1, do it, it is how music was meant to be heard, and the surround mix for this album is outstanding.

As for the album, it's the Moodiest and Bluest the Moody Blues ever got.  While I like their next album better, they'd never be trippier than "The Voyage", never be as achingly tender as "Never Comes the Day", never be so gently mystical as "Are You Sitting Comfortably", never concoct a masterpiece of haunting jazz like "Dear Diary".  The track "The Dream" even has the only Graeme Edge poetry that doesn't completely suck, with its eerily sliding, descending Mellotron, its "white Eagle of the north flying overhead" and "browns, reds, and golds of autumn (lying) in the gutter dead".  "Live hand in hand and together we'll stand/On the threshold of a Dream".  Not half bad, that.

Gotta say, though, it gets off to a rough start with the absolute worst Graeme Edge poetry ever.  Unfortunately, it took the Moodies a while to figure out that Graeme's doggerel wasn't the best way to start an album, so after a promising few seconds of eerie organ and some Mellotron-concocted sound that strongly resembles a lonely wind whistling through the naked branches of a solemn oak tree on an autumn midnight, we get this dopey voice going "I think, therefore I am…I think".  Probably sounds cool if you smoke a big enough spliff, but for those of us who don't partake in chemically enhanced reality it just sounds stupid.  And there's no spliff in the universe big enough to make the next lines "of course you are/my bright little star" not sound completely idiotic.  If any of you ever started the album and quit thirty seconds in, I really couldn't blame you, because it is really, really bad.  Why'd they even keep Graeme around, anyway?  He was a mediocre drummer at best, and a simply atrocious poet.  He made Jim Morrison look like a Pulitzer Prize winning poet by comparison.  I'd have swapped him out for about any semi-decent drummer in the world of rock in the late 60s, pick anyone at random, he's probably at least as good on the skins as Graeme and probably doesn't write crappy poetry.  Hell, I'd probably have swapped him out for a flugelhorn player who had never played drums a day in his life as long as he didn't write any poetry.  I can only conclude the other Moodies were too zonked out of their minds all the time to notice what a phenomenally terrible poet he really was, so he probably has the drug culture of the 60s to thank for not getting booted out of the band on his pretentious un-poetic butt.

Luckily in the nick of time a tremendously great song comes along in the form of "Lovely to See You", with its kick-butt guitar, shimmering melody, and stellar chorus.  A chorus that will stick in your head for the rest of the day.   And you've gotta love that bridge: "Tell us what you see/In faraway forgotten lands/Where empires have turned back to sand" with that John Lodge ultra high harmony on "sand".  This one's a winner, and proves the Moodies had such pop sensibilities that they could have been a well above average run of the mill Top 40 pop band if they'd been a little less ambitious (and let's face it, pretentious).  Great melody, great guitar, catchy tune, and right away the Moodies redeem themselves after a rather poor start to the album.

I find "Dear Diary" so intriguing – it has a real jazz feel for the first few seconds, then that haunting flute comes in and gives it that melancholy color.  Ray Thomas deserves a lot of credit for setting the mood for the song with his flute – he was never anywhere near the level of virtuosity as Ian Anderson, and yet, I've never thought Ian would have been a good fit for the Moody Blues with his constant flurries of a thousand flute notes a second.  In fact, I'm not sure I would have liked what he might have done with a solemn, introspective song like "Dear Diary".  What Ray Thomas lacked in technical skill he more than made up for in understanding how his instrument could enhance a song, and as far as the Moody Blues go I'll take his atmospherics over Ian Anderson's showboating any day.  Anyway, this song is a wonder, and you've gotta love the spoken lines in the fade out: "Somebody exploded an H-bomb today, but it wasn't anyone I knew…"

Then we hit kind of a strange and incongruous section of the album, where the Moodies forgo their moodiness and give us a few fairly standard nondescript pop songs.  "Send Me No Wine" is a disaster, with its tuneslessly busy guitar, "Send me send me no wine to send my love away" lame-o lyrics, and hoedownish Mellotron.  Not sure what they were shooting for here, but they ended up with a bizarre amalgam of country pop and British foppery that doesn't really work on any level.  "To Share Our Love" is another pop song, but with its driving beat and energetic chorus it's much more palatable, far more enjoyable, and almost marginally fantastic.  Great backing vocals on this one, and a much better guitar part than the one that preceded it.  "So Deep Within You" has a great flute/kettle drum pattern, Graeme Edgeless does something useful for a change and gives us a memorable percussion part.  And while I wish I could tell you all to get your minds out of the gutter, a careful reading of the lyrics suggests it was intended to be as raunchy as it sounds.  But I'm inclined to overlook the stilted smuttiness of the lyrics because it's got a great melody, a ripping guitar part in the verses, a great dramatic vocal line in the chorus, and that cool flute/kettle drum thing.  These three songs kind of stick out for being so poppy, very un-Moody Bluesy really, but two of them are good enough that I really don't mind if they don't fit in with the aesthetic of the rest of the album.  Like I said, the Moody Blues would have made a great typical Top 40 band if that had been their goal.

But just when they are in danger of becoming a different band entirely, they make a hard left back into Moodyland with Justin Hayward's "Never Comes the Day", with its gentle guitar intro, dreamy Mellotron, quiet verses, and rousing chorus.  Although I'm not sure about those lines "If only you knew what's inside of me now/You wouldn't want to know me somehow…"  Umm, OK Justin, what exactly is going on inside of you I wouldn't want to know about?  Never mind, I probably really don't want to know.  But set aside that moment of awkwardness and it is an absolutely lovely song.  "Give just a little bit more take a little bit less from each other tonight…" – not a bad chorus.

After such a gorgeous song, "Lazy Day" comes bumbling along with its goofy wordless "Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah" refrain and dumb lyrics about putting your feet up and watching TV and having lamb because beef was last week.  Most disposable song on the record.  The vocal in the background at the end of each verse is supposed to be delivering a poignant twist about how what seems like an enjoyably lazy day is just one in a pointless wasted lifetime of lazy days "until the day  you die-hi".  The twist doesn't work for me, it is a pointless waste of two minutes and forty-three seconds.  Ray Thomas was super hit-and-miss as a songwriter, when he hit he was pretty good, and when he missed, he missed by a country mile.  This one is definitely a miss.

Luckily from here on out we are in classic Moody territory.  "Are You Sitting Comfortably" is masterpiece of pothead mystical majesty, with its "fleet of golden galleons on a crystal sea", "glorious days of Camelot", and "seven wonders of the world" that "lay before your feet".  Gentle fingerpicked guitar, more Ray Thomas haunting flute, intriguing melody, and that Justin Hayward passionate and vulnerable vocal – all combine for a mellow masterpiece.  "Let Merlin cast his spell" indeed.  Love love love this song, one of my favorites from the Moodies.  The song that follows, "The Dream", is that rarest of treasures – a Graeme Edge poem that is actually listenable (if you can ignore the "brings in return a wondrous yearn" line, that is).  It actually has some really good lines, I'm as gobsmacked as anybody.  It's almost actual poetry.  The descending Mellotron note is pretty spooky too, scary even.

We then have a seamless segue into some gentle guitar strumming, and "Have You Heard?"  brings us full circle from the dippiness of "I think, therefore I am" at the beginning of the album to the dippiness of "Now you know that you are real" at the end of the album.  I mean really, how arrogant are those Moodies to think that across the two sides of their long-player record they have taught us that we exist?  Thanks, but I knew I was "real" before I ever listened to your album.  But oh, they think they have really taught us something.  Step aside, Rene Descartes, The Moody Blues have laid waste to all your philosophizing about the reality of existence with barely over a half hour of really deep musical ponderizing.  So, yeah, it's pretty silly, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I don't like the song anyway.  I'm not sure why, it is catchy, and it does have lots of that dreamy Mike Pinder Mellotron I like so much in the MB's songs.

"Have You Heard?", however, is broken into two parts, with a remarkable bit of Mellotron wizardry in the middle called "The Voyage", which I swear sounds just like a sailboat gliding down the river Styx wending its way down to the Underworld.  Layer upon layer of Mellotron overdubs carefully constructed for maximum emotional impact – it is a marvel to listen to.  Mike Pinder really was a Mellotron genius, quite gifted really, and it is no surprise the Moodies were never able to recapture their classic sound after they unceremoniously booted him from the band for refusing to tour in 1979, he was a key component of their sound really.  His replacement, Yes castoff Patrick Moraz, was little more than a two-bit synthesizer showoff, and they could have done without most of the synthesized mush he glommed all over their songs in the late 70s and early 80s.   He almost ruined their excellent comeback song "Your Wildest Dreams" by cheesing it up with his stupid blurps and bleeps, most of his contributions to the band were regrettable (with the exception of "The Voice", even I have to admit that keyboard part is pretty cool).  But back to "The Voyage ", true story, I remember listening to it late at night in the dark as a teenager and getting seriously spooked out, I was getting a total evil vibe and everything, like my bedroom was haunted and I was about to get possessed or something.  Of course, dumb impressionable teenage me didn't stop to realize that The Moody Blues are about the last band on the planet this side of The Carpenters whose music will cause you to be a victim of demonic possession, but the song is pretty creepy, you could totally play it in a haunted house at Halloween and it would fit the mood perfectly.  Marvelous song, haunting, passionate, and every whit worthy to stand among the best of the Moodies' songs.

Then it's back to hippy dippy pothead philosophizing with "Have You Heard? Part 2", and as the song's mellow vibe fades out we get more of that eerie organ and Mellotron drone that opened the album.  And so we reach the end of what I find to be an immensely satisfying musical journey – not without a pothole or two along the way, but overall a wondrous listening experience.

You know, the album had no hits, and none of these songs were ever commonly found in the setlist for Moody Blues concerts after about 1970  –  several of them are found on the Caught Live + Five album recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969, including the "Have You Heard?"/"The Voyage" sequence (which of course pales in comparison to the studio version).  But they rarely returned to the album in concert after that.  "Lovely to See You" became the title of their 2005 live CD and DVD, but they didn't really play the song all that often.  I watched them do "Are You Sitting Comfortably" through the bushes one night outside Fraze Pavilion in Dayton, Ohio around that time because the show sold out before I bought tickets, but again, they didn't do that one very often either.  Most years you could go to a Moody Blues show and not hear anything from OTToAD. While it's one of the "Core Seven", it wasn't an album with any hits songs on it that charted or anything.  And yet, in some ways it represents their classic period better than any of the other "Core Seven" albums – Days of Future Passed is a better album, sure, but with its orchestral interludes it is hardly representative of the others. To Our Children's Children's Children released later that same year is also a better album, but is also the most obscure of the "Core Seven", with nary a hit and making contributions but once in a blue moon to the setlists of their concerts (hardly any of that album's songs found their way into setlists even at the time the album was released).  If you want the most typical, most representative Moody Blues "Core Seven" album, On the Threshold of a Dream is my recommendation.

In my review for In Search of the Lost Chord I've already discussed at length why I know I should hate The Moody Blues, and pretty much everything I said there applies to On the Threshold of a Dream.  My brain tells me this was music for pothead idiots in 1969 – but my heart, well, my heart agrees with Pete Townshend, who once said "listening to a Moody Blues album is like being in church."  And he didn't mean it was boring and stifling and monotonous like being in church generally is – he meant that in spite of their obvious flaws, those albums were so beautifully produced and constructed, were such sonic chapels and resplendent cathedrals of sound, that at their best had such a gorgeous majesty, that listening to them can be a transcendent experience in spite of the logical part of your brain shouting at you "this is so stupid" the whole time you are listening to them.

But I've gotta wonder, would it have been half as great an album if it had an album cover like this?

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