Zuider Zee - 2018 - Zeenith

 

Light In The Attic – LITA 166

Zeenith has one of those histories that makes the word “reissue” feel inadequate. When Light In The Attic released it in 2018, the music was already more than forty years old, recorded by Zuider Zee during the early 1970s before the Memphis band finally released its lone self-titled Columbia album in 1975. These were not familiar songs being polished for another anniversary edition. The material had never been released at all. An entire alternate Zuider Zee album had effectively remained buried in tape storage while the band itself became a small cult footnote in American power pop. Heard decades later, the remarkable thing is not simply that the tapes survived. It is how little the music sounds like something that deserved to disappear.

Zuider Zee occupied an odd place geographically and musically. The band settled in Memphis, but Richard Orange and company were not particularly interested in sounding Southern. Their reference points leaned heavily toward British pop: The Beatles, glam, Merseybeat, carefully built vocal harmonies and the kind of melodic rock that eventually became categorized as power pop. The obvious comparison is Big Star, another Memphis band making exquisitely melodic guitar music at almost exactly the same moment, although Zuider Zee apparently had virtually no relationship with them. There is something wonderfully strange about two groups working in the same city, drawing from overlapping musical ancestry and nevertheless occupying separate little universes.

“Haunter Of The Darkness” makes an excellent opening argument for Zuider Zee. It has the large chords and momentum expected from power pop, but underneath that brightness is a groove with considerably more movement than a straight guitar charge. Organ adds another distinctly early-1970s texture, while Richard Orange’s vocal immediately reveals one of the defining characteristics of the band: his ability to jump into a high register that can make Paul McCartney feel less like an influence than a distant relative. Even the song’s origins are peculiar. Orange later recalled rewriting it rapidly after reading H.P. Lovecraft, turning the song into his own little story about something coming after the narrator. That combination of musical sunshine and lurking darkness is a good introduction to a band that rarely seems satisfied with doing exactly what the genre around it suggests.

“Lancelot’s Theme” heads somewhere more openly charming. There is almost an innocence to Zuider Zee when they allow themselves to make a straightforward love song. The hooks are immediate, but little rhythmic and arrangement decisions keep the music from becoming anonymous nostalgia. These recordings were made before power pop had fully hardened into a recognizable genre, so Zuider Zee are pulling directly from Beatles and post-Beatles pop rather than imitating a later codified style. That distinction matters. The songs have the ingredients that would eventually become power-pop clichés, but here those ingredients still feel fluid enough to wander into glam, psychedelia, music hall and progressive arrangement ideas without anybody worrying whether the record still belongs in the correct bin.

“Miami” is one of the clearest examples of that flexibility. Piano introduces a more reflective quality, gradually opening into something grander without losing the band's melodic directness. There is a faint almost devotional feeling to parts of the arrangement, followed by the realization that Zuider Zee can make music feel large without making it heavy. Their strength is not brute force. It is lift. Chords rise. Harmonies appear. A melody that seems modest for a few seconds suddenly opens into another section and the whole room gets larger.

“Lana” continues the album’s gift for melody without needing to announce itself as one of the major discoveries. That may actually be one of the reasons Zeenith works so convincingly as an album rather than a historical collection. There is remarkably little sense of hearing archivists clean out a drawer. The songs belong together. The recording quality is coherent, the personnel remains recognizable and the melodic instincts are consistent enough that the record develops a personality rather than becoming a scrapbook of leftovers.

Then comes “Ackbar Didedar,” perhaps the song with the most moving history attached to it. Orange wrote it for an Iranian immigrant neighbor, building a long, warm melody around an acoustic framework and shifting meters. Decades later, drummer Gary Simon Bertrand located the old tapes in storage and had to find equipment capable of playing the original analog reels. Orange has recalled that “Ackbar Didedar” was one of the first recovered songs Bertrand played to him. He had apparently forgotten the song completely. Hearing it again after all those decades moved him to tears. There is something extraordinary about that situation: not merely discovering an unreleased recording, but discovering a piece of one's own creative life that memory itself had already erased. The tape remembered something its author did not.

That story quietly changes the entire album. Zeenith is full of young musicians who do not know they are recording messages for their older selves. Nothing in these performances knows that the songs will spend four decades unheard. The band sounds ambitious, energetic and remarkably unburdened by hindsight because hindsight has not happened yet. These recordings have not been constructed to explain Zuider Zee's historical importance. They are simply a working band trying things, writing constantly and getting better at what they do.

Side two begins with “After The Shine’s Gone,” where the band's ability to move between muscular rock and more expansive pop becomes particularly obvious. Contemporary reviewers have heard both Wings and Pink Floyd in it, which sounds like an impossible combination until Zuider Zee make the transition seem perfectly normal. “Better Than All The Others” pulls another old British ingredient into the mixture with touches of music hall, emphasizing again how culturally displaced this Memphis group could sound. Their imaginary map often seems to point across the Atlantic rather than toward the American South immediately surrounding them.

“Royal Command Performance” even announces that fascination in its title. Zuider Zee were not attempting to erase their American identity, but their melodic imagination was saturated with British pop culture. That could easily have produced mannered imitation. Instead the group’s years of performing ridiculously long club sets appear to have given them enough practical muscle to keep the music alive. Orange later described years of playing five-to-seven-hour nights, six days a week, often in miserable venues. Whatever glamour existed in the songs had been earned through profoundly unglamorous labor.

“Quite A While” may be one of the album's simplest pleasures. It has the brightness of morning music, melodic and lightly whimsical without becoming weightless. By this point Zeenith has demonstrated how many varieties of pop Zuider Zee could move through while maintaining a recognizable center. That center is melody. A hook rarely feels pasted onto a song after construction. The melody usually seems to be the reason the structure exists in the first place.

The vinyl version makes an interesting archival choice near the end. “Old” appears in its shorter single edit rather than the longer version found digitally and on CD, while “Nightlight” is absent from the LP entirely. “Old” wears the band's Beatles fascination especially openly, but there is something appealing about musicians being this unapologetic about what formed them. Influence does not automatically cancel personality. Zuider Zee can sound astonishingly Beatlesque in one passage and then make some peculiar harmonic, rhythmic or arrangement choice that belongs to nobody else quite as neatly.

“Might Be I’m Losing My Mind” closes the LP in full early-1970s English-pop splendor, another song packed with the sort of melodic material other groups might have stretched across several singles. That abundance may be the strangest fact about Zeenith. These do not sound like recordings withheld because nobody could find enough worthwhile material for release. The record sounds like evidence of a band generating songs faster than circumstances could properly accommodate them.

Which leaves the inevitable historical question: how does music this good vanish? There is no satisfying answer. Zuider Zee eventually signed to Columbia and released their self-titled LP, but the label never even issued a single from it. The group failed to become the major band that admirers thought they might become. Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen was reportedly baffled by their lack of success. Meanwhile these earlier recordings were not merely unsuccessful; they were essentially nonexistent to listeners.

That is what makes Zeenith such an enjoyable archival release. There is no need to pretend the album secretly altered musical history. It did not, because almost nobody heard it. Its value comes from the opposite fact. Music does not have to influence history in order to have been excellent. Sometimes history simply loses things.

Light In The Attic recovered these recordings from the original tapes and John Baldwin remastered them without trying to turn the early 1970s into 2018. The resulting album still belongs unmistakably to its period: glam stomp, Beatles-derived harmonies, bright guitars, keyboards, psychedelia and unapologetically elaborate pop writing. Yet it also demonstrates why the best power pop tends to survive fashion unusually well. A really good melody does not require much historical explanation before it starts doing its work.

Zeenith therefore exists in two times simultaneously. It is a young band from the early 1970s still imagining what might happen next, and it is a 2018 record whose listeners already know that almost none of those imagined possibilities came true. Zuider Zee did not become enormous. These songs did not become radio staples. Most sat unheard for more than four decades.

Then somebody found the tapes.

Suddenly the future arrived after all.