Review Summary: This album is very simple and relaxing with great guitar and mysterious vocals
Simplicity is something that everyone takes for granted. Today we often get caught up with all our high-tech gadgets and doohickeys and we forget to enjoy the simpler and more peaceful things in life. A way everyone escape all of that is giving
Surrealistic Pillow a nice peaceful and relaxing listen. With a blend of beautiful mysterious voices and clean not-fooled-around-with guitar, this album is a favorable way to separate ourselves from stress.
The major point that enforces the simplicity theme is that the guitar is rarely distorted. Some of the songs are 100% clean and the others may have a tiny iota of high-gain at the most, which still does not take anything away from the quality of the album. One example is
Somebody to Love. It is one of their heavier songs with a driving sound and a bit of dry high-gain distortion. It doesn’t really fit the mysterious voice that Grace Slick has but they still pull it off. The track that truly exemplifies the clean sound is
Coming Back to Me. That song features Marty Balin’s more relaxing vocals and great acoustic guitar with woodwinds in the background. But there are absolutely no fuzzy, nasty, crunchy sounding guitar effects anywhere on this album. Another great contributor to this theme is that there are no 10:00+ epics but rather songs averaging about 2:30 to 3:00 minutes of lovely sounds making this a quick, stress free half hour, listen.
One thing that I fell in love wtih was Grace Slick’s harmonizing, mysterious vocals. Though she does share the spotlight with Marty Balin, I find her voice a lot more enjoyable. Not to say Marty Balin doesn’t have good vocals because they are exceptional. Marty’s are somewhat high-pitched and very relaxing. Grace’s are more dark and folkish. In the great song
White Rabbit, she has a spectacular performance. In that songs and a lot of her others, they are eerie, peculiar and above all, unique. The song itself is probably the best song on the entire album. It has a galloping yet slow bassline and a guitar that can easily remind me of crossing a deadly, barren desert. After that it hops up and becomes very energetic. This is a very trippy band and it comes out in the lyrics, which are pure genius. They make many references to the story
Alice In Wonderland and associating it with psychedelic drugs. For example
“When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low”
And
“And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head!
Remember what the dormouse said:
Feed your head”
Also the title gives that theme away obviously.
Something that automatically comes with a trippy sound is a dark and mysterious sound. You can’t avoid it. They really extrapolate that in this album. As I said before,
White Rabbit is spewing with dark, thick mysteriousness. The song that I find most odd is
Coming Back to Me. Consisting of only vague acoustic guitar in the background and Balin’s vocals, this song is very soothing yet melancholy. A hint of hope does rear its head once in a while but nothing too giddy throughout the entire song. Another song is
She Has Funny Cars. It’s not a extraordinarily dark song because it is mostly Balin’s voice but Grace does have a part and, inevitably, it will song very eerie. The outro to that song is the creepiest part of the whole song. It has a guitar solo consisting of what sounds like the minor pentatonic scale and weird noises in the background. With out this mysterious sound the album wouldn’t be half as good.
A whole album can’t be muddled with dark songs so they put in some happier ones.
3/5 of a Mile In 10 Seconds starts out with a gleeful guitar riff and some fairly fast drums, which persists throughout the whole song.
D.C.B.A. –25 is more of a cheesy joyful song. The song just shouts confidence (if you could imagine what that could sound like). The song that I found the most pleasant was
Embryonic Journey. It is a short little acoustic instrumental ditty with very fast finger picking and going up and down the fret-board and making great uses of slides. With glumness and happiness, we really get the best of both worlds.
Jefferson Airplane, in a nutshell, is trippy, simple and relaxing. They display a dark side and a bright side giving us a nice mix of feelings. It is really hard not to enjoy these guys and how simple yet talented they are.
Pros
Simplicity
A great mix of dark and bright songs
Grace’s vocals
Cons
Grace isn’t in enough songs
Some may find the lack of technicality boring
Best Tracks
White Rabbit
Embryonic Journey
Coming Back To Me
3/5 of a Mile In 10 Seconds
4/5
