The opening track, “Odessa (City on the Black Sea)”, with its choirs of voices soaked in reverb, yawping “Ohhhhh-desssss-aaaaaaa” - the puffed-up gravity, beaten-down acoustic guitar, and weeping cello prove a lethal combination indeed. The extravagance of the reissue’s packaging (which, in all seriousness, is utterly fantastic - an area in which the folks at Rhino continue to excel) is a manifestation of the album, which, despite being the album to listen to while stoned out on a lonely patch of ocean surrounded by black abyss below and blue sky above, often sacrifices economy to the will of artsy ambition. The first two discs present the entire album in stereo and mono, respectively (which is better is a decision perhaps best left to the ear of the beholder, but an argument for stereo is the way to go for the full on-the-ocean-no-one-can-hear-you-scream-or-sing-emotional-ballads effect), and the third disc offers up an array of demos, alternate mixes, and a few unreleased tracks. Rhino’s lavish three-disc reissue (the sequel to 2007’s box set that collected those first three albums for Polydor) replicates the original vinyl by coating the small box in red velvet inside, original artwork, a fold-out poster, and sticker offer tangible temptations for a digital era. Despite its many pluses (more on those in a moment), Odessa is a bit too much - too many ballads, too many instances of the Gibb brothers’ voices trembling atop platters of strings, too close to an overblown concept in mood, if not in plot. (Somewhere one of the Decemberists is eating his or her heart out.) The Bee Gees were still a solid six years away from their notorious disco period (in ’69, the Gibb brothers were all barely in their 20s), and here they found themselves somewhere beyond the lively pull of the exquisite psychedelia of their earlier records and into something weighted with sobering self-importance. Odessa feels like a concept album - even if it lacks a true conceptual narrative at its core - most likely because it begins with a seven-minute epic about the “British ship Veronica” lost in the Baltic Sea, a theme later picked up by cinematic instrumentals like “Seven Seas Symphony”, and because it is long as hell. In 1969, after releasing three psych-pop albums in little more than a year’s time (the best of which, Bee Gees’ 1st, is like Revolver at a tea party: awesome), the Bee Gees went whole hog into melodramatic chamber rock with Odessa, a 17-track double album steeped in gaudy melody and lush orchestration.
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