"Imaginos" - The Perfect Blue Öyster Cult Album

Introduction

When I first heard this it was the culmination of every Blue Öyster Cult album up to that point finally completing Sandy Pearlman's vision of what the band was.

The documentary and wiki entry at the start of this article actually shows it to have a tortured history salvaged from a proposed set of three double albums covering the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to the end of the twentieth century.

These albums were planned to be:

• Act I: Imaginos
• Act II: Germany Minus Zero and Counting (also known as Bombs over Germany and Half-Life Time)
• Act III: The Mutant Reformation

The writings of Sandy Pearlman (founding producer/contributer for Blue Öyster Cult) while at university in the 1960's were later employed and made up a great deal of the lyrical content of the first three Blue Öyster Cult albums (and scattered songs throughout the rest of the band's catalogue). Very few people really knew what all of the obscure lyrical references were about until 1988 when Pearlman resurrected the album Imaginos from demo work started by Albert Bouchard as early as 1981. Liner notes for the album revealed that the cryptic lyrics were all part of a larger body of work titled "The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos: A Bedtime Story for the Children of the Damned". This was essentially an alternate historical fiction of the origins of the first two world wars, replete with conspiracy theories, secret societies and supernatural/alien presences surrounding a protagonist named Imaginos. The writings themselves were never published, but the musical version was intended to span three 2-LP volumes, had they been completed.

This site tells the story of "Imaginos" and along with the Wikipedia entry makes excellent reading for any love of dark fantasy and the Blue Öyster Cult.

Here is the introduction:

The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos: A Bedtime Story for the Children of the Damned

From a dream world paralleling our Earth in time and space, The Invisible Ones have sent an agent who will dream the dream of history. With limitless power, he becomes the greatest actor of the 19th century. Taking on many disguises, he places himself at pivotal junctures in history, continually altering its course and testing our ability to respond to the challenge of evil.

His name is Imaginos

And so the story continues.

I will continue this piece as a playlist to give you an idea of the sound of the album, although you could buy yourself a copy if you like what you hear, It is very sophisticated heavy metal with a story that completely draws you in.

"I Am The One You Warned Me Of"

This opens the album and sounds just monstrous, like something coming for you that you can't escape. Lots of mystical Lovecraftian lines and the title inspired a little micro-fiction piece of my own on Vocal this morning.

The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein's Castle at Weisseria

Possibly one of the longest and most convoluted album song titles ever. Again a monstrous meta riff with a descending swirling keyboard and piano sequence.

Finishing with a coda of "World Without End" you don't know whose world is not going to end.

Astronomy

This first appeared on "Secret Treaties" but now seems to be even more threatening, the subdued guitar ushers it in, before the drums and keyboards join in as the protagonist and his romance wander out towards the sea.

Blue Öyster Cult

I will close this dreamlike eponymous song, the penultimate song on the album, with lines like "where oyster beds are soft as down", again they are returning to the sea.

For me despite, all the problems in its history, this is a damned near-perfect metal album.

Imaginos Addendum

Re Imaginos sees Albert revisiting the 1988 Blue Öyster Cult album Imaginos, which was originally intended as his solo album.

The album weaves scripts and poems by the late Sandy Pearlman, a concept album about an alien conspiracy that is brought to fruition during the late 19th and early 20th century through the actions of Imaginos, an agent of evil.