AT THE SOUND OF THE BELL

Very occasionally, you'll run into a band that has one album that kind of ruins the rest of their discography for you - not necessarily because the rest of their discography is bad, but because that one particular album is such a masterpiece, and stands so far above the rest of their output, that it completely overshadows everything else they did. Grandaddy are like that for me - I simply can't get into any of their albums other than The Sophtware Slump, because whenever I try I keep thinking "Well, this is OK... but I could just listen to The Sophtware Slump again", and that's always the right call because that album is fantastic.

With Pavlov's Dog, their astonishing debut Pampered Menial is, as far as I am concerned, THE album as far as the band goes - the perfect marriage of David Surkamp's distinctive vocals and an utterly unashamed flood of romantic symphonic art rock and an alchemical blend that any subsequent album would struggle to equal.

That being the case, I have to be really careful here in terms of how I rate their second album, At the Sound of the Bell. It would be very easy to rate this unfairly low simply because it isn't Pampered Menial. And yet the fact can't be denied that... this ain't Pampered Menial, not by a long shot. Oh, Surkamp's vocals are still here, and we still get flashes of mellotron from Doug Rayburn, but the Mellotron isn't allowed to run wild and the songwriting is significantly less classical-influenced than on the debut album. Instead, the sound of the album steers significantly towards middle of the road soft rock - it doesn't get all the way there and there's still flashes of their earlier approach audible, but it would be hard to deny that a shift has occurred.

Surkamp has later reported that the band was coming apart behind the scenes at the time, with resentments surging over who got to have their songs represented on the album but few members actually coming up with usable material - Surkamp himself has a songwriting credit on every song, with about half the album co-written with Doug Rayburn, and other than Steve Scorfina getting a credit on Mersey that's about it. The band seem to have run perilously short on workable ideas if Surkamp's account is accurate; take out Surkamp's vocals and the material here would be achingly, stultifyingly generic.

One can only imagine the pressure they were under to have a commercial hit after the debacle over the large advances they were paid for Pavlov's Dog by two different record companies; internal politics at ABC saw them booted out and snatched up by Columbia when the executive who had previously championed them at ABC left, setting up a ridiculous situation where Pampered Menial was released by both companies at the same time and, with the publishers realising any publicity could translate to sales for their rival instead of themselves, it sank like a stone. The commercial failure of this album would seem to have much more straightforward reasons: by sounding significantly more like everything else on the sappy soft rock end of the market than they previously had, Pavlov's Dog more or less guaranteed they would be lost in the shuffle.

It would be lovely if one could listen to At the Sound of the Bell and say that it was a gem on a par with Pampered Menial - a companion piece which may be less celebrated but is just as worth of attention. It isn't, though - not unless the sole thing you care about is Surkamp's vocals, and even here he seems a bit more restrained and less dramatic. Had this come out before Pampered Menial, we could see it as a promising start for a band whose musical development was still in its infancy - but coming out after it's impossible not to see it as a significant step backwards.

This was their last roll of the dice - a third album in a comparable vein was put together by 1977, but didn't find anyone willing to release it before the band disintegrated - and perhaps the biggest criticism I have of this album is that they chose to play it safe, rather than going for broke and trying to top Pampered Menial in its sheer monumental grandiosity. They may well have still failed - that album is an absolute beast - but it would have at least been more interesting than the sound of Pavlov's Dog scampering towards the middle of the road.