Pandemonium Shadow Show

iTunes Review

Recorded at RCA studios in Los Angeles at the peak of the “Summer of Love,” 1967’s Pandemonium Shadow Show is at once emblematic of its era and entirely outside of it. While his peers were consumed with all things freaky and loud, Harry Nilsson embraced ornate orchestration and the woozy march-times of circus music. The album has a natural affinity with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, from the same year, and the connection is made explicit with a reading of “She’s Leaving Home,” a song that sports the bittersweet elegance that was to become Nilsson’s stock in trade. The Beatles, in turn, got turned on to Nilsson through “You Can’t Do That,” which is at once a masterful parody and sincere tribute to the Lennon-McCartney catalog. While Nilsson might have been attracted to the gilded melodicism of McCartney, his sardonic writing was much nearer to Lennon, who later became one of his closest friends and allies. The snappy sing-alongs of Pandemonium Shadow Show often disguise personal revelations, coated in dark wit.