The All-Timers #7 & #8 - The Olivia Tremor Control's "NYC-25" & The Zombies' "Hung Up on a Dream"

I have no idea about the prerequisites, logistics, or responsibilities of a music supervisor for film and/or television, but I've always thought it'd be the coolest job in the world. There's nothing more memorable than a pitch-perfect sync—Underworld's "Born Slippy" in Trainspotting, Kavinsky's "Nightcall" in Drive, The Doors' "The End" in Apocalypse Now, My Bloody Valentine's "Sometimes" in Lost in Translation. It elevates the movie first and foremost, but if it really hits, the existing music also gains new resonance.

There's a delicate balance between stylish vibe-matching and on-the-nose overkill. I'm writing this minutes after finishing an episode of Netflix's 3 Body Problem that (vaguely as possible to avoid spoilers) ends with someone enacting revenge/retaliation, and it's set to Radiohead's "Karma Police," specifically the sections where Thom Yorke sings, "This is what you get/When you mess with us." I'm enjoying the show quite a bit, but that took me out of it.

Because my music knowledge dwarfs my nonexistent footprint in the world of filmmaking, I more often hear songs and imagine fitting scenes, rather than the reverse thought process of seeing a shot or sequence and seeking out the perfect soundtrack. Some directors specifically orchestrate scenes around songs they love, but meat of the film—plot, setting, characters—usually dictates the sync, not vice versa (though critics of Sofia Coppola's work might beg to differ).

"Filmic" is a silly word to use to describe music. Does it hearken back to specific famous scores? Say that! Is it epic? Orchestral? Specify that shit. But I have to admit that a select handful of my favorite songs always seem to yell at me: "Give me a big-screen moment!" Chief among those is The Olivia Tremor Control's wistful 1996 track "NYC-25."

This is the type of song that, even if heard divorced from tracklist context, even within OTC's world of jumbled idiosyncrasies, sounds like an album closer. Across their two albums, the band ping-ponged between psychedelic pop gems that sound like forgotten '60s hits and tape-loop experiments that locate them squarely in the weird '90s. They'll bang out three consecutive Lennon-McCartney confections and immediately throw you a noise-collage curveball. But even these tricksters knew that "NYC-25" belongs nowhere but the end.

I struggle to explain why its quavering acoustic guitar, midtempo plod, and melodic catharsis produce this mood. It just conjures up a final scene where the camera pans up and the credits roll. In my mind, it's a movie about maturation—not a "coming of age" thing, but maybe a dark-but-warm comedic drama about an event or moment that shapes someone's early adulthood (a death, a divorce, an illness, something of that nature). It takes place in New York City, obviously. The lead is walking away, perhaps alone after making peace with the primary conflict, perhaps alongside a newfound or newly-redeemed friend or partner. But it's springtime, and there are brownstones and cabs, and they slowly recede into the city, jarred out of their old life, embracing an uncertain future. "Don't sleep too long/Pleasant dreams but please don't sleep too long."

With it in my pantheon of "begging for a film sync" music is a song that urges the exact opposite: stay in that dream, learn from it, let it change you.

I'm not as fervent about the placement of The Zombies' "Hung Up on a Dream" within a movie's plot arc. It's too open-ended to be a closer, but far too weighty for an opening scene. It should accompany an overwhelming, sensory peak. Released in 1968, its flowery themes of spiritual awakening immediately scan as a "Strawberry Fields"-style shorthand for hallucinogens, but I'm not a hack and this isn't Across The Universe. No one's gonna drop acid and have kaleidoscopic visions. I am, however, a sap. "Hung Up on a Dream" has always sounded to me like the overwhelming pangs of fresh infatuation. "A sweet confusion filled my mind"—yeah, we've all been there.

Give me an anti-"walk of shame" morning after—think a less annoying, but no less fantastic "You Make My Dreams" scene from 500 Days of Summer. Or maybe, in a darker, more cynical movie, an ecstatic indoctrination into a cult.

~~

I've wanted to write something about The Olivia Tremor Control ever since co-founder and co-frontman Will Cullen Hart died at age 53 last November. The other half of the band's brain trust, Bill Doss, died at an even more tragic 43 in 2012, right around the time I fell headfirst into the vibrant world the pair created together in the mid-'90s. Along with Neutral Milk Hotel and Apples in Stereo, OTC formed the central hydra of the fleeting, amorphous, now-revered Elephant 6 Collective. Hart, Doss, NMH's Jeff Mangum, and AIS' Robert Schneider met in high school in rural Louisiana, and although they soon splintered across the country and chased varying musical dragons, they fostered a like-minded satellite community of weird, '60s-indebted indie rock that defined an essential corner of the '90s.

Maybe that's why The Zombies are here, too. The British band's 1968 opus, Odessey and Oracle (misspelling initially unintentional but now canonical), was such an immediate bomb that the band broke up before the single "Time of the Season" became a surprise hit a year later. (Completely beside the point, but there's a fascinating read on the multiple fake "Zombies" touring acts that sprung up in the aftermath.) Along with similarly-fated albums like Love's Forever Changes and Gene Clark's No Other, Odessey gained newfound stature in the '90s and 2000s as indie bands seized upon heady—but pop-fluent—"lost classics" that made more sense in Gen X's musical landscape.

At first, The Zombies were a dime-a-dozen British Invasion band that nevertheless exhibited some real songwriting talent. Odessey was a pretty blatant Sgt. Pepper's swing at harnessing the psychedelia sweeping the rock world. Late-blooming single aside, it's not hard to see why it was either too cloyingly flowery or too aggressively weird to succeed at the time. But in the '90s, when used vinyl was cheap and plentiful, it seemed like every bygone, niche micro-genre was exhumed by kids looking for inspiration. Nirvana had Shocking Blue. G-Funk had Yacht Rock. There was a whole-ass swing revival. Elephant 6 had psych-pop bargain-binners like The Zombies.

Dovetailing with the affordability of boomers' tossed-off record collections was an unprecedentedly low barrier of entry for home recording. Classic tape-based consoles became the LPs to state-of-the-art digital equipment's CDs, which birthed a wave of lo-fi DIYers who didn't need a studio budget or audio engineering course to produce their own material. I'd argue that no one took more advantage of this than the E6 bands, who treated their four-tracks like toys that were capable of Brian Wilson/George Martin tapestries while beholden to none of the major-label pressure that once squeezed psychedelia's innovators.

Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is unquestionably the pinnacle of E6. Lauded and mythologized to no end, Jeff Mangum's final album still bears similarities to the baroque, sunshine-y pop that influenced the rest of the collective, but it's something entirely its own. Apples In Stereo hewed closer to power-pop. Of E6's Big Three, OTC were simultaneously the most '60s-reverent and most avant-garde.

Both of their albums play as unorganized data-dumps of studio experiments, each structureless tape-loop collage treated as reverently as each inconceivably catchy pop song. For me, these deviations align OTC even more with the ethos of '60s psych-pop. The Beach Boys and Beatles got famous because of their obsessive mastery of traditional songcraft, but they only upended popular music once they started fucking with the formula.

The Olivia Tremor Control flooding the back half of their debut with a numbered, ten-part suite of non-linear compositions called "Green Typewriters" was their version of The Zombies writing a dirge from the perspective of a World War I soldier.

OTC were detail-oriented enough to replicate distinct '60s hallmarks, whether guitar tones, vocal multi-tracking, or era-appropriate effects pedals. "No Growing (Exegesis)" nails the guitar sound from Simon & Garfunkel's "America," "Can You Come Down With Us?" mines the bad-trip underbelly of cult favorites Pearls Before Swine, "Green Typewriters 4," sandwiched between snippets of circus music and effects-fucked drones, plays like a Donovan demo.

Their 1996 debut, Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle (such a '60s title), is a classic in its own right, but their second and final album tops it. Hart and Doss burrowed even further into their alternate-reality vision of the '60s on 1999's Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One, never losing sight of their influences, but also starting to innovate on their own. I can't imagine the freak-folk scene of the early 2000s (Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart, Akron/Family, etc.) existing without it.

~~

I got to see The Zombies perform Odessey and Oracle eight years ago on a tour commemorating the album's 50th anniversary. All four surviving members (guitarist Paul Atkinson died in 2004) were present, and it was incredible. In particular, I was struck by how pitch-perfect singers Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent sounded in their 70s. Full-album playthroughs by aging bands are always a gamble, but this was a joyous bucket-list experience for me.

Last July, Argent (79 at the time) announced that he was retiring from touring after suffering a stroke. That's sad no matter how you slice it, but it's incredible that he was able to reunite with his once-failing band to finally capture the goodwill that they were denied in their heyday.

I'll never get to see The Olivia Tremor Control live. They toured one last time, sans Doss, in the months surrounding his death in 2012. Their only performance since was a one-off in 2022 commemorating the release of an Elephant 6 book. Now that Hart is gone, any ensuing reunion will be a tribute at best.

When David Bowie and Prince died within three months of each other in early 2016, it fucked me up. I had always been hesitant to seek out live performances by my aging heroes, whose artistic peaks were far behind them. It's incredibly hard for a 70-year-old to live up to the virile idealization that young fans have cobbled together from decades-old albums, and the ticket prices are usually set with prosperous boomers in mind. But after those two demigods of 20th Century pop music succumbed to mortality, I vowed to see as many living legends as financially possible.

More often than not, they blew me away. A solo Randy Newman at a small venue had me sobbing into my bourbon. Bruce Dickinson, mere months removed from beating throat cancer, wailed like a banshee and jumped all over ziggurats on an elaborate Iron Maiden stage. Ozzy Osbourne's stage banter was slurred and incomprehensible on Black Sabbath's final tour, but the second the music started, he locked in and nailed every note. Dr. John could barely walk, but he still played the piano like a Julliard prodigy. Bruce Springsteen—okay yeah, that guy's just immortal.

Premature deaths like those of OTC's twin braintrust strengthen my resolve to see as many all-time favorites as I can, no matter how washed or decrepit they may be. Those bucket-list concerts are just the cherry on top though. The beauty of recorded music is that you can discover it years later and make it your own. If you're The Olivia Tremor Control, discarded '60s scrap heaps can spark creativity and reshape your worldview. If you're me, cherished songs that float in voids unbound by time can conjure vivid scenes that I can only dream of one day seeing. Call it Music from the Unrealized Film Script.

BOI (Best Of Inbox) #42

bdrmm - "John on the Ceiling"

Location: Kingston upon Hull, UK // Genre: IDM-tinged indie pop // RIYL: Panda Bear, Youth Lagoon, A Beacon School // From: Microtonic, out 2/28

Benjamin Booker - "SAME KIND OF LONELY"

Location: New Orleans // Genre: scuzzy, rap-fluent blues rock // RIYL: Yves Tumor, anything on billy woods' Backwoodz label (his frequent collaborator Kenny Segal is producing this album) // From: LOWER, out 1/24

Ghais Guevara - "The Old Guard is Dead"

Location: Philadelphia // Genre: psychedelic boom bap // RIYL: Zelooperz, Pink Siifu, and yet again, Backwoodz // From: Goyard Ibn Said, out 1/24

Panchiko feat. billy woods - "Shandy in the Graveyard"

Location: Nottingham, UK // Genre: airy trip hop // RIYL: Air, UNKLE, and—say it with me everybody—BACKWOODZ // From: Ginkgo, out 4/4

Unreqvited - "Void Essence / Frozen Tears"

Location: Ottawa, CA // Genre: blackgaze // RIYL: Alcest, Sadness // From: A Pathway to the Moon, out 2/7

All Inbox Infinity picks are available in playlist form via Apple Music and Spotify.