SECRET TREATIES

This is BÖC's best album. It might not have my favorite song on it (that'd be Tyranny and Mutation), it might not be their most consistent record (that'd be Fire of Unknown Origin), but there's just a certain ineffable quality about it that makes it the best in my eyes. It's the final album in their "Black and White Trilogy", and the final record (until Imaginos, of course) to have Sandy Pearlman taking a "directorial" role he held over the band in their early years. Appropriately, while Sandy's Imaginos mythology had served as the band's conceptual foundation from the start, this album leans into it far more than the prior two, with multiple songs based on the Soft Doctrines poems and a cryptic message on the inner sleeve summarizing the story in brief. The band even decided to forego any lyrical contributions themselves, leaving all of them up to Sandy and his close friend Richard Meltzer.

The music here is very much still 70s-style hard rock in the same vein as the other two "Black and White" albums, but where the debut seemed adjacent to psychedelia and Tyranny amped up the heaviness, Secret Treaties goes for a far more dramatic and prog-adjacent sound. As Buck Dharma and Joe Bouchard typically only sang songs they wrote the lyrics to, they're no-shows here on the vocal front, though Albert sings lead on one track.

While the inner sleeve connects its title with the Imaginos story, the lyrics to album opener "Career of Evil" are more a Patti Smith original than a Sandy Pearlman one. The song is a little repetitive both musically and lyrically, but that only serves to make it all the more catchy. The bridge section also breaks things up pretty nicely.

A natural transition leads us right into "Subhuman", a classic rocker with a memorable riff. I prefer the live renditions to the studio version, but it's a great song regardless. This is our first Imaginos-related song, with lyrics from the Soft Doctrines that narrate Imaginos' meeting with the Lovecraftian Les Invisibles and rebirth as Desdinova. 1988's Imaginos would revisit and GREATLY expand this song into a self-titled piece, but aside from the lyrics that rendition is essentially a completely different song.

"Dominance and Submission" is the first all-time classic on here and one of my favorite BÖC tracks. It's the only track here where Eric isn't on lead vocals. Albert's vocals are very much an acquired taste for many people, but I love his performance here, especially near the end with the call-and-response "Dominance!" and "Submission!" that slowly builds into him screaming the latter. The lyrics are (according to Sandy) meant to be about the transformative power of rock music and the cultural impact of the British Invasion, themes that are both obsessions of Sandy's and significant parts of the Imaginos mythology, though this song's literal plot doesn't really connect directly to the storyline. Instead, we're privy to an incestuous, bisexual tryst between a teenage boy, his friend Susan, and her brother Charles, driven to libertine excess by the wild beat of the British Invasion. Fun stuff, especially if we read the song's title in a sexual light! Easily the best thing about this song, however, is the guitar solo that closes it out. It's such a great payoff to the call-and-response buildup, and my favorite solo in the entire BÖC catalogue.

"ME 262" closes out Side A. Something about this song just doesn't click with me as much as the rest of the album, though I find its placement very fitting, and the lyrics about a Nazi Luftwaffe bomber obviously tie into Imaginos' backdrop of the alien conspiracy behind the World Wars. It's got a good hook too, and the way the piano creates the noise of a beeping radar is really cool. It's also a rare tasteful use of sound effects in a rock song of this variety, something which is usually more annoying than it is fun or atmospheric.

"Cagey Cretins" opens up Side B. While it's not quite as great as Dominance and Submission or the rest of the songs on Side B, it's super underrated and an invaluable part of this record. Catchy riff, love the backing vocals, and it's really good at creating this very nervous, anxious atmosphere to it that fits the lyrics about going nuts from cabin fever. Easily the best part here is the bridge section, where in addition to the instrumental shifting, sees Albert taking over on vocals for a bit.

"Harvester of Eyes" has a bit of a rockabilly/country flavor to it, which is not usually my thing, but I'm very fond of this song regardless. In part that's due to the lyrics, which exemplify the band's signature tongue-in-cheek black humor. The song was supposedly inspired by the Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, whose ocular TB during WW2 came up during his confirmation hearing, but I'm not really sure how Meltzer got "serial killer who goes around collecting his victim's eyes and consuming them as a drug" from that. The penultimate section, with the repetitive chanting of "harvester of eyes..." is really fun, and the song kind of devolves into a non sequitur at the end, with Eric almost scat-singing over a guitar part before the song closes on the sound of a music box. It's very weird but absolutely works

"Flaming Telepaths" is a song that didn't click with me for quite a while, and I'm not quite sure why. I definitely "get" it now, though! Allen Lanier's keyboard has been present throughout the album, but it's this penultimate track where it takes on a more prominent role. Piano drives the song from the start, then halfway through we get a lengthy instrumental section where a brief but very memorable Moog solo is followed by a piano solo and finally a guitar solo. The sci-fi lyrics loosely tie into Imaginos' story and themes, with their story of psychic experiments designed to grant our mad scientist narrator the "secrets of space and time". A second guitar solo with the hypnotic repetition of "and the joke's on you" closes us out, only to be abruptly and cut off for a dramatic transition into...

"Astronomy" is Blue Öyster Cult's masterpiece. It alone elevates this album, already full of great songs, to a whole other level. It's also easily the proggiest thing the band ever recorded, and not just because of all the piano, but its unconventional structure. Beginning as a slow, quiet piano ballad, it slowly reveals itself as a rock song with a highly dramatic, an almost symphonic tone. The song first builds up higher and higher as the guitar is introduced and overtakes the piano, with the "Hey!" shouts contributing greatly to that feeling of "building", only for things to descend again and build up a second time. The final verse is followed by a guitar solo, then the iconic finale, with the repeated "Astronomy, a star!" chants as the perfect conclusion. It has all the gravitas of a prog epic, in just 6 minutes, from a band who only flirted with the genre most of the time. Of course, we can't talk about Astronomy without acknowledging that it is the heart and soul of the Imaginos storyline, having lyrics taken directly from the Soft Doctrines in the same manner as Subhuman's. The highly cryptic and symbolic lyrics, remained almost indecipherable for years, with fans only able to puzzle out some kind of occult ritual and the recurring characters of Suzy and Desdinova. The release of the 1988 Imaginos album, which featured an extremely different re-recording of this song, revealed far more details about the Imaginos concept and what precisely a lot of the more obscure imagery in it alluded to.

After Secret Treaties, Sandy would take a bit of a step back. He remained BÖC's primary producer and manager, still wrote lyrics from time to time, and material he provided the band with would continue to serve as inspiration, but creatively the band members began to drive things far more than he did. The band made a few attempts at writing and recording more of the Imaginos material between 1975 and 1978, even getting as far as demos for a few songs, but most of it would never see release until the concept was eventually revisited by Albert Bouchard in the early 80s. That's a story for another time, though...

BEST TRACK: Astronomy

WEAKEST TRACK: ME 262

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