“Let Go Of You Girl” is my pick from the LP | Left Banke – ‘Walk Away Renee / Pretty Ballerina’ (Smash SRS 67088) March 1967
Article published in Crawdaddy!, August 1967
The Left Banke | Walk Away Renee / Pretty Ballerina | (Smash) 1967 | Often a preconceived notion of what type of charisma something ought to bear will throw you off. For instance, while riding up on scenic Route 95 towards Boston, through Providence, from New York, I first heard of The Left Banke and “Walk Away Renee.” Immediately struck by the far-too-sophisticated name of the group, I refused to listen. Changed the station, you know. Right off good old WABC. With a name like that and a song named that, prejudice led me to believe that this was just more fag-rock. Finally, however, the omnipresence of the big hit forced me to listen and I realized this was a masterpiece.
The Left Banke’s album is called ‘Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina’, after the two hits on it. Although everyone knows and loves these two songs they are still interesting. Both are relatively motionless but “Pretty Ballerina” is more so. It is another example of the cycle, but its multiple resolutions (mostly in the strings) render it not so Byrd-like.
“Walk Away Renee,” on the other hand, is comparatively dramatic. It even has its share of crescendi. Both are representative of the Left Banke’s recorded style, which is compounded of the best cliches of Baroque, Romantic and 20th century music, pretty familiar lush and/or taut string arrangements, lots of rhythmic constancy in the percussion and piano or harpsichord, all produced so as to densely mesh together. It should be surprising to realize that such a cliche density can eventually produce this novel synthesis. But that’s what happens.
The Left Banke | Walk Away Renee / Pretty Ballerina | (Smash) 1967
There is something that is not-so-curious-as-it-might-be about this album. It has to do with its peculiar style. Anything can become a style, stylized or stylistic. With the Byrds the historical persistence of a form has led to an overly familiar style. With the Left Banke the beautiful has become a stylistic goal.
The songs on this album are not incidentally beautiful. They are first-of-all beautiful – the point is not their irony or their satire or their immobility but simply their beauty. And besides that their irony can, for example, become merely structural.
Something to hang all that beauty on, just as anything can become a style, so can anything become an object for self-conscious artistic manipulation. The Left Banke songs are self-consciously beautiful. Somebody decided to concentrate on making them quite obviously so.
And that’s how beauty wound up as the stylistic goal. This also led to their becoming a less than objective matter. The songs have such a high density of real or Bizzaro pretty cliches, so well put together, that who could dare assert that they aren’t nice?
Atmospheric beauty
They are a sort of collection of familiar instances of the beautiful. All drawn, as if whole and pre-existent, out of the culture pool. Very agreeable. And because all this stuff is so beautiful it sounds very much the same. It takes a lot of work before you can force any major significance out of the minor differences among the songs.
After “Pretty Ballerina,” things become very rough in this regard. “She May Call You Up Tonight,” “Barterers and Their Wives,” “I’ve Got Something On My Mind” and “Let Go Of You Girl” all seem indistinguishable. As the Lightmaster Flooke has pointed out, anything that’s this beautiful, in this way, sounds the same in comparison to everything else.
But the ability of this simple atmospheric beauty to absorb everything renders many of the other qualities of the songs gratuitous. Everything is so uniformly beautiful that you don’t notice the irony of the words, the humour or even the meaning.
And when a song which is not beautiful, and therefore atypical, shows up (“Evening Gown”), it can seem disqualified and not very considerable. The beautiful is, after all, a very rigid style. And that’s a crying shame. Because the words on this album are very interesting.
The Left Banke | Walk Away Renee / Pretty Ballerina | (Smash) 1967
The first song, “Pretty Ballerina,” opens up whole new possibilities for the word “yeah,” a word hitherto considered totally played out with the advent of the Mamas & Papas. The absolutely matter-of-fact flatness of these statements, “Was I surprised? Yeah.” and “Just close your eyes. Yeah,” makes it even ironic, a far cry from the Mamas & Papas devalorization into simple sound.
And the last song, “Lazy Day,” succeeds in blocking out all of the possibilities in “yeah” via an extraordinarily hackneyed usage. It surpasses even the aforementioned Mamas & Papas and is a real complement to “Pretty Ballerina.” Other nice touches are “Barterers and Their Wives,” considered by the Lightmaster to be the first recorded instance of anti-Semitism in rock, and “Evening Gown,” recalling both fag-rock and the athletic performances of Jim Morrison. This too could be ironic.
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