Blue Öyster Cult

It's perhaps curious, in some respects even paradoxical, to acknowledge as the absolute peak of a career - and among the most significant albums in the entire history of hard rock - a record that made transience, stylistic ambiguity and a refusal to crystallize its most powerful trait. "Secret Treaties" is not a monolith, but a living, unstable creature, a strange alchemy between nascent heavy metal, psychedelia already on the wane, cultured literary suggestions, and those esoteric atmospheres that had always enveloped the aesthetic of Blue Öyster Cult.

Conceived in the early Seventies, hot on the heels of the compelling “Tyranny And Mutation”, the album that had finally won the band the attention of critics and audiences alike, above all for its cerebral, provocative lyrics, “Secret Treaties” marks a decisive leap forward in the maturation of Blue Öyster Cult. This third effort succeeds exactly where its predecessor still hesitated, balancing the power of the riff with structural coherence and channelling the band's visionary instinct into a precise, hypnotic, cutting musical form. It would be almost heretical not to call it a masterpiece, because this album represents a point of no return for the group: although the peak of global success would arrive a few years later with “(Don't Fear) The Reaper”, Blue Öyster Cult would never again reach, in terms of cohesion and artistic depth, the heights of this record.

Turning our attention straight away to its most memorable closing statement, it's impossible not to mention the dizzying, unsurpassable “Astronomy”, the album's final seal and a true talisman-song that gathers and sublimates all its underlying tensions: esotericism and science, mythology and technology, cosmic romanticism and postmodern nihilism. The track, an integral part of the so-called “Imaginos Mythos” devised by Sandy Pearlman, the album's producer and co-writer of several songs, is an enigmatic, visionary fresco whose lyrics are dense with cryptic allusions and alchemical imagery. Its greatness also lies in its formal ambiguity: is it a ballad? A progressive track? Proto-gothic rock? In truth, it's all of this and something more besides, an elusive creature that seems to anticipate the most expansive Pink Floyd (“Shine On You Crazy Diamond”), the lyrical Rush (“Xanadu”, “The Trees”), the most atmospheric King Crimson, the darkness of Fields Of The Nephilim and even the Smashing Pumpkins of “Adore“. Buck Dharma's guitar weaves melodic arabesques that echo forward into Marillion and Porcupine Tree, while its structure, made up of slow, solemn passages that burst into wide harmonic openings, influenced, at times unwittingly, entire generations of European gothic and power metal bands of the Eighties, particularly in their more melodic, “epic” strain à-la Helloween, but also traceable in Stratovarius, Gamma Ray and the most solemn moments of Blind Guardian. Even Metallica, in their cover version featured on “Garage Inc.”, sought to restore the song's epic, mystical dimension, heightening its dramatic intensity.

In any case, “Secret Treaties” is by no means exhausted by “Astronomy”: it consists of eight tracks, almost all of them noteworthy, with the possible exception of the two middle songs, “Cagey Cretins” and “ME 262”, which represent something of a dip. The former is little more than a divertissement with odd little choruses that struggles to leave a mark; the latter, though it tackles a striking and controversial subject such as the flight of German jets during World War II, in keeping with the band's taste for historical ambiguity and provocation, lacks the evocative and musical force of the rest of the record. The song is, however, remembered today for the album's famous cover, which depicts the very aircraft of its title alongside the musicians, immersed in a black-and-white suspended somewhere between glamour and unease.

And yet, aside from this brief lapse, the third effort by Blue Öyster Cult proves to be a surprisingly cohesive and inspired work. It opens with “Career Of Evil”, written by a young Patti Smith, at the time romantically involved with keyboardist Allen Lanier. It's the keyboards themselves that play a decisive role in this track with its decadent blues flavour, which precedes the energetic ballad “Subhuman”, marked by Bloom's thick, distant vocals. In atmosphere, it evokes the kind of secular, cosmic spirituality that would later become dear to bands like Spacemen 3, but what still makes the song one of their most celebrated today is Buck Dharma's spiralling guitar riff, which returns again and again to envelop the entire sonic structure.

“Dominance And Submission” and “Harvester Of Eyes” show the American band's more energetic, urgent side. The former is a micro electric drama punctuated by abrupt tempo shifts, tight guitars and restless vocal interplay, with an energy that in some ways anticipates the fragmented dynamism of Queen's “Sheer Heart Attack”. The latter, meanwhile, is a sharp midtempo number, steeped in black sarcasm and macabre irony, poised between the shock rock of Alice Cooper and the mechanical pulses of a still-embryonic proto-industrial. Its dry, menacing riff drives a lyric that oscillates between necrophilia and pop culture, before spilling into a final childlike music-box refrain worthy of a horror nightmare.

“Flaming Telepaths” is perhaps the album's most explicitly progressive track, and lyrically it serves as the ideal prelude to “Astronomy”, with which it shares not only an arcane atmosphere but also a certain lyrical-conceptual ambition. Its opening of piano and drums is unsettled by a declamatory, visionary voice, while the keyboards, the absolute protagonists here, don't decorate but rather disturb, helping to build a mounting sense of mental tension. About halfway through, a burst of synth throws open the doors to an instrumental crescendo that, without ever abandoning the song form, touches on moments of almost symphonic grandeur, in a fragile, feverish balance between the most narrative strand of British prog (think of the Who of “Quadrophenia“) and that dark progressive of the Eighties (such as IQ or Twelfth Night) that would make this murky, nocturnal use of keyboards its own. Buck Dharma's guitar, lucid and grieving, carves out two memorable spaces for itself, culminating in an estranging, poetic ending that fades into the unknown.

It's a track that sounds like a final rite before the closing apotheosis, on an album that leaves more questions than answers, harbouring beneath its rock surface the tension between what is shown and what is concealed. Something secret, yet set down with rigour: treaties that anticipate, without ever proclaiming it, what music would soon become.

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06/07/2025