The Swimming Pool Q's - Royal Academy of Reality

Royal Academy of Reality

Royal Academy of Reality is an ambitious and successful summer blockbuster of a release...a sexy tour de force...glorious odes to the solar system. It's an anthem of the sun that would bust out in blows against the empire if anyone had the energy to launch a wooden ship, much less a rocket.

--VILLAGE VOICE

Possibly the most progressive American rock record of the new century. It sets an artistic standard few bands will be able to match.

--THE STATE

Overflowing with musical and intellectual ideas...flat-out astonishing.

--WIRE U.K.

Pocket symphonies of silvery guitar and warm-water singing: Abbey Road wrapped in kudzu.
--ROLLING STONE

A lavish record that's as cryptic as R.E.M. and as expansive as The Flaming Lips...warm and humane rather than aridly cerebral...their time may have come. 4 STARS.
--Q MAGAZINE U.K.

A gorgeous disc from a unique band that has been out of action too long.
--WASHINGTON POST

GRADE: A: Repeat listenings of Reality yield countless new pleasures.
--ATLANTA JOURNAL

A sprawling 70-minute voyage into deep space.
--CREATIVE LOAFING

The striking scale and superb craft of this album are impressive by any standard.

--ALL MUSIC GUIDE

This is one terrific album...a spectacular sound, one that overflows with sheer exuberance and invention...a strikingly original piece of work, and proof positive that in the grand tradition of Sgt. Pepper and Dark Side of the Moon, imagination and ambition are still vital ingredients when it comes to making music that really matters.
--SOUTH FLORIDA'S ENTERTAINMENT

NEWS & VIEWS

A rock and roll Gravity's Rainbow.
--AMPLIFIER

Exquisitely crafted songs [that] burst on the ear with the sudden force and electric sizzle of an August thunderstorm. Others open like furled flower buds, petal by petal, with imagery that's both winsome and passionate.
--TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT

Administration

" Royal Academy of Reality"

The Swimming Pool Q's. Bar None Records. 20 tracks.

Grade: A

For local pop music scribblers, this album has been a running joke for the past decade. Every six months or so, Swimming Pool Q's frontman Jeff Calder would dutifully check in and provide updates on its progress. Like local pop act the Producers' long-rumored but long delayed fourth album, most fans assumed the Q's 1989 album, "World War 2.5," would be its last. And then in 2001, something odd happened on the Atlanta pop scene --- that Producers record, "Coelacanth" mysteriously turned up in record bins. Just as quietly, the Swimming Pool Q's' gorgeous new "Royal Academy of Reality" graces store shelves today.

While the band emerged from the same humid, kudzu-choked Southern funk that spawned Pylon, the Brains, R.E.M. and the B-52's in the late 1970s and early 1980s, "Reality" sounds like nothing the Q's have recorded before. Nostalgic fans looking for "Rat Bait" redux , a retread of the group's first hit, won't find it here. This is a dense, spiritual, satisfying gumbo with loads of chunky, delicately seasoned bits to be found in the Technicolor trippy broth. If Alice had an accompanying soundtrack in her Discman when she fell down that rabbit hole, this would be it.

"Reality" sonically resembles what "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Pet Sounds" might have sounded like if the Beatles and the Beach Boys had joined forces and had the luxury of a decade to record --- and the advanced technology the Q's employ here.

Unlike most of the disposable pop records issued in today's market, repeat listenings of "Reality" yield countless new pleasures. There's Calder's ironic, smart, funny lyrical insights along with ear candy pellets of glass harps, sitars, vibraphones and Appalachian dulcimers sprinkled throughout the recording.

For old fans, just hearing Calder and Q's vocalist Anne Richmond Boston sing together on record again is well worth the sticker price. It's the compact disc equivalent of inviting old friends over for dinner and discovering that, despite passage of time, the mortgage payments, spouses and kids, you still share the same worldview.

--- Richard L. Eldredge