If you can get past its flaws, however, Imaginos represents a substantial recovery from the disastrous Club Ninja, and it’s arguably the strongest BÖC outing after the ouster of the original rhythm section. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Imaginos sessions allegedly began as a solo album for ex-drummer Albert Bouchard, and the song cycle (of which the released album is supposedly only a fraction) was cooked up with BÖC’s pleasantly-demented Svangali figure, Sandy Pearlman, starting in the early 70’s. (The wikipedia article on Imaginos has the bare bones of the album’s convoluted history, but currently omits to mention any of the epic mudslinging I’ve heard described.)

You can’t really follow the story by listening to the album, which is probably for the best. You can read a plot summary at the wikipedia entry referenced above, but I recommend against it. It’s all about secret mysterious forces, after all, and I think it benefits from being as murky and ill-defined as possible. Vaguely spooky mumbo-jumbo like, “seven years of labor for the instruments of time” is more evocative if you know less about what it specifically refers to.

Despite the strikes against it, Imaginos offers at least two bonafide classics of the BÖC canon, “In the Presence of Another World” and “Del Rio’s Song.” The former is almost reminiscent of occult goths Fields of the Nephilim, with its darkly swirling arpeggios and concluding, heavily-processed, horror movie vocals. The latter, by contrast, sounds of a piece with the band’s masterful first three records; the verse and chorus hooks are easily strong enough to stop the plot-advancing midsection from dragging it down. And if Imaginos offers only two real peaks, the lows aren’t so bad. Only the closing title track makes my skip finger itchy, partly because of the dumb chorus (”Ooh Imaginos, ooh Imaginos”) but mostly because of Jon Roger’s grating lead vocal. (It’s perhaps worth noting that neither Joey Cerisano’s stereotypical metal screech*, the overlong outro, nor the unwieldy title quite ruin “The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria” for me.)

Star rating: 2.11

*Cerisano’s vocal credits include BÖC, Korn, and Michael Bolton. Ye gods preserve us.