Perhaps the most tragic result of the Bee Gee’s disco-era comeback, aside from the Brothers Gibbs’ newly liberated chest hair, was that it overshadowed the group’s earlier forays into orchestral pop. Odessa, from 1969, has since been either praised as a masterpiece or damned as overwrought fluff. Now packaged as a 3-disc, 40th anniversary edition, the greatly expanded Odessa offers arguments for both sides.

Planned as a double concept album - concerning what is anybody’s guess - the strained Odessa sessions eventually resulted in a two-year split between the brothers, with Barry and Maurice Gibb continuing under the group moniker as the high-singing Robin bowed out. It doesn’t take listening past the first few tracks to discover whatever conceptual framework the Gibbs sought to build got lost amid the album’s construction. The songs, however, provide some of the Bee Gees’ most densely arranged and carefully crafted work when taken as individual pieces of a confounding puzzle.

Odessa begins slow and dreary, with the title track’s sailor lost at sea. From there, we’re presented with a situational potluck - a “family on the skids” who can’t stop adopting orphans (“Marley Purt Drive”), a brief sketch of electrical pioneer Thomas Edison (“Edison”), a traveler bidding farewell to those he’d befriended (“Give Your Best”) - all of which would appear to set the stage for the ever-rotating concept to finally take hold. That firm grasp, though, is never really attained.

It may be hindered by too much pre-planning and not enough subsequent focus, but Odessa’s soaring melodies, intricate string arrangements and stylistic genre-hopping do not fail. The string section, presented in conjunction with the Gibb's trio of immaculate vocal harmonies, creates a mighty and resounding lead instrument. Robin Gibbs’ quavering falsetto sends tracks like “Lamplight” into the emotional stratosphere with Barry and Maurice providing a safety net for the comedown. Many of the lyrics, sometimes as brow-furrowing as The Monkees’ Head or The Beatles’ White Album, are textbook examples of the Bee Gees’ tendency to set dark lyrical concepts against warm, inviting melodies. Loves are ripped apart, hearts are trampled and nobody’s dreams unfold like they’d hoped. But, the album is, somehow, not a downer.

Though the repackaged Odessa suffers from too much expansion - with both stereo and mono mix discs of the original - the third disc of demos and alternates is a smart, revealing addition. Often, the skeletal sketches have a more lasting impact than the layered final versions. Boiled down to three harmonizing voices accompanied by softly strummed guitars, a basic layer of strings and slow, steady drums, the sketches are often more rewarding experiences than the final portrait.

Sometimes referred to as the Bee Gees’ Sgt. Pepper - a fair comparison as the group’s members were admitted students of The Beatles’ melodic smarts - in retrospect Odessa sounds more like the missing link between the acid-era Fab Four and the then-still-embryonic E.L.O., which would later cherry pick ideas from both camps. Strange, turbulent waters it may present, but, 40 years on, Odessa’s re-release assuredly confirms two things. One: the confines of pop music, a niche market long synonymous with the Bee Gees, has actually narrowed since the original release of Odessa, which maneuvers nimbly between dense chamber pop, catchy pseudo-country and suave white-boy soul. Two: though sometimes overwritten by decades of pop-culture revision, there was always much more to the Bee Gees than simple jive talkin’.

Michael Andrews