CAROLE KING: WELCOME HOME (1978)
1) Main Street Saturday Night;
2) Sun Bird; 3) Venusian Diamond; 4) Changes; 5) Morning Sun; 6) Disco Tech; 7)
Wings Of Love; 8) Ride The Music; 9) Everybody's Got The Spirit; 10) Welcome
Home.
Okay, now this
is an album that can hardly be saved by even the most objective and
unprejudiced analysis. Even if it was produced by pretty much the same team
(including the same couple of guitarists, although husband Rick Evers is only
credited for cowbell this time — given his drug problems, this somehow does not
look surprising), Welcome Home seems
to take everything about Simple Things
that was problematic (weak hooks, banal lyrics, generally unimaginative
arrangements), discard everything that was good (such as classy guitar solos
and progressive ambition on songs like ʽOneʼ), and throw in a few additional
problems — most importantly, copycatting, as Carole now seems almost resigned
to «follow where you lead», even if that makes her sound like a laughable
third-rate imitator at times.
Clearly the greatest embarrassment, and one of
the worst ever experiences in King's catalog, is ʽDisco Techʼ — the title alone
should be enough to die on the spot from an overdose of bad taste, but, yes
indeed, this is Carole King going disco, heavily laying on all the clichés of
the genre. Considering that Carole King and funk are about as compatible as
Shostakovich and hip-hop, lyrics with lines like "rhythm is our way of
communication, you won't ever want to take a vacation" (Mike Love, eat
your heart out!), and especially "Disco Tech — let me be your
teacher!" (no thank you), simply point out the sad fact that, as generally
lovable and talented Carole King is as a human being and an artist, she is a bit lacking in the basic intelligence
department: even in the sweaty disco climate of 1978, with everybody losing
their heads and all, this song could not pass even the lower rungs of the
quality test for Whiteboy (Whitegirl) Disco Fodder.
And, unfortunately, that ain't all. On a less overtly
embarrassing, but still highly disappointing note, a song like ʽEverybody's Got
The Spiritʼ seems clearly copped from Fleetwood Mac's ʽDon't Stopʼ, from the
basic rhythm pattern to the fade-in build-up of the introduction to the
friendly anthemic chorus — except that it is much weaker in every respect, be
it the lyrics, the thin arrangement, the lack of energy, and a complete
misunderstanding of the ascending melodic pattern that made ʽDon't Stopʼ so
great, as it captured the listener's spirit and pulled it upwards along the
melodic stairway. In the place of the invigorating "don't stop thinking
about tomorrow", we here have "everybody's got the spirit, yeah you
know what I mean" (do we?), delivered in such a way that it seems clear
that the only person who's really got
the spirit is Carole herself, and even she
might be just faking it, too.
Other «highlights» include ʽVenusian Diamondʼ,
an oddly «psychedelic» song with Vocoder-treated vocals, circa-1966-Beatles
vocal harmonies, two sections that make a transition from slow, lazy,
Lennonesque psychedelia to bouncy McCartney-style pop, and sitars a-plenty —
the best thing about the song is that it at least does not try to adapt to
contemporary trends, and is not as openly annoying as the previously listed
two, but it does show that retro psychedelia is no more Carole's forte as is
disco music; and two ballad collaborations with Rick Evers — ʽSun Birdʼ (is
this, too, inspired by Fleetwood Mac's ʽSongbirdʼ,
by any chance?) and ʽWings Of Loveʼ, featuring some of the most inane lyrics of
Carole's entire career ("You fill me with love I can give / You fill me
with life I can live / You fill me with song I can sing / And truth that makes
the kingdom ring" — did they make a journey through time to the 21st
century to have a computer write that for them?).
Ultimately, the only song here that rises half
an inch above mediocrity would be the album opener ʽMain Street Saturday
Nightʼ, a simple pop-rocker with the only example of good lead guitar work on
the album and a tiny bit of vocal grit that sounds authentic. Other than that,
just about everything is a heavy letdown, and it honestly seems that with Simple Things, Carole was on a positive
roll, but less than one year later, she was once again in full turbulence,
probably more busy with her (once again) deteriorating family life than with
making good music: unlike the aforementioned Fleetwood Mac, who could find
artistic inspiration in their troubles by pulling them out in public and
perversely feasting on them, Carole always seemed to value her social role of
Good Mood Muse, stubbornly stuffing her problems inside of her or only vaguely
hinting at them in the good-time melodies she wrote — and with Welcome Home, it feels quite strongly
that she is not being honest with us at all, producing insincere, underwritten
fodder with no direction whatsoever. Is it any wonder, then, that where Simple Things still went to No. 17 on
the charts, Welcome Home did not
even make it into the top hundred? No wonder at all. At least with such weak
records as Rhymes & Reasons and Thoroughbred, we could hardly doubt the
sincerity of the writer's motives: Welcome
Home is the first genuinely rotten artifact in the writer's history, reason
enough for a rather vicious thumbs down.
"about as compatible as Shostakovich and hip-hop"
ReplyDeleteNot sure, but considering Shostakovich's lifelong interest in popular music genres, he may have had fun with hip-hop had he lived that long... :)