Carpenters: Close To You

CARPENTERS: CLOSE TO YOU (1970)

1) We've Only Just Begun; 2) Love Is Surrender; 3) Maybe It's You; 4) Reason To Believe; 5) Help!; 6) (They Long To Be) Close To You; 7) Baby It's You; 8) I'll Never Fall In Love Again; 9) Crescent Noon; 10) Mr. Guder; 11) I Kept On Loving You; 12) Another Song.

It should hardly come off as a big surprise that the first song to break Carpenters big was a Burt Bacharach number. What does come off as a surprise is that the song in question, first recorded by Richard Chamberlain in 1963 and then re-done by Dionne Warwick and Burt himself, actually sounds good in this arrangement — Richard (Carpenter) gave it more of a beat, bringing it closer to a lively music hall number, and Karen sang it like only Karen could: with a pinch of dark de­spair, implying that being "close to you" is more of an unattainable dream than a reality. I could very well live without the last minute and a half of dreamy la-las and wah-wahs that try to dis­solve memories of Karen's dark-golden voice in regular syrup, but the first three minutes prove decisively that even a Burt Bacharach song can be turned to first-rate pop art if it is done properly. (Ironically, the second Bacharach song on here, ʽBaby It's Youʼ, is done in a slower, soapier, and far more generically melodramatic manner — definitely not the right way to cook this goose, so do right unto yourself and check the Beatles' version instead).

The second big hit that confirmed and solidified their pop star status was ʽWe've Only Just Begunʼ, a song that had just skyrocketed the career of... Crocker National Bank! (having been used, alongside wedding imagery, in a TV commercial) — and yet again, Karen was able to make something bigger out of this than just a sappy wedding ditty. The key to this version is that, by her very nature, she was almost incapable of sounding perfectly happy: there are no false sugary notes in this voice as she sings about "white lace and promises" — instead, there is a note of pensive introspection, an implicit understanding that some out of the "so many roads to choose" may not necessarily be the right ones. Even the flute riff somehow manages to combine tender­ness with a warning intonation, and this mix of happiness and worry is precisely what separates the Carpenters' version from just about any other cover of this song that you might encounter. In short, this performance has psychological depth, even if none of this was an intentional decision on the part of either the brother or the sister. (For that matter, just how many people, I wonder, upon hearing the song and seeing the album sleeve back in 1970 thought of Richard and Karen Carpenter as husband and wife rather than siblings?).

In between these two classics (yes they are), Richard and Karen insert all sorts of randomized material that suffers either from being too lightweight and flimsy (Offering-style), or too boring, or both. The idea to repeat the formula of ʽTicket To Rideʼ with another Beatles song falls flat: not only is their slowing down of ʽHelp!ʼ sort of plagiarizing Deep Purple, but, unlike ʽTicket To Rideʼ, ʽHelp!ʼ was actually a showcase for desperation from the very beginning, and there are no new dimensions to be opened here (plus, Karen is mixed way too low for her magic to work pro­perly this time). Pop fluff like ʽLove Is Surrenderʼ and ʽI'll Never Fall In Love Againʼ (Bacharach again!) passes by quickly and inconspicuously, and Richard-led pop fluff like ʽI Kept On Loving Youʼ passes by slowly and painfully. Tim Hardin's oft-covered ʽReason To Believeʼ is quite nice and gives a good hint at how Carpenters could have sounded with a country-western career (not too country-westernish, I'd say), but the definitive version of the song still belongs to Rod Stewart: this one is just way too fragile.

Curiously, the most interesting two songs past the big hits actually belong to Richard, although ʽCrescent Noonʼ would not have been anything other than a midnight piano ballad without Karen: this is her technically strongest and, perhaps, most nuanced performance on the entire album, not to mention the most depressing — it would have been a stroke of genius to place it at the very end, so that the record could go from "we've only just begun to live..." to "all our green Septem­bers burn away, slowly we'll fade into a sea of midnight blue", but I imagine that such grim con­ceptuality would have been banned by the industry people; after all, this is family entertainment here, not an airbrushed take on Jim Morrison. So the song is buried deep in the middle of Side B, immediately followed with ʽMr. Guderʼ, an amusing personal attack on a Disneyland boss who had the nerve to fire Richard once — and, by extension, a general attack on all kinds of corpo­rate behavior, ever so ironic because it does not seem to me that Richard was particularly averse to shining shoes, neat haircuts, coats and ties, either. Still, it is always fun to hear a soft-pop artist go soft-poppily vicious on The System, more so than just have another love ballad from them.

To conclude: Close To You is where the duo truly arrives, especially considering that Karen is handling most of the lead vocals now, and while they would have slightly more consistent albums in the future, on the whole, this is really as good as it gets — for all their career, they had exactly one great asset at their disposition (some people also like to gush about Richard's skill in arrange­ments, but complex and perfectly organized fluff is still fluff), and they did not always use it with wisdom. When they did, though, I can pardon them everything else for it.