The Carpenters and Yesterday, Once More
The Carpenters and Yesterday, Once More
By Jason Tedjasukmana
JAKARTA (JP): Angst, edge, pain and sexuality. While these may not be the terms that come to mind when one thinks of the music of the Carpenters, a new tribute album makes plain the cauldron of emotions seething beneath the persona of Karen Carpenter.
Though her fatal battle with anorexia nervosa was well documented, the pain of her suffering was recorded much more subtly in her deceptively straightforward lyrics. Her puerile take on the world around her reveals a murky understanding of her own emotions and her music appears to have been her best means of making sense of a life of conflict and confusion.
Her vision comes across as simple and rosy, but Miss Carpenter had the capacity to candy-coat and hide feelings in a way that suburban parents are all too familiar with. She struggled to cope with the torpor of life on the road while simultaneously trying to come to grips with sensations of love, betrayal and impossible crushes. But her ability to do so was undermined by the pressures of super-stardom and post-teen celebrity.
Karen and Richard Carpenter brought a brand of sublimely saccharine soft rock to the eight-tracks of multi-component stereos everywhere in the 1970s. Tribute to their impact has now been laid down in the various artists compilation If I Were a Carpenter, released in late 1994.
The global reach of their multi-platinum success is reflected in the nationalities of the acts featured on the compilation, with groups from the States, Japan, Ireland, and the Netherlands. From power-pop to glam-rock, the disparate styles of each band stitch together an album that flows and allows all of the performers to pay homage while offering their own takes on the tragedy of Karen Carpenter.
Star Power
Two outstanding mentions go to Sonic Youth and a surprising entry by 4 Non Blondes, feverish in their determination to escape one-hit wonderdom.
4 Non Blondes open with a force and a hook much along the lines of Seattle's finest, the Screaming Trees -- to whom they pay homage almost as much as the Carpenters. Bless the Beasts and Children was not one of the major chart-toppers for the Carpenters but it does tap into Karen's child-like fascination with Sendakian monsters and things that go bump in the night.
The lyrics are Karen's but the grinding guitars are the Screaming Trees, relentless in their attack on the senses and blood-curdling when amplified to unsafe levels. Lastly, the nicotine-soaked lungs of the lead singer provide the proper grit to accompany the power chords that fuel this winning rendition.
Sonic Youth leave their mark with an elegiac orchestration of Superstar. Its strength lies in the band's balance of dark, mystic guitar riffs, strange peppy piano interludes and the hollow vocals of Thurston Moore, whispering the lyrics in what seems a long, heavy sigh.
These New York superstars probably come closest to Karen Carpenter on a psycho-sexual plane, dissecting her emotional distress most poignantly in lyrics like:
Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear, but you're not really there, its just the radio... What to say, to make you come again, come back to me again and play your sad guitar.
The band's other lead on vocals, bassist Kim Gordon, has once before alluded to the emaciated spirit of Karen Carpenter in Tunic, from Sonic Youth's Goo album, perhaps in a gesture equal parts empathy, fascination and memorial. Their entry on the album is natural and also one of the most original.
Redd Kross appear with a tongue-firmly-in-cheek interpretation of Yesterday Once More, injecting a healthy dose of camp to the album and to their video clip for the track as well. Redd Kross have never attempted to hide their affinity for the Platform Age and thus their Carpenters contribution comes across almost as a payment long overdue.
The group takes the infectious pop chorus (every sha-la-la-la, every shing-a-ling-a-ling) and showers it with full wah-wah guitar regalia. You may not make out to the tune in 1995 but listening to it you might almost think you were back in the flatbed of your El Camino.
Instant Gold
It seems appropriate that this year's press darlings the Cranberries cover Close to You, the first major single for the Carpenters that peaked at number one in 1970. Though it was originally penned by Burt Bacharach for muzak-muse Dionne Warwick, Close to You was the measure of confidence the brother/sister team needed to make it into the big leagues. The Cranberries now sprinkle it with a little Irish prairie dew, and take their version to an even easier easy-listening level.
Cracker turn in a lazy version of Rainy Days and Mondays, possibly more melancholy than the original, and Bettie Serveert from the Netherlands improvise brilliantly on For All We Know. The Dutch quartet fuse country-fied vocals and long bouts of guitar feedback to produce a loosely-woven take on this single that breezed past the million-copy mark in 1971.
Matthew Sweet's cover of Let Me Be The One is a near replica, altered only slightly in the vein of Seals and Croft, another 70s pillow-talk duo. While his voice sweetly suits the material, the interpretation is fairly lifeless next to its more colorful counterparts on the compilation.
Equally predictable is Babes in Toyland's metalized Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. Granted, the Babes did get one of the rough gems from the Carpenter songbook, but their version certainly does little to reinvigorate this anomalous single. Occupants again exhibits what Karen may have been seeing when she closed her eyes at night, trying to make a communication breakthrough with the fanciful creatures of outer space.
And perhaps they were the only beings able to hear Karen Carpenter's inaudible cries for help. After ten albums, heavy rotation and a string of platinum hits, the magic began to fade. Karen was wasting away at an alarming rate and her body finally gave in to an unsustainable battle with anorexia. She died in 1983 at the age of 32 in Downey, California, and though Richard vowed to carry on, the Carpenters were no more.