Artist: Carpenters
Title: Yesterday Once More
Format: Double LP
Label: A&M
Catalogue Number: Sing 1
Year of Release: 1984
A1 Yesterday Once More (3:50)
A2 Hurting Each Other (2:46)
A3 Please Mr Postman (2:48)
A4 I Need To Be In Love (3:29)
A5 Make Believe It's Your First Time (4:07)
A6 Sing (3:20)
A7 Only Yesterday (4:10)
B1 (Want You) Back In My Life Again (3:39)
B2 Ticket To Ride (4:10)
B3 Sweet, Sweet Smile (3:00)
B4 I Won't Last A Day Without You (3:47)
B5 Now (3:46)
B6 For All We Know (2:34)
B7 Touch Me When Were Dancing (3:19)
C1 Top Of The World (2:59)
C2 Calling Occupants Of Interplanertary Craft (The Recognised Anthem Of World Contact Day) (7:37)
C3 Solitaire (5:24)
C4 Don't Cry For Me Argentina (8:02)
C5 We've Only Just Begun (3:06)
C6 Those Good Old Days (4:52)
D1 There's A Kind Of Hush (2:55)
D2 Jambalaya (4:22)
D3 (They Long To Be) Close To You (4:21)
D4 Superstar (4:22)
D5 Rainy Days And Mondays (3:21)
D6 Goodbye To Love (4:30)
Trite, twee, over-produced, joyless, bland, characterless pap. All of it. Music made with no innovative spirit, or anything more than perfunctory talent. Boring, annoying, cloyingly over-orchestrated; greetings-card sentiments set to lift music.
Not even retro-chic, or so bad it's good. Just bad. Arrangements that aren't interesting, and in some cases (their breakthrough Beatles cover Ticket to Ride; the sax solo in Please Mr Postman; the howls [that I felt some sympathy with] in Hank "spinning in his grave" Williams' Jambalaya) actually painful.
I bought this to sample the opening of Calling Occupants... for a radio show I was doing at the time, and now regret it. Possibly the worst record I own, which is saying something.
UPDATED 06/03/09: I knew there was something else I meant to add. I am aware that the Carpenters are very popular in certain quarters, and I remember this brief interview with savant Daniel Tammet in The Observer. Like a lot of incredibly clever people, he can be breathtakingly stupid, although in the first instance this may be bad editing. On the Carpenters, he says
Since a teenager I have made a point of tracking down and collecting every single song and out-take of them the Carpenters ever recorded. An amazing voice, and very tragic in a way.
In a way? I don't think you could tell someone the story of Karen Carpenter, ask them if it was tragic, and expect the response, "Well... in a way". Perhaps this means something else in Tammet's private language, which he has completely missed Wittgenstein's point on. If you start to tell me what your private words for things are, your language ceases to be Private. If you don't tell me what they are, your 'language' is not what we mean by Language. Talk of a private language is nonsensical.
