Sonic Youth Superstar If I Were a Carpenter album

More recently, Van Morrison had a hand in choosing the artists and interpretations of the newly released “No More Prima Donnas - A Tribute to Van Morrison” (A & M).

Gene Stanley organized the tribute to his band Kiss this summer. Increasingly, artists are arranging their own tributes as if they were planning their own memorial services. “If I Were a Carpenter” succeeds not just on the quality of the songs but also in the freedom used to interpret them. This may be a lesson of tribute albums overall. Under his eyes, Sweet plays the pop tune pretty straight - and dully. Just about the only cut that doesn’t work is Matthew Sweet’s version of “Let Me Be the One,” possibly because Richard Carpenter is on hand playing keyboards and singing background. Stranger, perhaps, is the notion that Berend Dubbe of the band Bettie Seveert (which covers “It’s Going To Take Some Time”) has fashioned a shrine to Karen Carpenter in his bedroom. Likewise, ’70s pop addicts Redd Cross do the Carpenters right by throwing some velocity into “Yesterday Once More.”Ī surprise is that the usually uncompromising screamers, Babes in Toyland, do their best to croon “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.” Like many of the bands involved, the Minneapolis band was struck at an early age, according to press materials that assert: “By the age of 9, Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland could sing every Carpenters lyric on the `Close to You’ LP and believed the duo lived in the family record player.” Shonen Knife, the female Japanese trio that began its career bungling American punk songs in an entirely gleeful manner, brings the right amount of sunshine (and a brand new riff) to “Top of the World.” But when this tribute album to the Carpenters rocks, it’s entirely in character. ”Īn easy route, clearly, would have been to thrash out punk versions of the middle-of-the road classics. He’s also true to Karen Carpenter’s underlying sadness in her voice, on now-ironic lines like “so much of life ahead. Grant Lee Buffalo’s version of “We’ve Only Just Begun,” a tune that has launched countless marriages, goes out of its way to include the kind of layered harmonies of the first. Some artists are truer to the original productions. The band’s live performance of the song last month at Woodstock ’94 was thinner and more vapid than the original.) (This might be a production trick, however. “Sometimes I’d like to quit,” drawls Cracker’s David Lowery in a slowed-down version of “Rainy Days and Mondays” that cuts to the despair of the original.Įven the Cranberries’ “Close to You” hints at a kind of paranoia, so that the opening inquiry, “Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?” almost seems to be referring to vultures. The 14- track album begins with the dour Mark Eitzel of the American Music Club croaking a tune as if it were a suicide note: “I’ll say goodbye to love/ No one ever cared if I should live or die.” Her best-known songs, as handled on the tribute album by singers with a more raw style, are freer to loose the demons within.

The unrequited-love theme, along with the dark despair of other songs, was often overlooked beneath the warmth and technical grace of Carpenter’s unmistakable voice. Unrequited love was an ongoing theme of the Carpenters’ music, just as it was, apparently, in the life of Karen Carpenter, whose one mar- riage ended quickly and badly. The love of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore for the Carpenters’ songwriting was genuine, and Sonic Youth’s contribution to “If I Were a Carpenter” is one of the best - a slowed down, almost eerie version of “Superstar,” already a strange song of obsession just short of stalking. She’s been the subject of an underground movie, and Sonic Youth released “Tunic (Song for Karen)” as part of its 1990 album “Goo.” This is not the first time Karen Carpenter has been lionized in the underground.

Sonic Youth Superstar If I Were a Carpenter album