Afternoon Aural: The Carpenters
The Osmonds may have started their joint career first, but we always preferred The Carpenters: Karen and Richard. Does that make us lesbians?
Anyway, here are two of our favorite tracks: “Close To You” and “Top of the World”. Yeah, they’re cheesy, but so are brother/sister singing duos…
Not my favorite songs of Karen’s, but her voice is incomparable.
If that’s cheesy, I’ve been constipated since 1973!!!
Thanks for this guys, the Carpenters are so amazing! 100 x better than the Osmonds (I guess I’m a lesbian, too). Plus Karen was a really sweet drummer, which is also cool and her brother is/was a major closet-case (less cool, but as per Todd Haynes’ awesome Barbie-doll biopic/short about Karen).
Like Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Grace Slick, Judy Collins, maybe 2 or 3 others, Karen had one of the most distinctive and instantly-recognizable singing voices of her generation. However, and to lasting regret, she was also saddled with some of the most ersatz and drippy material of any major singer. That’s why, today, you can’t through a 16 track ‘greatest hits’ disc –let alone any boxed set- of Carpenters material without the sugar starting to hurt your teeth. Yet, in their original means of presentation, one at a time on the radio, interspersed with the more muscular rock & roll and soul hits of her peers, Karen’s records could be as irresistible as a rich vanilla ice cream cone on a sweltering summer day.