There are times when we music fans want to hear something layered, complex and musically inventive – the sort of music that allows one to lie back with an open mind and marvel at the technical accomplishment of producing such an innovative opus. Then there are the other times. The times when wild horses could not drag us towards the nearest Can-playing stereo. The times when the mere thought of listening to Sigur Ros induces a panic-attack of biblical proportions. The times when exposure to some Japanese noise terrorism causes unremitting, pants-wetting terror.
I accept I might be alone on the symptoms of that last one.
For these times, the Good Lord saw fit to provide us with the simple pleasures. Not so much the foie gras of Godspeed as the buttered toast of The Beach Boys, the egg and chips of Big Star and the Desperate Dan bar of Teenage Fanclub. To these names, add The Raspberries.
Gusting out of renowned musical spawning ground, Mentor, Ohio, like a cool breeze, The Raspberries were the antithesis of their harder-rocking 70’s counterparts. Looking, on their album covers at least, like the sort of matching velvet-suit wearing adolescents that Donny Osmond used to wedgie in school, they nonetheless boasted pop-sensibilities you could serve in a cocktail glass. Both these records, released in the same year of 1972, serve as powerful testimony to the claim that the group really did scale as high a creative peak in their field as anyone else. Impossible to separate, the albums sprang forth in unison from the same winning template of a combination of glucose-injected pop balladry allied with muscular guitar riffs.
There really isn’t a duff track here at all. The two openers 'Go All The Way' and 'I Want To Be With You' are pugnacious rockers with a silk lining while the ballads, if at times overly syrupy, are rich enough in their hooks that it’s at worst an eminently forgivable minor offence. 'Reach For The Light' builds to an archangel-worthy climax, and contains possibly the group’s finest moment when Carmen utters the line “Well I wish I could forget/how good you look tonight.” There’s even space for the token ridiculous moment at the opening of 'Driving Around' which is Beach Boys thievery at its best, even down to a bass backing vocal exclaiming 'Woah Baby.'
There’s a pretentiousness in the heart of most music fans that shies away from what can only be described as good, clean fun. These records should be held as a litmus test for those who feel their emotional core has become immune to the sort of youthful exuberance that characterised the early stage of relationship with albums. If you can’t love these records, a little bit of you has died.
