A middling Carole King album with a few moments of inspiration

Carole King’s second album for Capitol was originally released in 1978, and is now being reissued on her own Rockingale imprint with its original track list and an eight-page booklet that includes liner notes, lyrics, photos and album art. The songwriting continued her work with then-third-husband Rick Evers, who co-wrote two of the titles, and also continued King’s weakening commercial success. The album scratched just below the Hot 100, and a lone single (“Morning Sun”) just missed the A/C Top 40. As on her Capitol debut, Simple Things, King’s songs are incredibly optimistic, perhaps sparked by the communal living she and Evers had set up. Evers died, reportedly of a heroin overdose, a few months after the album was recorded, so the album’s sunny vibe was thrown into shadow by the songwriter’s loss.

King reaches back to the Brill Building for the cruisin’ themed “Main Street Saturday Night,” but it doesn’t crackle with the authenticity of her earlier work, and Evers’ new-agey lyrics for “Sun Bird” must have seemed deep at the time, but don’t hold a candle to the expressiveness of even King’s lesser works. Even stranger is the catchy “Venusian Diamond,” which combines late-60s Beatleisms with the too-clean studio sounds that marked many productions of the era. Even that’s explainable compared to the bandwagon “Disco Tech,” though even here you get the sense that King has a deeper sense of music’s primordial hold on the soul than many of the hacks writing disco at the time.

A more conventional pop expression of her love is heard in “Ride the Music,” and the following “Everybody’s Got the Spirit” continues the community theme which closed her previous album in “One.” The album’s most emotionally satisfying lyric is in its closing title song, offering the warmth of the California canyon music she wrote nearly a decade earlier. It too has its hippie moments, but closes a pleasant, but ultimately pedestrian Carole King album on a strong and memorable note. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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