The Carpenters: Horizon : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Horizon, the Carpenters' most musically sophisticated album to date, smoothly adapts the spirit of mainstream Fifties pop to contemporary taste. While not an emotionally compelling singer, Karen Carpenter has developed into a fine vocal technician, whose mellow interpretations of the Eagles' "Desperado" and Neil Sedaka's "Solitaire" evidence professionalism on a par with such Fifties stars as Jo Stafford and Rosemary Clooney. Richard Carpenter has also grown into a highly skilled producer/arranger of easy-listening music. Against the carefully structured sound of the Carpenter formula, wherein Karen's solos burst in and out of diaphanous multiharmonies, Richard has imposed more elaborately orchestrated textures than before and wisely mixed them at a level that doesn't distract attention from Karen's intimately mixed singing.

For the Carpenters' many fans, Horizon offers their recent hits, "Only Yesterday" and "Please Mister Postman" (a diluted pastiche of the Marvelettes' 1961 hit that's nonetheless pleasant). I much prefer, however, the short, identical mood pieces, "Aurora" and "Eventide" that serve as the album's bookends, and most of all the Carpenters' lovely remake of the Andrews Sisters' 1949 hit, "I Can Dream Can't I." Beautifully orchestrated and coarranged by Billy May, one of the finest studio band leaders and arrangers of the Fifties and Sixties, "Dream" is such a gem of updated schmaltz it makes me wish that veteran masters of the studio like Gordon Jenkins, Ray Ellis, Nelson Riddle and Percy Faith would be encouraged to collaborate with other best-selling MOR acts of the Seventies.