The consensus amongst most Caravan listeners seems to be that somewhere along the way they drifted a bit too far into commercialised poppy soft-rock realms, lost their distinctive personality, and churned out some really bad albums. The main point of disagreement seems to be precisely where the decline began.
Personally, I take a hardline approach: Cunning Stunts, the album which changed up Caravan's sound and swapped out the Canterbury style of For Girls Who Grow Plump In the Night in favour of cheesy strings, anonymous and generic jazz-rock blended with unconvincing stabs at hard rock, and The Dabsong Conshirtoe, Caravan's least convincing epic.
Over time this has grown on me a little, and I have to admit that some parts of it are pretty darn catchy - Stuck In a Hole, in particular, has an echo of the whimsy which ran through Caravan's work from their debut to Plump In the Night, and some of the band's attempts at funk aren't too terrible. Judged on its own merits, I'd say that this album's actually pretty good... the problem is, whilst it's a good album in its own right, it's by no means a good Caravan album - not in terms of delivering the Caravan sound, and not in terms of hitting the high standards we'd come to expect of the band.
I've come to the conclusion that the basic problem that Cunning Stunts had isn't necessarily that it's too pop - but it is too much of the wrong kind of pop, the sort that ages badly and seems tasteless and trite in retrospect. There was daring, interesting, whimsical, and otherwise Caravan-esque stuff happening in some corners of 1970s pop - but that's not the sort of pop they go for here. A little too often, the album becomes redolent of ugly paisley-patterned wallpaper and other aspects of the 1970s we all prefer to overlook.
Whilst it probably made sense to Caravan to pivot away from the hippy underground music of their origins to instead focus on something more suited to the way the commercial winds were blowing, this isn't that - and as the increasingly poor reception of Caravan's late-1970s/early 1980s attempts to go all-out pop shows, this would be a recurring problem. Compare to their debut album - redolent of the psychedelic pop of the time, and all the richer for it.
It's one thing to give up on your classic sound and sell out - but if you're going to do so, you should at least bring something to the table that people want to buy. Cunning Stunts is worth a listen less for its attempts at 1970s pop and more for the last flashes of old Caravan it offers; Stuck In a Hole, for instance, is notable less for sounding like something from the 1970s and more for the way it sounds like a lost song from the 1960s - you could see it being a forgotten psych-tinged pop number very easily.
Whilst some argue that Blind Dog At St. Dunstan's has its merits, I'd say that Cunning Stunts is probably the last Caravan album you really need to listen to from their classic run; if you really, truly like the poppier aspects of it, maybe Blind Dog's also worth a try, but even fans of that musical style seem to balk at later albums from the 1970s and 1980s.
It's notable that when Caravan put out their ill-advised albums of rerecorded songs in the late 1990s, All Over You and All Over You Too (never a good sign when a band resorts to such gambits!), they didn't get around to including anything from Cunning Stunts until All Over You Too, and then they only touched Stuck In a Hole. If even Pye Hastings and company themselves don't really see the album as being worth revisiting to the same extent as the albums from If I Could Do It All Over Again... to Plump In the Night, why should you?
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by bRETT
Bookmarks