Carpenters - Offering

I've been avoiding Offering, the debut Carpenters album for quite a while. Now that i've heard it though, it's weird. As far as my unwritten standard evaluation of albums goes, it's actually a pretty good album, but Richard is weird. I wouldn't call it a speech impediment, but something about the way he forms words is a sound i've never heard before, and it sounds like he's double miced, or using a bizarre chorus effect or something. And his arrangements are strange too. The songs he wrote are fine, but the cover songs are wacky. Every track is somehow different, but they all elicit the same "why are you doing that?"

I gather most people had a similar reaction, because it was a flop until after their second album when they reissued it as "Ticket to Ride," with different cover art.

Now, i personally don't buy into the fallacy that music speaks about the psychological state of it's composer/performer. Yes, they both had serious mental health issues, but that's not why this album sounds so strange. It sounds strange because you can hear the difference between the tracks that were "chaparoned" and the stuff they did because it was fun and probably made them giggle; the back and forth is what's confusing to me. Management obviously won out, because you've heard the famous Carpenters, but i can't help imagining how much more awesome it would have been (and probably healthier for them), if they'd just let these naive siblings play with all of the studio equipment instead of running them ragged as pop stars.

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