Comments
If you're a 70's studio magic fetishist then this is an essential record to own. It ranks up there with the work of Godley & Creme, and the zanier aspects of Todd Rundgren's cut and paste psychedelia. Parts of this album remind me a bit of Blue Oyster Cult in their sci-fi, lite-metal moments. Whether the songs are actually good is a whole other story. I don't really know. Maybe they're not actually such well crafted songs. But the arrangement ideas and execution of the material is really fascinating. Sonically, Hope sounds breathtakingly full and dynamic.
Klaatu fits neatly in the lineage of rock stemming from the collage-composition school of Good Vibrations. This is my favorite school so I am biased towards this sort of thing.
Klaatu's Hope illustrates perfectly why people at the time speculated that they might be a sneakily reunited Beatles - between the vocal harmonies and the whimsical compositional style they sound uncannily like late-era Beatles with mildly updated instrumentation and production values. Few bands can pull off the Beatles' particular style of whimsy without sounding like irritatingly twee tryhards - hell, even the Beatles themselves couldn't pull it off 100% of the time - but here Klaatu nail it. Even when the album becomes saccharine and annoying, it does so at exactly the points the Fab Four themselves would have become saccharine and annoying. With a Phil Spector-like wall of sound approach applied to the production with skill and finesse, the better portions of the album put me in mind of a version of Let It Be that actually works, and for that achievement at least they deserve recognition.
