Monday, December 21, 2015

Tom Hibbert Reviews Turtle Soup


And here's the first fruit from my book purchase of last week. Editor Tom Hibbert reviews the record featured below.

'One of the five best albums of the sixties in the estimation of this listener. Sensing that their moments of pop stardom were almost up, The Turtles entered the studio to record one last long player under the production auspices of Kink Ray Davies. How much control the old soak from Muswell Hill actually took over the record is uncertain, but its raw, low-key production exhibited the band's strength of performance as never before.



Less kooky and ebullient, more subdued than the Turtles' previous work, this was the first time they had used nothing but original material on album. And one can only wonder why they waited so long, piddling about with mediocre Bonner/Gordon and P.F.Sloan work and dodgy Nilsson numbers. These songs are magic bits of low key love/ cerebral celebration, from 'Love in the City' a beautiful ballad that builds to a binding hook, to 'Hot Little Hands', a manic squeaker that sounds like the Velvet Underground on something not very nice; from 'She Always Leaves me Laughing', a charge of feigned joy, to 'Somewhere Friday Night' which is a regular tear-jerker and no mistake. This is the stuff pop legends are supposed to be made of but due to circumstances not a million miles away from a near-zero sales situation, 'Turtle Soup' proved to be just a silent bye-bye. Artistically, however, a fitting end to the story of Californian pop.'



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