If I Were a Carpenter

Go ahead and call them a guilty pleasure, taunts the Keane-painting kitsch of the album art, but you know you’ll get choked up a couple times listening to this. Dropped into the midst of alterna-nation’s mid ‘90s struggle session with irony and taste, If I Were a Carpenter follows in the iconoclastic footsteps of that other great arthouse tweak of the mythos behind the lives of Karen and Richard, Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, by finding the unease and ennui beneath the surface of one of the 1970s’ most archetypal easy-listening acts. Sonic Youth’s tension-and-release version of the Leon Russell-penned “Superstar” has grown into this comp’s main attraction over the years, and it still holds fast to the original’s melancholic grace even when the discord plays at the margins and the distortion boils over on the chorus. (It also sounds uncannily like Thurston Moore more-or-less channelling Ira Kaplan.) Mark Eitzel’s voice fights through a dazed wistfulness on American Music Club’s version of “Goodbye to Love” and makes it hit as a sincere alt-country-tinged reckoning with regret. And Babes in Toyland taking on the Klaatu-penned, Carpenters-popularized space-alien entreaty “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” is a cover of a cover and punchline without a joke; Kat Bjelland committing to the bit because it’s more fun to take a song like this into fuzzed-out, upbeat hard rock-via-power pop than it is to roll one’s eyes at it. But often enough what remnant irony might’ve gone into a project like this recedes into a sort of shared understanding: Shonen Knife’s pop-punk “Top of the World” amplifies the song’s joy instead of undercutting it, Sheryl Crow’s “Solitaire” is country-folk at its sincerest and most unguarded, and Redd Kross’s history of finding the nostalgic childhood roots of pop enthusiasm in things their punk peers thought were uncool pays off wonderfully in “Yesterday Once More.” Grant Lee Buffalo’s comp-closing “We’ve Only Just Begun” is the best of both worlds — eerily, psychedelically dissonant at the outset, but coalescing into something as heartfelt as it is enigmatic.