Search - Caravelles :: You Don't Have to Be a Baby

From The Office To The Pop Charts

Kert Conrad | DENVER, CO United States | 07/22/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"According to the liner notes on this import, The Caravelles were a couple of young British office workers who were signed to a recording contract and had a fairly big hit with YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A BABY TO CRY in 1963. Their sound has been described as "whispered harmonies", and listening to the 25 songs on this disc, the closest way to sum up their style would be to say that it feels as if you're listening to an early demo tape of The Chordettes. Their harmonies are in fact quite nice, but the arrangements are very pedestrian and the instrumental accompaniment is very sparse, to say the least.

Most of the songs in this collection are simple pop tunes of the type you'd expect to hear from teen singers in the early sixties. The girls also cover a number of songs made popular by other artists ranging from Rosemary Clooney to the Everly Brothers. Unfortunately, it's on these tracks that their limited singing abilities come up shortest, and the marginal sound quality doesn't help matters any. I'm not enough of an audio expert to tell if the fault lies in the way the songs were originally recorded or in the mastering of the material for compact disc, but the sound has a muddy quality with the instruments often only barely discernable.

High fidelity or not, it's still pretty neat that SOMEBODY has taken the time to release a collection by The Caravelles. The girls may be just a footnote in pop music history, but they put together some nice melodies and it's cool that that their work has been preserved, if rather shabbily, on this CD.

For the record, The Caravelles took their name from a stylish French jet airliner, which is pictured on the back cover of this collection.

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