Consumer Guide Album

Anne Murray: Together [Capitol, 1975]
Tom Smucker, who should know, says the difference between the departed Brian Ahern and Tom Catalano, the producer Murray has inherited from Helen Reddy, is the difference between Revisionist Anti Schlock and Assumed Schlock. If Schlock is "materialism in a Dionysian mode"--innocent, like Las Vegas as Tom Wolfe explains it--then Assumed Schlock "takes consumption for granted as consumption turns into smug middle-class accumulation." In other words, all the Canadian songwriters in the world can't overcome the extravagant dullness of these arrangements: the rock 'n' roll cut could be Giselle MacKenzie in 1956. Say it ain't so, Annie. C