HOPE

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.