KLAATU

The debut at least had a couple of tracks I was into and I remember seeing that album cover at parties back in the day. "Hope" is the followup held in much higher esteem by Prog fans and maybe more consistent but both records are 3 star affairs in my music world. The opener and closer of this album are very much in THE BEATLES realm while the longest track "Long Live Politzania" reminds me of a movie soundtrack. The proggiest for me is "So Said The Lighthouse Keeper" with it's repeated themes. "The Loneliest Of Creatures" is a tough one for me to listen to and lets leave it at that. "Madman" has some aggressive guitar but given the title I shouldn't be surprised.

An okay album but I don't get what all the fuss is about.

While I won't say the sound of the album is one on one with The Beatles, I can definitely see the parallels through the mixture of sunshine pop, psych pop, and a relative more art rock nature the album composes that has similar veins to that of Beatles albums from Revolver through Let It Be. I think, if we take Beatles out of the equation, this truly is one of those albums that alone just bleeds happiness and sunshine though any speaker. Like many sunshine pop groups of The Beach Boys, Sagittarius, and later on in the 21st century with the prog rock band of Moon Safari, Klaatu's 3:47 EST is this overwhelmingly charming and happy experience that each song masters in their own unique and fun way, from the overjoyous Calling Occupants, to the fun grooves and tribulations of Doctor Marvello. I think this album not only does a wonderful job and showcases the band's sunny styles, but only proves that even without the Beatles comparisons they are quite the band to have around for some very nice and sunny pop music.

I think the only true issue I have with this album is that I feel like the first side is filled with amazing, grade A songs like Calling Occupants and Anus of Uranus, while the second side probably only has one really stand out track of Doctor Marvello, but even then you can tell that song is basically a B side at the end of the day. I feel like this album would benefit heavily if these songs on the second side of the record had the same amount of craft and devotion as the first side's songs. Not saying these are bad tracks, I just do not get the same drive as I do with the first side's songs.

An album with quite the story, and one I think should definitely be looked into. While I do not think it is a full blown masterpiece, I can tell you this is an album worth having in your collection just for the story of it alone. Even then, I still think it is a good album musically that adding it to your collection won't hurt one bit. We need a little more sunshine in our days, and I think this album is a serviceable product of that need.

The album starts with We're Off You Know. Rather jazzy and pop sounding with a little hint of psychedelism. I say this is a good starter for this album. It adds a little quirky aspect to their sound that I really like. Feels like something from the mid 60s. Super fun start.

Next is Madman, which is more like a 180 from the first track. Pretty spooky, electronic, and new wave like. The vocals remind me of Peter Gabriel, and more electronic and experimental type sound gives it a haunting sound. Their sound is clearly wide ranging and seemingly ahead of its time.

Next up is Around The Universe in Eighty Days. I really love this track. Super symphonic and joyous. Reminds me a lot of Genesis or even Neo Prog bands like IQ or Anubis. I also love how it goes into a different direction than the last two tracks, being less poppy and goes for a more stylized sound, which I appreciate a lot. I appreciate my bands trying new things and using their music to experiment. This is the first real track I adore, and honestly right now, I am fairly hooked.

The next track is even better, being Long Live Politzania. The first half of the song is an orchestrated arrangement with that kinda creepy new wave sound from the second track while the second half has a more poppy sound while still keeping the orchestral arrangements going. With being 9 minutes, it's super proggy and amazing. I could not get enough of it, especially with the smaller bits and pieces of monologues and instrumentation. It goes a long way and makes every second feel worthwhile, and I just love it for that.

Next track is The Loneliest of Creatures. A lot more folk like, and gives me a ton of vibes from A Trick Of The Tail by Genesis. In fact, this whole album feels like some kind of Genesis tribute of sorts, with the arrangements feeling straight from their albums, but of course with a different, more pop-like style. Cannot deny, this song is super fun, and a treat to go through.

Next up is Prelude, a orchestral + rock arrangement with zero vocals. It is rather fun to go through. It goes super solid from minute to minute, and utilizes the sound found from the previous tracks to really elevate itself to a new core. I also love the ending of the song, how it just goes super hard and rocking about. I have been saying this a lot, but this is a fun song from a very fun album. You can clearly feel their enjoyment when making these songs.

Next up is So Said The Lighthouse Keeper. My first thought was some kinda tribute to Van Der Graaf Generator, specifically the song A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers, but now it's very much its own thing. It's a sorta mix between the first two tracks, being pop-like but also very creepy and sinister sounding, plus that guitar. I swear the guitar playing is almost heavy metal-like. It is super cool and I just love it to death.

Lastly is Hope, which I gotta say might be the weakest track here. While it is beautiful and it builds to a good end payoff, it's kinda forgettable to me, and pales in comparison with every other track on this album. It's not bad, but I cannot say I ever really enjoyed it as much as I did with every other song here. Still good, just not as good as I want it to be.

So I really like this album. Again, super fun and super enjoyable. It is a well worthwhile album that wastes no time being an enjoyable romp through great pop songs with a proggy and symphonic flair. Definitely one I'd check out if I were you and never heard of this album.

"Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft" is such a great song with the subject matter, reserved vocals and horns early on as the mellotron rolls in. Love this song! "We are your friends" is a line that seems lame to me though. Processed vocals around 3 minutes followed by piano as it picks up. I like the vocal arrangements here. A calm after a dramatic section before 4 1/2 minutes. "California Jam" is BEACH BOYS-like just not nearly as good in my opinion. Harmonies galore. It's okay. "Anus Of Uranus" has silly lyrics and lots of abrasive guitar, it rocks pretty good. "Sub Rosa Subway" was the other song on the radio here back then and it's a feel good THE BEATLES-like tune with lots of horns and harmonies.

"True Life Hero"is an uptempo rocker, it's okay. "Doctor Marvello" is the other song besides the opener to have mellotron on it. It does have an interesting sound to it with the vocals, beat and mellotron. "Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby" reminds me of the lame and silly songs that ELP liked to throw on there albums. Not a fan at all. "Little Neutrino" is the longest tune at 8 1/2 minutes and it's different from anything else on here. An eerie start as processed vocals arrive after 1 1/2 minutes with strings, a beat and more. The processed vocals will continue throughout this experimental track.

This record reminds me of some of the best SAGA albums I have in that there are a few really good songs and a bunch of average or below tunes. Well worth the 3 stars of course and I will always enjoy "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft".

"Hope" is the simple title of this musical number and it is either two stories that are part of the same tale or two separate stories told over the course of eight tracks. Two of the first three songs, "We're off You Know" and "Around the Universe in Eighty Days" are about space travel, a theme already covered on their debut album. The track in between these two, "Madness" could be related either to these two or the story that comes after.

The main story here is the tale of an ancient advanced civilization called Politzania which seems to have existed on another world from ours. They were a proud people who thought themselves the highest of all civilizations but fell in some disastrous war with another race, or so I gather. The track "Long Live Politzania" is told mostly by a stuttering archaeologist who speaks like a dithering British professor without the accent. This can bit a bit detracting from the music at times, especially the part about reclaiming the brains of non-believers in Politzania's superiority, but the music is very dramatic with orchestra and band. Different voices and different styles of music make this seem like a musical soundtrack. "The Loneliest of Creatures", "Prelude", "So Said the Lighthouse Keeper", and "Hope" all help tell the story through lyric and music, and the whole package is quite a decent production.

The one track that will stand out is "Madness" which has what I've decided is "Flying V rock". This is because each time the music gets heavy and the electric guitar comes rocking in, I imagine that the guitar is a Flying V. I can't help but imagine that this kind of music must be played on a Flying V. It's my favourite song on the album, too!

A little bit cute in a way, this is an impressive performance nonetheless. There are some who call this one of the little known must have albums. Maybe picture "The Neverending Story" or "Dark Crystal" or something like that with Muppets but about a lost civilization on another planet. Some great music here and imagination, too.

Now we reach 2015 in my story and I was making a playlist of seventies Canadian bands, and Klaatu popped up from my memory. I checked them out on Wikipedia and was surprised to see them classified as pop prog. Prog? It's been my observation that Canada mostly missed two important periods in the evolution of rock music: the early first generation of heavy metal between 1968 and 1973 (not many bands that I know of) and the seventies prog movement (Harmonium, Rush and... Saga... and... ?). So this suddenly became a band I needed to hear. I ordered the anus album, "3:47 E.S.T.".

Now there's a funny story about this album and Klaatu. When the first couple of singles were released, there was an American DJ who heard the song "Subrosa Subway" and thought it sounded remarkably like the Beatles. He looked at the album and found that there were no names given and no photos of the band members. It was just Klaatu. "Could this possibly be," he surmised, "a Beatles album? That the Beatles have reformed and released an album under an alias?" He boldly announced his supposition to the public and enticed his listeners with supposed hints that his theory was true. The American label found that this was a great publicity stunt and would be good for boosting album sales and went along with the whole thing. The band, however, simply denied the story when asked. In the U.K., a music reporter pulled the plug on the story, saying that there was an American DJ foolish enough to not be able to distinguish the Beatles from this band. Nevertheless, Klaatu rarely performed live and recorded their second album and released it without any personnel mentioned by name, keeping an air of mystery about them.

The album is quite work of progressive rock with strong pop melodies. It does indeed resemble the Beatles often, especially the songs with John Woloschuk on lead vocals. Though the music is never really complex, there's a strong formula of simple and catchy melodies and a clever use of rock and symphonic instruments to create music that goes beyond the standard pop song. Dee Long's "Anus of Uranus" (about a space man who picks up the song's narrator and takes him around the solar system) and "True Life Hero" are more standard rock songs but with interesting lyrics. Other musical themes include the experiment that was done to contact alien spacecraft through the transmission of a welcoming thought by thousands of people at once. You can read about the song "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" on Wikipedia and find the link to the real life story. This song was covered with great success by the Carpenters a year later. There's also the story of New York's first subway in "Subrosa Subway", one of my two favourite tracks on the album. I also really like "California Jam" which shifts through various themes like a musical number.

The last three tracks have as yet failed to really captivate me. "Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby" is a humorous song about a ship's captain who disappears at sea but seems to have returned, stating "I'm the only one who ever went to Hell and came back alive". It's done in a funny, Pirates of Penzance kind of way and has a female back up vocal group that make the musical effect even better. "Neutrino" is musically simple but beautiful, but also a bit weird with distorted vocal effects meant to emulate an imaginary neutrino voice. There's a story about the band experimenting with sound effects in the studio in Toronto when Mick Jagger walked in wondering what the heck they were doing in there. "Dr. Marvello" is also a bit show tunesy. Some songs remind me a little of It Bites' album "Once Around the World" and the song "Hunting the Whale".

Klaatu concocted some really wonderful music on this album. Some might not like it because it's not complex enough, too much like the Beatles, or too sweet in pop melodies. But I have been enjoying the first five tracks immensely over the last two months and keep coming back to them again and again.

While this album may have been released in 1976, almost everything about it brings late-sixties' proto progressive rock acts like The Beatles, Procol Harum, and The Moody Blues to mind. In addition to the organic production, the tracks here have a psychedelic and mildly progressive flair that sounds rather different from what other bands were doing by this point in time. Though 3:47 EST has a few hard-rocking tunes like "True Life Hero", Klaatu shines brightest in the more progressive songs like "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (a superb sci-fi epic that was clearly influenced by The Moody Blues) and the Beatlesque "Sub-Rosa Subway". Speaking of The Beatles, "Doctor Marvello" sounds almost eerily like something from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - the use of backward tape loops, trumpet lines, vocal harmonies, harpsichords, and Indian instruments make this track sound like pure Beatles worship.

Being a fan of the Fab Four, I don't have much of an issue with Klaatu's strong Beatles influence throughout 3:47 EST, but I feel like the listen is rather inconsistent as a whole. While the band does try some unique things here, especially in "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft", it seems like they borrow ideas from The Beatles as a bit of a crutch. The record's abrupt changes from moody space rock to rather generic hard rock and psychedelic pop, and even strange theatrical stuff on "Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III" makes for a somewhat disjointed listen, but Klaatu thankfully have penned solid enough material to make this recommendable to fans of progressive pop music. It's definitely an interesting curio from a band with a lot of promise, and I'll be interested to hear to the rest of Klaatu's discography in the near future.

The fact that no musicians were credited in the original vinyl release made people believe that Klaatu were The Beatles under a fake name, which time prooved to be totally untrue.Except for the opening and closing tracks the whole debut of Klaatu is filled with easy-listening Pop/Art Rock tunes with an intense Beatles-que vibe at moments, especially in the Psych/Pop approach of ''Sub-Rosa Subway'', which led to the aforementioned misunderstanding.From simple rockers to Orchestral Pop flavors and from Art Pop ballads to catchy tunes, most of the tracks are following the easy, commercial path of Rock music with an intense psychedelic nature of the 60's.Well-crafted but too simplistic musicianship with no particular surprises.The closing and opening cuts though are more demanding but not equally good.''Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft'' is a very nice piece of Orchestral Proto-Prog with obvious THE MOODY BLUES and PROCOL HARUM overtones, delivering a soft but lovely atmosphere and offering some good keyboard/Mellotron work by Woloschuck and Long.''Little Neutrino'' is decent but way too long for its own good.It reminds me of the early ANTHONY PHILLIPS albums.Distorted vocals supported by a dramatic keyboard tune and passionate acoustic guitars lead the track from its opening to its closing second with no particular changes, which unfortunately transforms it from nice to decent.

A good debut for anyone wanting to taste some easy-going Psych/Pop/Rock music with a late- 60's feeling, ranging from THE BEATLES' to PROCOL HARUM's works, but rather simplistic and flat for the average proghead...2.5 stars.