The Knack - Round Trip
#525
By Robbie Rist
October 1981
The Knack
Round Trip
Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5
Robbie’s Rating 4.5 out of 5
Genre: Horny teenage music for grownups.Star Trek movies.
The even numbered ones are awesome.
Knack records.
The odd ones are awesome.
Lamentably, The Knack’s third album turned out to be their last major label release.
Which I find something of a crime.
Yeah yeah yeah. Album one. Sharona. Made in 7 days. Eleventy billion copies sold. Whatever.
Round Trip is it’s own brilliant bird.
The band knew after the tepid response to their second record (the really good but not amazing .....But the Little Girls Understand) that the party was pretty much over.
Knacklash had begun.
The public was ready to tar and feather any skinny tie wearing Anglophile in Cuban heel boots.
There were better things to go back to now.
Like disco. (Fuck you Duran Duran with your cocaine grooves and pastel colors)
So, their options waning, The Knack did what any self respecting pop band on the way out would do.
They made an expensive, melodically mature, musically experimental pop record.
And far and away their best sounding.
Sure, there are ‘knack style’ power pop songs to be found here like Boys Go Crazy.
But there is also a moody country number (the confounding ‘single’, Pay The Devil)
And a psych song with a bridge sung in Hebrew (We are Waiting).
Soul Kissing is in the Bo Diddley-sequel style of She’s so selfish but its more confident a groove. And its a deep one. Bruce Gary is a sadly missed energy in the musical landscape. A ‘song player’ who understands the value of occasionally ‘tastefully over playing’. We still have Clem. We still have Pete Thomas. Not many others.
The words are a bit more introspective this time out.
Radiating Love asks to join the tribe of positivity and light (saccharine and idealistic? Maybe. But I will take that a billion times over the over earnest, navel gazing nihilism of the 90s).
The most ‘Knack’ song on it has go to be Just Wait and See. It’s the Byrds, The Beatles and The Who all in the proper amounts with a sheen of teen innocence.
Then there’s Africa.
Which I am sure confounded many a fan.
It’s mid 70s jazz rock featuring bassist Prescott Niles on keys, Doug Feiger on 6 string bass and an appearance by the Chicago horn section with a guitar solo that surpasses Sharona and rockets the song in to the stratosphere.
It’s not a perfect record. Art war is just kind...there. And I myself could have done without Pay The Devil (which proves how much Capitol wanted them gone. They released this as single. Almost as if to say, ‘Thanks for the fat stacks of cash. Now be on your way’. Even the title sounds cryptic.)
To my ears, Round Trip is the best SOUNDING Knack record. Sonically, Jack Douglas makes the most of Niles and Gary, probably the best rhythm section of that era next to The Attractions (go ahead and fight me).
And not enough gets written about Berton Averre both as a guitarist AND songwriter. You can sing every one of his solos (even if actually playing them can be tricky). And, if you ever heard Doug’s solo stuff, which is anything but bad, Averre becomes illuminated as the one truly indispensable member of The Knack.
So yeah.
If you liked the first record but that is all you heard, I suggest going next to album 5, Zoom. It’s the closest to the first one.
Then, slip out of your shoes and dive into Round Trip.
The water is nice here.
https://open.spotify.com/album/1tWYjtPL5lgX0FUHIBWpDd?si=e1-GxVpOSnybOLzoOWRl2Q
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