Hope 1977 Album

Klaatu

There were tons of acts from the 70's to geek out on post-haste, but if there was any one of them tailor-made for the role, hard to find a better candidate than Klaatu. Not only did they take the name from the old sci-fi film The Day The Earth Stood Still, but also got caught up in a Beatles hoax, and had their biggest song covered by The Carpenters. There's way more to read about, but what concerns us here is their second record, Hope – essentially, a concept record about space travel to a lost planet. Released the same year Star Wars came out, it's a bit of a wonder it didn't receive more attention at the time, but then you actually listen, and begin to understand why. There's a ton of orchestral input from (naturally) the London Symphony Orchestra, which is at certain intervals wondrous and others rather disconcerting. This was way beyond the plebeian tastes of 1977, and even the group's own debut record, which already was a strong dose of quasi-psychedelic guitar pop to the left of Queen and similar acts. Overall, it's stunning how they held this all together and made it sound so clean on record, although a lot of the music doesn't leave much impression. I liked this record because it was fairly adventurous, and if you take as fantasy you'll probably come back to it again as I did. But don't beat yourself up if you forget to.