The Club gets proudly romantic with considerable help from guest singer Susan Cowsill. You already know the song, one of Bacharach/David’s loveliest and the one that started the Carpenters’ chart run. Opening with the original piano lick, the band fits the song smoothly and naturally into the rhythm; their extended outro maintains the slinky groove with some tasteful wah-wah guitar. Cowsill clearly knows and loves her Carpenters (she’s done their greatest hits in her Covered in Vinyl series), and her warm-hearted treatment of this lyric is a thing of beauty. There’s a precedent for this sort of thing; Jamaica’s Trojan label released a stack of reggae-fied covers of pop hits in the ’60s and ’70s. But few of those records had a singer this good.
