This is a very different album from Number One. That was more power pop, a little bit glam, a little bit teeny-bopper. This one is a lot more downbeat.
This is largely, I think, due to the lack of commercial success that the band were having that led to a lot of internal fighting and Alex Chilton’s declining mental health. And frustratingly, a lot of the commercial failure came from Stax Records being sluggish and uncooperative in promoting the albums. This one was shelved before release for a long time, eventually released with a kind of temporary title - “Sister Lovers” being a suggested alternative name for the band more than the album, and nothing to do with incest. It comes from the fact that Chilton and bandmate Jody Stephens were dating sisters at the time.
Musically, there’s a certain Velvet Underground feel, not least thanks to their cover of Femme Fatale (originally sung by Nico on their banana album). Another unusual, but quite effective, cover is of Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy, and you can’t help but feel that “a very strange enchanted boy” who is “a little shy and sad of eye” applies to Chilton and Stephens at the time of this album.
There are Eno-esque pretensions to the oddness of You Can’t Have Me, while the tracks Take Care and Holocaust address depression and mental health – Holocaust is a very bleak and sparsely arranged bit of beautiful misery.
It’s not all doom and gloom, there are some returns to upbeat pop-rock tunes, but the overall effect is to make an oddly disjointed album that falls in the “cry for help” pile of albums from Skip Spence, Syd Barrett, and Paul McCartney that we’ve had on the list. Given how much fun the first Big Star album was, it’s sad to see them decline, even while it’s interesting to see them trying a different musical direction.
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