The Knack – …But the Little Girls Understand. – 1980
Hey! That’s THE Sharona on the cover of the follow up to their massive debut album! I wonder if this album will have anything near as good as that track!!
The first half of that sentence I’m pretty sure no one said when they reached for this platter in 1980. But I am positive that second part is what people were thinking when this album came out.
And Fieger and Averre try hard to give the people what they want. That opening track, “Baby Talks Dirty” sounds like it was the son-of-Sharona and the next track, “I Want Ya” attempts to out do the previous record by ramping up the crash and sturm and drang. Those drums are giGANtic. For me, even though it’s Get The Knack Pt. II, I’m okay with it.
The first real stumble on the record occurs on the third track, the Buddy Holly influenced (read: ripoff/pander), “Tell Me You’re Mine” where Fieger inexplicably twists his voice into a quasi-Orbison baritone and fails miserably. We sort of right ourselves on the bright “Mr. Handelman”, which is…well…it’s not awful. It’s just a song that wasn’t good enough for the first album and is the kind of thing you expect deeper on a sophomore record. It’s also the first song Fieger and Averre wrote together. So, there’s that.
What’s most intriguing to me is the direction the band takes on the second single, “Can’t Put a Price on Love”. The track sounds way more like a descendent of latter day Stones versus The Beatles, whom Fieger was trying to be on that first record. “Price” is the sort of song Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes should have recorded. Thankfully, Side One recovers with a flourish. The supershort, “Hold on Tight and Don’t Let Go” is an inspired piece of pop rock. In and out in a flash, leave a good looking corpse.
Including the Ray Davies penned, “The Hard Way” is odd, it could almost make a case that Fieger is a better songwriter, since it’s not up to the band’s snuff. But it’s gone so fast and replaced by the frenetic pairing of, “It’s You” and “End of the Game” that you don’t care. The second side is so lickety split that I have to wonder just how much Colombian Marching Powder might have been flying around the studio.
At least the band is having fun as evidenced by the Phil Spector homage “The Feeling I Get”. Trouble is, it’s SO on the nose accurate that it’s hard to believe that it’s not a cover. But they don’t sound original at all here. “Havin’ a Rave Up” sounds toooooo much like any rockabilly band of the 50s. And “How Can Love Hurt So Much” has John Barry and Shirley Bassey all over it. (I hope I got the right reference there. Maybe I meant Nancy Sinatra….)
Little Girls…is such a schizoid record that offers fans nothing more than what we already got the last time, rendering it sort of redundant. At the same time, there’s nothing on the record so fantastic and hookalicious that it should encourage any new fans to flock to the band.
Grade: B+
ASide: Baby Talks Dirty, Havin’ a Rave Up
BlindSide: I Want Ya, Hold on Tight and Don’t Let Go, It’s You
DownSide: Tell Me You’re Mine
