It's New to Me: Distant Shores by Chad & Jeremy (1966)

Cover illustration of Popular Mechanics magazine, August 1947

My recent series of reviews of '60s sunshine pop continues today with the LP Distant Shores from British folk-pop duo Chad & Jeremy. Chad & Jeremy had commercial success in the US, in part because of the lush orchestral arrangements they used to bolster their acoustic tunes. From '64 to '66, they released some great singles (and a couple patchy albums), and people thought they had run their course as part of the British Invasion scene. But, with the release of Distant Shores in 1966, the duo showed they weren't done yet. The album is considered by some to be Chad & Jeremy's best, as it is fully realized (whatever that means) but avoids some of the dippy conceptual moves that they turned to with their other late-'60s albums.

Distant Shores opens with its title track, which was Chad & Jeremy's last hit single. It's a lovely baroque pop song with an "Eastern" acoustic riff that gives it a more modern feel than some of the more traditional numbers on the record. Songs like "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" feel soppy and old-fashioned, but they do pretty well with more contemporary folk material like Paul Simon's "Homeward Bound" and Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Mornin' Rain". They also contribute several quite-good originals to the album, showing that (like many of the folkies) they were figuring out that they could write songs as good as the ones they were covering - of these, the awkwardly-titled "You Are She" is the best. It sounds like a lost Left Banke track.

There's more good songwriting from Chad & Jeremy in Distant Shores' thirteen bonus tracks - a couple of them are useless (a couple of the album tracks sung in French?), but there are eight songs that are good enough to be on the album, and half of them are originals. Jeremy's "Last Night", the b-side of the "Distant Shores" single, is a bouncy pop number, as is the Chad-written "Your Mama's Out of Town". My favorite track on the whole CD is probably "Teenage Failure", a surprisingly angry-sounding song (for a pair of folkies) with very Byrds-like chorus and some amusing lyrics from Jeremy Clyde. He sneers at his boss, pretty girls, and ultimately starts taking pot-shots at the listener, singing, "Now this ain't a very fine song / But lucky for you, it ain't too long /(Sit still or I'll smash your face in!)" So here's your warning: you'd better sit still while listening to this one.

"Teenage Failure" by Chad & Jeremy