The Four King Cousins – “Introducing” CD (El)

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Reissue of a 1969 harmony-pop disk on Capitol, produced by David Axelrod under the not-quite-anagramic Lex de Azevedo. The cousins King were music industry pros with a family TV show and the connections to get their nascent quartet a regular slot on John Davidson’s Kraft Summer Music Hall. Blonde, slick and resoundingly old-fashioned despite the matching mini-dresses on the cover, in the studio they brought their frosty, elevator-ready pipes to arrangements of Beatles, Boyce & Hart, Hamlisch, Bacharach-David and Nichols-Asher that veer from the tasteful to the mildly twangy and tuff. The best track is “God Only Knows,” where their ethereal ice princess sexiness really suits the material. Like an estrogenic Carpenters without the angst, these four twenty-somethings made music for people the sum of their combined ages.