Crackers

  • Crackers
  • Guaranteed (Edison) 1983 
  • Contraband EP (Edison) 1984 

Albuquerque, New Mexico is home to these five clean-cut kids in suits and sneakers. (They’re not related to the Beat Rodeo-related Crackers.) Guaranteed offers a remarkably accurate, ingenuous merseybeat sound: ten charming slices of memorable guitar pop with magnificent harmony vocals. On Contraband, having swapped one guitarist for a keyboard player, Crackers sound far less crisp (sorry). In fact, from the mild leer of the routine-rock “Skinny Girls,” it’s obvious the band is contemplating a major stylistic mistake. Two of the five tunes preserve the album’s Freddie and the Dreamers pop bounce, but the EP suffers from too little exuberance and too many lyrical clichés.

[Ira Robbins]