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Charlie is an AOR act who found them­selves in the strange posi­tion of build­ing a large body of work with­out ever achiev­ing the kind of large-scale suc­cess that usu­ally makes that pos­si­ble.  Despite man­age­ment has­sles and a lot of record-label turnover, they issued a string of albums that made them a cult favorite within cer­tain cir­cles of AOR fans.  The rea­son why is sim­ple: they were good at what they did, man­ag­ing to fill their albums with well-written and skill­fully recorded tunes that would have brought them main­stream suc­cess if the busi­ness side of things had worked out better.

Fantasy Girls was their debut effort and inter­est­ingly, it’s the least AOR-sounding of the bunch.  It’s a sur­pris­ingly hard-rocking affair, with the gui­tars placed front and cen­ter in the mix and plenty of solos and rif­fery to please the air-guitarists in the audi­ence.  Indeed, tunes like “T.V. Dreams” and “Don’t Let Me Down” have a hard-charging, over­driven qual­ity to their gui­tar attack.  There’s also a cer­tain fond­ness for boogie-rock stylings in the Foghat/Status Quo vein, albeit recorded in less ham­mer­headed man­ner.  The title track is a per­fect exam­ple of the lat­ter ten­dency, which spruces up its famil­iar boo­gie rhythms with nim­ble, melodic gui­tar work.

Part of this heav­i­ness comes from the way it is pro­duced.  The pro­duc­tion chores were han­dled by Roy Thomas Baker pro­tégé Mike Stone, who would soon be engi­neer­ing ses­sions for Queen and would also even­tu­ally go on to pro­duce arena-friendly fare for the likes of Journey and Asia.  He acquits him­self nicely here, pre­sent­ing the guitar-centric tunes with plenty of Marshall-stack bom­bast but also show­ing a nice atten­tion to vocal har­monies and blend­ing acoustic gui­tars in with their elec­tric brethren.  Fantasy Girls has a rough edge that other Charlie albums don’t have thanks to its guitar-centric style but it works given the embry­onic, rocked-up mate­r­ial on dis­play here.

However, hints of the group’s soon-to-be-realized AOR lean­ings can be detected in the high level of crafts­man­ship that band leader Terry Thomas puts into the writ­ing and arrang­ing of the group’s songs.  None of these songs ride their riffs to the break­ing point: instead, they are often arranged like mini-suites, com­plete with mul­ti­ple riffs and elab­o­rate bridges that work in new melodies that change up the song’s pac­ing.  A great exam­ple of this approach is “It’s Your Life,” a hyp­notic num­ber that starts with fast-strummed acoustics, builds into elec­tric riffage and breaks out with a heavy, double-time mid­sec­tion before return­ing to its ini­tial melody.

It’s also worth not­ing that Charlie shows its pop-hook friendly future on a great lit­tle track called “First Class Traveller.”  The witty lyrics present a char­ac­ter por­trait of a man addicted to the good life and the music that backs it up is a jaunty, acoustic pop affair in the vein of 10cc’s more Beatlesque mate­r­ial.  The use of stacked vocal har­monies is really impres­sive here, with some fun call-and-response bits that inter­act with the lead vocal, and some tasty slide gui­tar work in the Queen style amps up the pomp-pop fac­tor here.

In short, Fantasy Girls is some­thing of a lost minor gem for the AOR set.  While it lacks an obvi­ous break-out sin­gle, every­thing here ben­e­fits from a thor­ough sense of melodic crafts­man­ship that sets the stan­dard for future Charlie albums.

(Note: this was reviewed using the recent LP-sleeve CD reis­sue put out by Japanese label Air Mail Recordings.  It’s the first-ever remas­tered ver­sion of this album in the for­mat and the rec­om­mended option for any­one curi­ous enough to buy)