Four Tops: Reach Out [ANAGRAM]

Why you'll love it

This 150g pressing brings back the group's biggest-selling studio album. It carries six of their best-known singles, including the US and UK No. 1 "Reach Out I'll Be There," and Rolling Stone ranked it No. 429 among the 500 greatest albums in 2020.

This edition

• 150g vinyl

About the album

Imagine a greatest-hits record that happens to be a regular studio album, and you've got Reach Out. Issued on Motown in July 1967, it was the Four Tops' last LP with Holland-Dozier-Holland, the writing and production team behind their run of smashes, and they went out with the songbook wide open.

Levi Stubbs leads from the front, his baritone pushing hard against the Funk Brothers on "7-Rooms of Gloom" and "Bernadette," while Duke Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton stack the harmonies and the Andantes add sweetness behind them. Berry Gordy picked the covers himself: Tim Hardin's "If I Were a Carpenter," the Left Banke's "Walk Away Renee" and two Monkees tunes, "Last Train to Clarksville" and "I'm a Believer." Smokey Robinson produced "Wonderful Baby," and Clarence Paul handled the closer.

It reached No. 3 on the R&B albums chart and No. 4 in the UK, and gave the group its first charting album in Canada. BBC Music's Daryl Easlea called it the high-water mark of Motown's first decade. Turning the Monkees into a soul group is quite a trick; turning the Four Tops into the Monkees would have been rather harder.

Also at Kops: more Four Tops on vinyl · browse Motown

Tracklist

Listen

On Anagram (cat# 620898), a reissue of the 1967 album.