Close Up was Tom Jones' first album to not go gold since Green, Green Grass of Home, and given the wildly inconsistent quality of the material and performances, it's easy to see why the record was only a minor hit. The hit single "Till" was a fine MOR ballad, but its stilted follow-up "Young New Mexican Puppeteer" illustrates the problem with the record: most of the songs were either cutesy or vapid and occasionally -- such as "Young New Mexican Puppeteer" and "Witch Queen of New Orleans" -- they were both.