Well what's this? ...."songs for getting
together...drinking beer...and raising hell!!!".... well fair enough, but though
I confess to being partial to a sing song after a few scoops myself, it's
normally a good bellow along with whatever comes over the pub speakers at the
end of the night. Which in my day tended to be 'Living On A Prayer' and I
usually got the words wrong. And the timing. All of it really.
On the strength of these recordings though, it does not sound like anybody involved is actually drinking anything, and if they are then they're not drinking enough. Instead of the raucous hellraising that the cover promises, the vocalists here are performing incredibly tight and intricate harmonising with perfect pitch and barber shop syncopation; I know that I wouldn't sound like these lads after a skinful. I might think that I did, but to anybody listening it would sound as melodic as Norwegian death metal.
But for those paying attention then the back cover gives the game away; "For the want of a name, we call the group on this recording the Ivy Barflies. Actually, these talented gentlemen, under the direction of Lee Gotch, are among the finest vocalists in Hollywood today". So then, these aren't field recordings of regular Joes on a weekend bender, they're professional singers in a studio performing some songs that you may or may not want to sing whilst having a drink. And whilst this isn't a revelation along the lines of the three secrets of Fátima, it does lead me to shrug my shoulders and ask 'what's the point'? I mean 'Shine On Harvest Moon', 'I've Been Working On The Railroad', 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' - these aren't songs about drinking at all but are instead offered up as songs you might like to drink along to, but who on earth would want to?
Well, the back cover suggests 'In this collection we have selected a programme that is, for the most part, inevitable at any party" - I'm sorry, I don't know if something has been lost in the passage of time, but that doesn't apply to any party I've ever been to or would want to; the songs here may have been popular in 1959, but I've not heard of at least half of them, and the ones I have heard I would never have regarded as 'drinking songs'. It's horses for courses I guess, and the guys on the cover look happy enough, but that Technicolor drenched shot is indicative of how incredibly polite and dated all of this is.
With the references to 'Ivy Barflies' and 'Alma Mater' and 'Sigma Chi' in the songs themselves, we're clearly in American college territory here, with these Eisenhower era, preppy looking, middle aged teenagers cast as the Ivy League version of Oxford's Bullingdon Club, happy to be 'raising hell' safe in the knowledge there's a trust fund to pay for the damages and expensive lawyers on hand to hush it all up should anyone get hurt. At heart, the whole amounts to very professional and very serviceable easily listening experience You can't criticise it for that in itself, but with the cover text suggesting something more raucous was on the cards then I can honestly say I'd rather have an early night than go to any pub session that took this as its text.
On the strength of these recordings though, it does not sound like anybody involved is actually drinking anything, and if they are then they're not drinking enough. Instead of the raucous hellraising that the cover promises, the vocalists here are performing incredibly tight and intricate harmonising with perfect pitch and barber shop syncopation; I know that I wouldn't sound like these lads after a skinful. I might think that I did, but to anybody listening it would sound as melodic as Norwegian death metal.
But for those paying attention then the back cover gives the game away; "For the want of a name, we call the group on this recording the Ivy Barflies. Actually, these talented gentlemen, under the direction of Lee Gotch, are among the finest vocalists in Hollywood today". So then, these aren't field recordings of regular Joes on a weekend bender, they're professional singers in a studio performing some songs that you may or may not want to sing whilst having a drink. And whilst this isn't a revelation along the lines of the three secrets of Fátima, it does lead me to shrug my shoulders and ask 'what's the point'? I mean 'Shine On Harvest Moon', 'I've Been Working On The Railroad', 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' - these aren't songs about drinking at all but are instead offered up as songs you might like to drink along to, but who on earth would want to?
Well, the back cover suggests 'In this collection we have selected a programme that is, for the most part, inevitable at any party" - I'm sorry, I don't know if something has been lost in the passage of time, but that doesn't apply to any party I've ever been to or would want to; the songs here may have been popular in 1959, but I've not heard of at least half of them, and the ones I have heard I would never have regarded as 'drinking songs'. It's horses for courses I guess, and the guys on the cover look happy enough, but that Technicolor drenched shot is indicative of how incredibly polite and dated all of this is.
With the references to 'Ivy Barflies' and 'Alma Mater' and 'Sigma Chi' in the songs themselves, we're clearly in American college territory here, with these Eisenhower era, preppy looking, middle aged teenagers cast as the Ivy League version of Oxford's Bullingdon Club, happy to be 'raising hell' safe in the knowledge there's a trust fund to pay for the damages and expensive lawyers on hand to hush it all up should anyone get hurt. At heart, the whole amounts to very professional and very serviceable easily listening experience You can't criticise it for that in itself, but with the cover text suggesting something more raucous was on the cards then I can honestly say I'd rather have an early night than go to any pub session that took this as its text.
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