There's scope here for a bit of game I think;
imagine buying this album but getting it home and finding the wrong record
inside the sleeve - would I be able to have a decent stab at what it sounds like
from information gleaned off the cover alone? There are plenty of clues there
for my inner Sherlock to consider, so let's have a bash.
First, the title - 'The Look Of Latin'; well that
immediately puts me in mind of Bacharach and David's 'The Look Of Love' and,
sure enough, it's there on side two. So I'm guessing some kind of Latin tinged,
easy listening affair is on the agenda here. Second, that cover shot - what do
we have here? A dusky, pouting woman who looks like she gypsy dances for pesos
down the local cantina flanked by a bloke all in black and looking like a cross
between a pound shop El Cid and Droopy. I'm not going to reach for the big guns
and play the 'racist' card over all this, but I am more than happy to
play the one marked 'stereotype'; this contrivance is obviously some ad
executive's concept of how folk look south of ze border and, when you add the
fact that the music is played by a collective known as 'The City of Westminster
String Band', then the whole set up screams 'fake' and 'artifice'. I'm assuming
those psychedelic swirls that frame the cover are a belated nod to the times to
get the hippy kids interested too. I don't think they have too much to do with
'The Look Of Latin' anyway.
So much for the front cover, and yet turn it over
and the back cover has informative gold of its own in the form of a note written
by one Elizabeth Witham who starts off vague and then proceeds to get vaguer.
"You can't have a string band. Bands are
brassy and loud. Strings are soft and orchestral." Ummm, well I'm not really sure what she's getting at there, but I'll let
it go. "This is a relaxing LP full of the
South American sounds, conjuring up distant suns and different lands that most
of us have never seen, but know so well through the music of South
America." Well ok, there's my initial stab
at what this music is all about confirmed in black and white, but I'm happy to
say for the record that the 'most of us' she herself has in mind does not
include me; I do not know these lands well via the music of South
America.
"The words will be on the tip of your tongue,
the music will instantaniously (sic) come flowing back to you. Some of these
tunes have been lying dormant for years just waiting to be given new life and
played again." "The individuality of the
LP is obtained by the use of harpsichord and soprano sax carefully knitted into
the overall sound. This sound is a focal point in music as is Westminster a
focal point, hence its incorporation into the orchestra's name."
Well that's quite enough of that I
think; we're not here to dissect what Ms Witham
makes of all this, and I think an Enigma machine would be needed to crack the
code of what she's on about anyway - it's what I think that's most important,
and I think two of the tracks on this nicely sum up exactly what's being aimed
for here - 'The Look Of Love' and 'Volare'.
To hit the 'easy listening' mark the album strives
for, the former has to be given a Latin 'upgrade' and the former a 'downgrade',
all the while lathering some defiantly Western strings over the top of both.
This the arrangements dutifully do, but the result on neither is so different
from their source material to generate any kind of 'Wow that's different'
revelation. They both sound much the same as they ever did and neither sound a
million miles away from what Sergio Mendes was doing with Brasil 66, which makes
that puff piece on the back cover an exercise in hubris, albeit very badly
written hubris - nobody is reinventing the sombrero here.
For the rest of it, the album divides quite neatly
into two halves, with the first side made up of mainly genuine Latin tunes and
side two with predominantly more Western compositions. The former is just Herb
Albert pumped with more air, but it's on the latter that things get (slightly)
more interesting. And that's because far from invoking
hazy sunsets over the Hacienda, the music on the second side is, largely via the
harpsichord and soprano sax that Ms Witham identifies, shot through with the
chilly remove of a soundtrack to an Italian Giallo, perhaps something Ennio
Morricone was sawing off by the yard during the sixties and Portishead were
sampling in the nineties. It's not what I expected anyway, and it makes for a
more enjoyable listen because of it, but I'm not sure the atmosphere of a lurid
murder mystery is exactly what was intended.
In the final analysis though, and cutting through
all the nonsense, what we have here is a perfectly agreeable album of Latin
tinged instrumentals that could burble away in the background to any social
gathering without either clearing the room or becoming its focal point. Maybe
that's how it should have been marketed, perhaps with a tasteful cover shot of
the sun going down over some South American landscape. It certainly doesn't need
all the baggage it does come with, and it's baggage that both sets a
far too high bar of expectation that it never manages to clear whilst at the
same time mires it in cheap cliché that side two manages to break free
of.
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