This Is Gunter Kallman: The Gunter Kallman Choir - Polydor 1970

'This Is Gunter Kallman'? Well you can read that as either a promise or a threat I guess. Kallman* was (yet) another German bandleader peddling a strain of easy listening music during the sixties and seventies, but his own wrinkle was that, like his contemporary Ray Conniff, he came with his own resident male and female choir who added vocal harmonies to the music. From what I can surmise, 'This Is Gunter Kallman' is a 'best of' compilation taken from four other Polydor albums and has title tracks of each present on this album. I'm assuming that was done to give the back catalogue maximum exposure, but it also goes some way to explaining why this particular release sounds like such a trainwreck.  

Because whilst I don't know if those other releases were thematic in nature, I do know that if you wanted a German choir singing a phonetic English version of 'Strangers In The Night', an oompah version of 'Put A Little Love In Your Heart', a faithful interpretation of Binge's patriotic 'Elizabethan Serenade', albeit with a German language vocal pasted over the top of it or a fairly straight take on Handel's 'Largo' then you've come to the right place; this is nothing if not eclectic. For those of us up to date with our bipolar medication though, then even though there's an undeniable voyeuristic curiosity in hearing all these tunes crash into and then bounce off each other in a bagatelle of no rhyme, reason or thematic continuity, it makes for a far from relaxing listen.  

If there are any constants here, then it's the pushed right up in your face choir who sound like they've learned English from a book as a fifth language, and an over reliance on percussive bells and tinkles that rattle along behind the tunes and which make for some rather harsh and bright sounding recordings that are as sharp, brittle and overdone as burned sugar and just as sickly. This is not an album for quiet reflection. And if all that wasn't migraine inducing enough, the back cover prints the running order as aqua blue on a dark green background, making it more akin to the later pages of colour blindness test book than anything remotely readable; when you don't know what's coming next then it makes the experience of listening to this something of a mystery tour but without any magic. Whatever merits any of Kallman's other albums may have I cannot say, I haven't heard them. But I defy anybody to listen to this one in a single sitting and come out the other end with a smile on their face.  

* Oddly, the front and back cover spell the name as Kallman, but the spine adds an extra 'n' to it both times. I won't lose much sleep over which is correct.