Well that's an eye catching cover; overtanned
blonde in a gold bikini, wearing gold jewellery holding a freshly painted gold
record and fellating a gold paint spattered brush on a gold background with gold
text. Oh yes, there's gold paint on her face too (which the cynic in me thinks
is meant to represent some kind of ejaculate, possibly from King Midas). And I
think in this heavy handed way the 'Golden' part of the title is just about
taken care of, it's a shame the budget didn't extend to pressing it up on gold
vinyl to finish off but - alas - the disc in that cover is as black as my heart
after listening to it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
As for the 'Oldies' part, then unless it refers to
the scary looking cover star (and I do wonder if she knew of the
contextual implications when she signed up for this), then it must be referring
to the ten songs. Which in itself is an odd
proposition, because whilst they may be regarded as 'oldies' to our modern ears,
in 1970 they were less so. Some of the songs here would have only been about
five or six years old at that time ('Dancing In The Street', 'Sweets For My
Sweet', 'Baby Love', 'Help'), which is hardly 'old' is it? I don't think that
point would have caused the band leader sleepless nights though - we've encountered Ray McVay records a few times already on this
journey and the splendid alliteration of his name has tended to be the most
interesting thing about them. To date, my abiding impression is of a man who
seems to have his fingers in many low budget music pies, and on this one it
looks like he's trying to muscle in on the 'cover versions in a cheesecake
sleeve' market. Instead of a set of contemporary chart hits though, he's gone
for the vague, catch all 'Golden Oldie' angle. Or as I call it, 'the coward's
way out'.
The album presents a mixed bag of songs that, what
they lack in contemporaneousness with each other, do share the common
ground of having hard wired earworms of tunes
that like as not will be as familiar to you as your own name. The over-familiarity of such popular songs acts as both a blessing and a
curse - on one hand, even the most raggedy arsed bar band couldn't screw these
up and fail to get an audience singing or clapping along, and whatever else Ray
McVay's and his ensemble might be, they are not a raggedy arsed bar band. Saying
that, here's no attempt made to present a reasonable
approximation of the original versions - the songs are taken as written and
arranged in a cabaret, chicken in the basket supper club type of way with the basic melodies left to do all the heavy lifting, precisely
because they can.
But in doing that, the curse gets the
upper hand in that, in being so well known, there's a handy benchmark in the
form of those original recordings by which to judge these versions, and in every
single case these are found wanting. Giving the songs a jaunty makeover in a relentlessly upbeat, big band
style with 'gosh darn it' over enthusiastic vocals is like taking the shell off
a snail and trying to pass it off as a slug; it's a pointless exercise that has
no discernible benefit for anyone. And a disinterested feeling of pointlessness
is what I'm left with after listening to this album. Maybe in the right context and after a few beers it would make more
sense, but sitting here all I hear is the emotionless husk of an album that,
unless it was done as a tax break, has no real reason for existing and I can't -
simply can't - imagine why anyone would want to listen to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment