Well, where to start with this one? OK, there's the
title for one - 'Dance To Beatles Hits In The Glenn Miller Sound'. That's clear
enough I suppose, but then so is 'Green Pig With Three Heads In A Tutu'; doesn't
make it logical though does it? I mean, who thought this would be a good idea -
to play Beatles songs in the style of a 1940s Big Band? There's no logical
connection is there? No lightbulb over the head moment of clarity where you can
see what they're getting at (and I'm afraid that remains a closed book to the
end). That's one thing anyway, but then I find that song one side one is
'Moonlight Serenade', a Glenn Miller hit played in the Glenn Miller style.
Nothing to do with The Beatles at all. It doesn't add to the
clarity.
And then there are three other tunes on this ('Bird
Cage Walk', 'Londonderry Air' and 'Diamond Rock') that have nothing to do with
either The Beatles or Glenn Miller save the fact they're played in Miller's
style - they are new compositions credited to one 'Bill Holcombe'. Two of them
are absolutely rotten, hamfisted pastiches of big band while 'Birdcage Walk' is
simply a minor rearrangement of 'Chatanooga Choo Choo', a tune associated with
Miller though credited here solely to Holcombe. All of which I find totally bizarre, but as this is on the Stereo Gold
Award label then maybe I shouldn't be too surprised; after all, they've
got form in this type of skulduggery and, true to that form, L Muller gets a
credit here too. But whatever the ethics of it all (which I'm not going to go
into again), it does make that title highly misleading and leaves the
listener all at sea.
Of the songs that are from The Beatles,
then yes they are arranged in a 'Big Band' style with a clarinet and/or
saxophone leading the charge, but that's where the positives end. For a start,
most of selections are a curious choice; 'Yesterday', 'Hey Jude', 'Michelle',
'Let It Be' all have a slow, melancholy air in their original form and don't
readily lend themselves to a Big Band makeover. The results are overcooked and
messy, holing the atmosphere of the originals well below the waterline and
they're left to sink in the waters of their own hubris In fairness, the opening track (a tag team medley
of 'Moonlight Serenade' and 'Something') does at least offer up
something different and interesting that's perhaps true to the promise of the
cover, but the exercise is not repeated again; the rest of the album is made up
of stand alone tracks.
'I Want To Hold Your Hand' and 'A Hard Day's Night'
carry more promise, but The Hiltonaires don't so much drop the ball as fail to
find it in the first place with their cramped and way too busy arrangements that
leave no room to breathe, let alone a solid beat to dance to. 'When I'm 64' or
'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' and the like would have been better choices by far,
but too late now. To provide the death blow, the
Tony Mansell singers are back to supply the vocals and they're just as flat and
toneless as they were on the Burt Bacharach album, taking the same cavalier
approach to beat and melody which, although may be just down to Holcombe's
arrangements, end up sounding like they don't have a clue what they're singing
and are just making up the tune as they go along. Maybe this would have been more tolerable if it had been all
Beatles songs, but as it stands this is a hideous mash up that never manages to
convince that it has any real idea of what it's trying to be except to act as a
cheap cash in on The Beatles' name. But if I don't know what it wants
to be, I can tell you what it is, and that's a frankly quite
painful listen that puts both Miller and The Beatles through an aural mangle
that neither deserve.
No comments:
Post a Comment