Drink! Drink! Drink!

Continuing my trip back through the 1956 album charts.

05/08/56 : Romberg: The Student Prince - Mario Lanza 

I have absolutely no idea what this, so here goes...

Hmmm - I guess it's "opera light" (popera?).  Sometimes it sounds like more like a musical, sometimes it gets more classical but it's always a bit too overblown for me.  Mario's voice is fine and the sound quality is perfectly acceptable, but there's no danger of me ever revisiting this - it's not even that it sounds dated, it just sounds like it's from another time entirely.  It's also hard to imagine an album featuring a track called "Gaudeamus Igitur" these days (except for a metal album, I guess).  That's quite the album cover as well - although it does have the distinction of acknowledging a woman is involved and there haven't been many of them this year.

This week we're at #5 with the only week this ever charted and the rest of the top five were Carousel, Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé and Bill Haley.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album but there are entries for the operetta and the film - the operetta was written by Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnell and opened in 1924, running for 608 performances which made it the longest running Broadway show of the 20s.  The film was made in 1954 and was due to star Mario Lanza (who was a massive celebrity at the time) but he walked off set and was fired before principal photography - but as part of the settlement they still had to use the songs he'd recorded, so Edmund Purdom had to mime to his tracks.

"Customers also listened to" Jeanette MacDonald, Joseph Locke, Howard Keel and Richard Tauber - I know there's some famous singers here and that's all I can tell you, but Wikipedia is your friend if you need more.  As it was for me, so now I know that Mario Lanza was a famous singer (and not a very nice person from the sounds of things) - and I also know from listening to this album that I have no interest in hearing any more of his stuff.

22/07/56 - A load of fun!
12/08/56 - Dated but perfectly fine

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more