Dudin' up to go and see your gal

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

13/08/61 : Seven Brides For Seven Brothers - Original Soundtrack 

I seem to recall this was one of my mum's favourites - I think I watched the film once but struggled to get past the fact that kidnapping multiple women is central to the plot and generally viewed as perfectly acceptable - I guess they just did things differently back then.  The songs are supposed to be pretty good though and it's got Howard Keel on it, so I'm looking forward to listening to it.

Hmmm - it's OK,  but nothing more than that for me at first listen.  There are actually less songs on here than I was expecting because there's an awful lot of random instrumental filler (which I assume relates to dance sequences in the film, but they're not exactly essential here) and the vocal style is very warbly-operatic, as things often were back then.  The album was also nearly an hour long, which has been pretty much unheard of this year!

We're at #13 in the charts this week on its seventeenth week of a 21 week run, with it having peaked at #6 in its second, fourth and sixth weeks - which is all very peculiar because the album was actually released in '54.  The top five this week were South Pacific, George Mitchell, Elvis, Barber/Bilk and TSOM - and if the top three sounds familiar, you should be aware it's going to consist of those three albums until we get to the middle of June!  There were no new albums in the chart this week - we're now down to only three albums that we have yet to meet.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry on the soundtrack - it's not even mentioned in passing in the film's entry.  The film's entry tells me that one of the brides is played by Julie Newmar, whose name I recognised but needed Wikipedia to remind me it was from the film title To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar - she also appeared in the video for George Michael's "Too Funky" and is still with us at the grand old age of 90.  The other thing I learned was that the film version came first - there wasn't a stage version until 1978, which wasn't initially a success but it's done OK after some rewrites.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - which does surprise me because South Pacific and several of the other musicals we've seen around this time seem to be very much in the same neighbourhood.  I didn't mind this, but it wasn't as good as I was expecting it to be.

06/08/61 - Nicely diverting
20/08/61 - Very much of its time

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