Why should it be you have the power to hypnotize me?

Continuing my trip back through the 1958 album charts.

10/08/58 : We Get Letters (Vol 2) - Perry Como


We've skipped seven weeks this time and I've also ignored yet another Frank best-of (our second of the year) to bring us to an album that, in any other year, I would either ignore or dread - but given it's '58 I'm almost looking forward to it. Particularly when I see his shirt on the album cover.

I thought I wasn't able to find the album anywhere but it was another one given a different name over here - it was called So Smooth everywhere else and I've absolutely no idea why. And I'd love to say tracking it down was worth the effort, but that would be somewhat overstating matters. None of it is dreadful, but it's all very dated in a Bing Crosby style - not a patch on our previous visit, I'm afraid. I didn't mind the Cole Porter numbers "You Do Something To Me" and "In The Still Of The Night" but it's all very inessential.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on his last week of seven on the chart, all but one spent at #5 - yes, he managed to spend one week at the dizzy heights of #4. The rest of the top five were My Fair Lady, South Pacific, Lonnie and Frank- yup, we've actually gone a whole week without mentioning Elvis (doh!).

Wikipedia has very little on the album - it's his first "proper" 12" album, although his first recording was released in '48 (format details are not supplied). Apparently, his singles at the time were generally novelty records but he decided to take a completely different path for his album - I guess it worked out OK for him!

"Customers also listened to" Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, Bing Crosby and Shirley Bassey - I'm not entirely sure what Shirley's doing in there, but apart from that we're not straying too far. After our last visit, this was a bit of a disappointment - but it was much more what I was generally expecting from Mr Como.

13/07/58 - A fine voice indeed
28/09/58 - An interesting listen

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