Chalk One Up For Inner Values...

Hooray for truth in advertising! When I picked up the original version of today's One Buck Record, I knew exactly what it was, thanks to Glitterhouse's honest ad in their catalogue. Yes, Glitterhouse is most known as a label, notably giving Neal Casal a home, as well as folks like The Walkabouts, Johnny Dowd, 16 Horsepower, Lou Ford or Terry Lee Hale. But before that they were, and stayed, a mail order company, that at a time I used to procure my music, notably getting a bunch of my Beach Boys and The Band remastered albums from them. And, uh, this. The refreshing thing about Glitterhouse advertising this budget item was their honesty. They more or less openly said that the conceit of this album as 'a tribute to the spirit of Eva Cassidy' - whatever the fuck that means - was poor taste bullshit and the packaging chintzy. I mean seriously, just look at the horrendous cover art (which I couldn't see in the catalogue, so it was the, uh, nice 'goes with the package' surprise). Yikes!

But, as the Glitterhouse catalogue entry argues, you would still get some very fine music from talented singers like Pentangle's Jacqui McShee and Judie Tzuke (who didn't make it on this reworked version) for very little money. And that is true. The music herein is often beautifully done, despite being made by something called The Klone Orchestra, which sounds really bad. But you can't argue with the results. This is beautiful music, no matter the commercial intent, with some very nice musical touches: adding celtic instrumentation to "Turn!Turn!Turn!", a flute to "I Shall Be Released", instrumentation to a couple of numbers, inluding "Bridge Over Troubled Water", where Filipa Jeronimo's accent always makes me smile ("wo-tah!"), or the little jazz touches and electric guitar solo on "After The Goldrush".  The packaging may be dirt cheap, but the music production in it isn't. Yay, Glitterhouse, you were right! 

Call it high-quality karaoke maybe, but sometimes high quality-karaoke is better than mediocre original songs. You wil easily recognize all these songs, beautifully arranged and very soothing. I threw off three tracks which I thought didn't fit well - and because there's little known rule #2 of this blog, right afetr rule #1 ("No fuckin' kazoos on this blog!"), and that is "No fuckin' songs from Cats on this blog!". So you're left with only the best of this package, 11 tracks of women's voices on the wind, making your day a little sweeter...