Nana Mouskouri - Christmas With Nana Mouskouri

Here we have a Nana Mouskouri album ... finally. I mean this is a sort of big deal. She was always that singer who wore the big black glasses. I had no idea what she sounded like, but it's funny that we all knew who she was. I mentioned in another post I thought that she and Roger Whittaker were two sides of the same coin. I managed to find Roger Whittaker's Christmas album, and recently I was rummaging in the dollar bin for Christmas records and scored a really nice copy of Nana Mouskouri's 1972 album Christmas With Nana Mouskouri.

Musically the songs hold up really well. I'm never quite sure what to expect with some of the stuff from the early '70s. The arrangements lean to the traditional, although there are a number of songs where there's a folky flavour. This was before adult contemporary was a thing, but I suppose it was always a thing, just not a genre. So many things get shoehorned into a box after the fact, and I'm trying to see where this fits. Which means I'm trying too hard to process what I'm hearing, rather than listening to what I'm hearing for what it is.

Make sense?

The first time through, the album was enjoyable enough, and the songs were good and covered a lot of the expected bases as well as breaking some new ground for me, which I always enjoy. I thought her voice was nice, but aside from being slightly operatic I found her tone a little thin, and her vibrato was a little too warbly for my taste. Why was she so famous? By the second time through, my earlier complaints were more or less erased and the charm of her delivery started to come through and there was something in her singing that was warm and engaging. Maybe I'm just overly fickle, or perhaps too quick to judge.

The album opens with the first of two interpretations of "Ave Maria," with the first covering the Charles Gounod version, and the album closes with the better-known Schubert arrangement. Both are really good. When the Athenians kicked off "Go Tell It On The Mountain" I wasn't sure where it was going, but then it settled down. I don't tend to lean into the Spirituals, but this was pretty good. I really liked the French language songs, "Petit Papa Noel" and "Minuit Chretiens," but it was her version of Roger Miller's "Old Toy Trains" with the double bass and acoustic guitar that was my favourite song here.

You can't tell because of how time works with writing versus the time I've been sitting here listening to the record, but I've been poking away at the alphabet for a bit in between doing other stuff. The album has been flipped over a few times now and each time it plays through something else stands out.

Which makes it sort of tempting to just start again and give a blow-by-blow as the songs play through, but dagnabbit I'm invested in this now so I'm just going to push through. See, this is what separates the real writers from the plebs like me who have more spare time than sense. I have just enough hubris to think this will be worthwhile in the end. If you're still reading, thanks.

As far as Christmas records go, this may not be a classic, but there are more than enough moments here to make this one worthwhile. I'm not sure I'll run out and pick up her Greatest Hits or anything, but I'm pretty glad I got to hear this one and finally put a voice to the glasses.

Cheers.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...

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