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 , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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