1001 Albums Summary

Awful caterwauling music combined with meaningless lyrics that left the whole album sounding like an angry toddler had composed the whole thing.

I thought The Style Council were good before I heard this awful album of terrible jazz-style coffee shop music.

Some good tracks, but after a while it becomes coffee shop background music.

Ifr you like noise then this is for you.

The whole album sounds like something you’ve heard before even though you haven’t. It’s basically 1990s noise.

Didn't understand a word those boys were singing, but really enjoyed the tune and listening to their voices.

Amsterdam was excellent, reminding me of old Eurovision songs from the 1950s. I think that is the problem for me, a modern 21st century listener. These are songs recorded in the 1960s when The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Elvis, Bob Dylan etc were around, yet this album lives purely in the very early 1950s - it was dated music even when it was recorded and the sound of the audience politely clapping between each track just adds to that sense of age. You can almost see an elderly audience sitting attentively in dinner jackets as Monsieur Brel sings his songs from a disappearing generation. One song worth listening to, apart from Amsterdam, is Le jardins du casino. It's a pretty terrible song if I'm honest and is written in the style of the book, Little House on the Prairie, in that it conjures up images of times long since past in a flat, descriptive way that leaves you imagining the gentlemen loafing around chatting and the fake duchesses surrounded by smoke in a casino with moustachioed musicians playing, but ultimately there is no real substance to it. It's worth listening to though because through that flat descriptive style it transports you back to a past long since dead.