The Household Clearance cds. Part 3

 

George writes

This is, I think, the 4th time I have been given someone’s record collection. The first time was when a friend went to live in Germany, and gave me his entire collection of albums and singles. I did take some to him at his request, on a visit (to Bremen). Of the  remaining albums I kept a few for myself, and sold the rest. But I still have his collection of 7-inch singles.

On to the next two blind selections, which are a pair that I could never imagine myself buying First up, it’s “Sucessos de 1998” on the “nova gente” label. I think it’s fair to say that this is not the kind of thing that finds its way onto these pages. But, dear reader(s), I have listened to it all, and was surprised that I recognised a couple of tunes, the one immediately below, that theme tune from Titanic, and one of the two Spice Girls songs. I don’t see the need for an mp3 of any of these, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to snaffle a copy for a collection, but they are perfectly decent pop songs:

The album has songs by some artistes I had never heard of: Aqua, The Rhapsody, Sweetfox, whose contributions, frankly, were bloody awful.

I like my pop songs up-beat, so those heartfelt songs by Ms Dion and Boyzone do nothing for me (Oh Vienna). Apart from irritate. Although not as much as something totally bland like the Lighthouse Family track, remarkably forgettable whilst actually being listened to.  The Sweetfox track has borrowed from Whiter Shade of Pale or J S Bach, and although the former was joint best pop song of all time (1952-1977) this effort will never be afforded any accolade. They were also very insistent that “everything was going to be alright” and indeed it was, when the song finished. The final  track is by Ricky Martin and sounds like a remarkably poor rehash of his famous song whose name  I really cannot be bothered finding out. Here’s the other acceptable track:

If anyone wants a copy, you will either have to ask me to send it to you, or work very very hard to source it. Well, it’s not on discogs.

Next out is an album that suggests it is the best music from Brasil. I’ve played it. I hope the title is not accurate. I would describe most of the first 9 tracks as belonging to the genre of bossa nova, so a new wave album! But not the new wave of last week, of course.  For the most part those songs are nearly listenable (and track 7 has really grown on me),  but, alas, things go from bad to worse with the onset of track 10, which is an annoyingly bad samba-style song. 

Here’s the aforementioned quite good, almost, track 7:

Fagner - Borbulhas de amor (eu tenho um coração)

I think the title means Love Bubbles (or Bubbles of Love), and not Love Pimples (or Love Plukes to the scottish contingent). But if it’s a song about sexual incontinence  it could be the latter. And here’s a track with Flaco-type accordion flourishes:

Fafá de Belém - Nuvem de lágrimas

Track 11 is not great; it is possible the compiler(s) ran out of steam. Or maybe it was a case of CBA. Track 12 sounds as if the singer is more unfamiliar with the Portuguese language than me, given her pronunciation, and that is taking into account that she could be Brazilian. Anyway, I’ve decided to play the first 9 again to pick out something. This seems to have inspired our dog to go into a shed and eat something from the cat litter tray. Is this his  way of commenting on the quality of the music he has listened to? 

The majority of songs have left me in a cloud of tears, nevermind Fafá

This too is a hard-to-find album. Unless you’re in my music room, and let me tell you this, that would  cause me no end of stress, I don’t even like my partner being in that room, nevermind some internet stalker type.

There’s a series of these “O melhor da música internacional”, and maybe this Household Clearance collection contains more. Part of me would really like to see what the Country and the Soul collections contain. We shall see.

CC writes

I'm sure the readers are greatful to George for introducing The Spice Girls and Natalie Imbruglia to these pages