And for some reason, Cream-related content started to follow me around. First i've a guy playing "Sunshine of your love" in the subway passage, then i've head "White room" on the radio, then i saw a commercial with "Strange Brew" all over it. And then i've looked through the newsfeed of my favorite blogs and saw Cream cover album of all things.
And because i'm good at writing pointless things - i thought it would be a good idea to write a review of this album. Because The Beatles "Because".
The album in question is "Cream Songbook" by The Rubber Band.
It is one of the series of releases that reinterpreted then white hot rock music into something else. Some albums tried electronic music like Wendy Carlos "Switched-on Bach", some went into a user-fiendly muzak direction. This album is the latter.
The albums starts with lounge version of "Deserted Cities of the Heart" with its teeth pulled out and balls busted into a soup. Now the song sounds like an Eleanor Rigby cousin with some drums tacked on its with a scotch tape. It is a James Last level of atrocity. You have Sinatra-cheese strings bumbling through the song making it nice. The main melody is handled by the obnoxious placeholder flute which makes you want to bath in acid. Drums are trying their best to drag this song to the end in a breathless run-through.
Track 2 is "White Room". It leaves the string section to do some stuff on their own and it is actually pretty serviceable lyrical composition.
The melody is entwined into an arrangement more naturally and it doesn't feel like a placeholder sticking its tongue. The strings move like a cloud of steam brushed by the fan, the melody swirls around feeling lost barely scratching the surface.
Then, slowly but surely the piano starts to move from the background to the foreground and by the middle of the song it starts to take over like emotions breaking through the shell. It is really good arrangement. The piano breakout changes the flow of the string section and makes it more intense. By the end, the composition presses itself against the wall in a stalemate. There is no closure but it works so well with this cliffhanger coda.
So naturally the promise of track 2 is squandered by track 3. "Toad" is Ginger Baker's showcase composition, a drum extravaganza he pushed to the conceptual limit with his latter project "Ginger Baker's Air Force". Ginger Baker is very good at music psychology. He knows how to tell the story by playing an instrument. If you listen to "Toad" - there is so much going on - it is like a tsunami meeting a tornado and stumbling upon a volcano to have a firecracker party. None of this is present in this rendition. It is just a melody bookends and the drums playing bunch of stuff.
"Those were the days" is more of "Deserted Cities of the Heart" kitschy detournement, but this time i is less appalling. The thing sounds like a stage end screen music in a Sonic The Hedgehog 2. The strings are doing buzzsaw seesaw and some swirls while the flutes are mostly in the background. They don't carry a melody so they are tolerable. The string arrangement of the middle section is actually quite good. It would not sound out of place on some Moody Blues record.
"We're Going Wrong" gets back to the "White Room" format and it works incredibly well. It is probably the highlight of an album.
I always thought the original version lacked the detail in sound design to fit its themes. The Rubber Band version pulls of the morbid tone of the song wih its superb string arrangement. It is a tone poem with an ominous vibe, eerie atmosphere and haunting sense of creeping dread. It feels like a lost theme from some Hammer Studios production.
You can almost feel the fog coming down and getting thicker while the light starts to crack from the horizon lighting up some nondescript vague shapes and outlining the desolate landscape. The moment it hits crescendo you're dumbfounded into stillness. It is astonishing.
Naturally, it is followed by the very worst muzak lounge rendition of "Sunshine of your Love". There is a flute cheese artillery and some zing cringe harpsichord. It is as pointless and annoying as it gets. If you This is some Abu Ghraib level of sonic torture. The guitar solo is performed on guitar and it is so out of place you think your sound system signal had an intrusion of a pirate transmission. The end is an attempt at making a psych-out rave up and it truly sounds like the end of the world, the whimper compressed into a thunderous roar version.
"Dance the night away" tries to pull off "White Room" trick but it falls flat. In fact it is so flat and featureless, you start to question the integrity of the third dimension. It is a wallpaper music. But it would sound fine backwards with tape delay and phasing.
"Sweet wine" is horrible. It is like "Toad" but with more flutes, pan flutes, oboes, recorders and other whistling instruments. It sounds like the spirit of Frank Sinatra had possessed someone and got himself into the exorcism session which ended with a binge-watch of Teletubbies.
The last track of an album, "Strange Brew" sticks to the original, save for swingy organ replacing the organ. While it sounds just like the Cream original, it is also incredibly not punchy and oddly grooveless. It is truly a background music version of a smoking rocker tune. Unlike the other poor renditions on this album, it is not offensive, just pointless. The conclusion is another variation on the end of the world, the whimper compressed into a thunderous roar version.
So that's "The Rubber Band - Cream Songbook" album. While it is definitely a cash-in on the popular act, it is not without its merit. "White Room" is really good, while "We're Going Wrong" is a tremendous interpretation of the song that needs to be implemented into some period gothic horror. These two need a listen. The rest is mostly by-the-numbers lounge muzak.
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