Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2021 November 05 • Friday

Speaking of Lola Albright's Dreamsville record, here's a contemporary review from Rogue magazine, one of a handful of efforts to siphon off some of Playboy's readership. Lenny Bruce had a regular column in it for a while and several other familiar names—Harlan Ellison, for example— were attached to pieces therein.

Listening to Dreamsville in 2020 and 2021 was delightful. Nobody makes records like this anymore and the Peter Gunn music itself is woefully underplayed.

But in real time, whoever reviewed it for Rogue wasn't so impressed. And to be fair, at that time, records like these were probably not that big a deal.

Without the stimulating sight of her, Miss Lola Albright (that Gunn man's chief target) comes across on Dreamsville (Columbia CL 1327) as merely an attractive young lady with a very average set of pipes. The sound boys have broken a leg covering her: tone-deepening artificially, echo chamber, orchestra surrounding, everything, in fact, save dubbing in Julie London as Miss Albright's voice. She manages to hit somewhere close to the notes desired, which makes for a mildly wingy sort of melancholic sound, and on the title song a bit of Mancini-orchestrated plushsound makes the melan even more solidly cholic. Also note the tune and lyrics on "Brief and Breezy." But essentially, this is for the set that will buy "Charlie Weaver Sings For His People," of which we, fortunately are not one.

I agree that "Brief and Breezy" is a highlight of the record but otherwise the review seems overly harsh to me. There is certainly quite a bit of reverb on Albright's voice but I don't think that's the same thing as an "echo chamber". And "orchestra surrounding" would just be the usual approach for a record like this. Also for a Julie London record.

Not sure what artifical tone-deepening would have consisted of in 1959-1960 and I also had to look up who Charlie Weaver was.

But nonetheless an interesting bit of ephemera.