Strictly for a specialized clientele
Red J. Comb | Chicago, IL United States | 04/01/2004
(2 out of 5 stars)
"Don't let the cover photo or the "daffiest, laffiest" tag fool you; there isn't much comedy here. What there is, is a modestly talented singing group that does some old-time favorites like "Sister Kate" as well as newer tunes. "Salt", the only overtly humorous song here, is funny more for the lameness of the attempted Yiddish accent than for anything else.
On the better side, one of the singers sounds a bit like Louis Prima, and a couple of the cuts could almost have come from Prima's 40's band.
The band, incidentally, seems to get in the way a lot here - especially when strings are added. Since we are told the Vagabonds are also talented instrumentalists, it would be nice to be able to hear whether they can play.
There is a peculiar sub-genre of music dating from the 50's-60's that is so big, amorphous, and ultimately obscure that no retro fad can ever do more than scratch the surface of it. I'm talking about the stuff that fell through the cracks of musical categorization. The stuff dating from the days when demand for records to play on one's new hi-fi was so great that literally anybody could make a record. The retro-lounge-exotica craze of the middle 90's rediscovered a small part of it, but enough to show that a lot of this stuff was better left undiscovered.
If you are a diehard devotee of undiscovered 50's-era kitsch (I confess to being susceptible to some of it), I can rather tepidly recommend it. But don't buy it if you are a newcomer to the field; you won't know what to make of it.
It may well be that the Vagabonds were a laff riot in person. However, this CD (which, by the way, is only 28 minutes long) does not give the listener any sense of that."
Track Listings (10) - Disc #1