78
(Pop & Jazz) There's nothing like an enigmatic statement in the first paragraph to make you want to read the second, so here goes: The Golden Earrings (kursivering Vaandrager) would have been a smash... in 1965. Now to explain.
Try to remember back: all of the major popgroups were keeping much to the middle of the road, although the heavies, like the Beatles and the Stones, were beginning to chafe under the uncomfortable restrictions of the three-minute hitsong. The explosion came a la Sgt Pepper and the rest is pophistory. If now, 68, a group tries to make it, they have to have a new sound and high standards. The music business is not unlike the old days of vaudeville: if the act was bombing, it was quick yanked off stage.
Today, if a group hasn't got IT musically, out comes that came with no regard for necks or years of struggling (kursivering Vaandrager) to get out on that stage in the first place.
Winter Harvest is too obviously 1965 vintage. This group hails from Holland, and maybe they got our music late - I don't know. The two best songs in the album (Smoking Cigarettes/In My House) are good for what they are, but I have the feeling that I heard them before. The piano chords and the guitar-lines have been used years ago by the Stones and the Kinks.
Why buy a copy of a Rembrandt if you can get the original for the same price? (kursivering van mij.)
Sometimes their imitation of other groups (and I'm not saying they're doing it consciously) is painfully blatant. At times I hear strains of, surprisingly, groups like Freddy and the Dreamers and Jerry and the Pacemakers.
It's too bad that a group like the Golden Earrings, which is obviously in a rut, is recorded, when there are hundreds of modern and starving musicians around, who would give their last pair of boots to get into a Capitol Recording Studio (kursivering van mij).
I hate to upset international relations, even in this minuscule way, but I'll have to go on record as saying that all that is Golden, does nothing more than just glitter (kursivering
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