|
Album REVIEW - John Hughes
By Malcolm Rogers
John hughes
Wild Ocean,
14th Floor Records
Immaculately packaged, a beautiful young blonde woman, Celtic overtones — this album will probably sell a million.
And it might just deserve to. Tara Blaise can certainly sing, and makes her way through a mixture of Celticy, ambient, big sounding anthems with style and aplomb.
Tara Blaise is only present on a handful of the songs — on most of the tracks John Hughes’ orchestra takes over. Having said that, the instrumentation is superb throughout, particularly when blended with folk instruments such as uilleann pipes and a range of drums — djemba, bongos and bodhrán.
The style falls somewhere between Tubular Bells, the Brendan Voyage and lift music. I mean, it's okay, and I could just about imagine sticking it on in the car. Some of the more upbeat numbers would make not bad trucking music.
One acoustic track does stand out — the plaintive Prelude, starting with some effortless guitar music, inevitably, however, being joined by the orchestra and kitchen sink.
It would be fair to say that the majority of material on this album is
classical-lite.
For all its massive arrangements, choral singing, stadium instrumentation and first class production, Wild Ocean lacks the distinct stamp of individuality to ever enter the pantheon of great Celtic ambient albums which have gone before.
There are too many musical cliches, too many hooks you've heard before and too many samplers trying to sound like tin whistles.
Nonetheless there's some middling to good material here, so cautiously expect to hear a lot more of this album, John Hughes and Tara
Blaise.
| 