The Album Club: "One From the Heart" OST by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle
 

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Hope this goes down better than my last choice!

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I'll just make the point that it's incorrect to consider this a duet album. Of the eleven tracks here (the twelfth being an instrumental) only three are duets. The rest are either Waits or Crystal singing on their own.

This is obviously the worst music Crystal Gayle has ever been involved in. The song writing is hackneyed and cliche. It's completely soulless, connect the dots coloring book with all the artistry of putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Waits is a disgusting talentless hack. Nothing about him is genuine. He's like a self-conceived boy band except he apparently has the gall to take his obviously premeditated musical failures seriously. How it is that so many people lack the intuition to see through this garbage is beyond me. If you like this please do some soul searching. It's that bad. Tiger Army from last week is bad but not offensively bad like this. If you can't see through Waits you have work to do. Make it a goal of yours to understand why this sucks so bad.

Meet me out back and bring some weapons cos you're gonna need them!
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Jazz for people who feel threatened by the freedom that defines jazz worth listening to. I love Tom Waits' later material and think that anyone who can listen to Real Gone without becoming a fan should reconsider their lives, but I've never been into the earlier, schmaltzy fart in a smoke filled lounge, side of Waits (yes, that includes Closing Time). Crystal Gale adds nothing to this record, as she takes a very safe approach to complement the dullness of this record. If I had to say anything positive about her performance, I'd say that Old Boyfriends doesn't fail in terms of melody. Instrumental Montage had cool sax, Little Boy Blue had a nice outro, and You Can't Unring a Bell had great percussion. Then there are the rest of the tracks that are ridiculously corny. It makes me sad that there are people out there who can listen to a song like Take Me Home and be touched.

There was no need to make this record. It's competent enough to abide by well-established rules, but it clings to them so firmly that it gives us nothing to look for. I only listened to this once because I've already heard this album 1000 times from other artists and I'm not exactly excited to return to them either. I was disappointed and honestly thought that your last pick was better. 2/10

I'm going to listen to Bad As Me to wash this album out of my ears.

A few things from the posts above I don't quite agree with: a) I wouldn't call Tom Waits a talentless hack, but I would say he is very fake. Whether that's a bad thing depends on how you take it. I don't think he intends to deceive anyone. I just think he loves the aesthetic of smokey old jazz of a particular kind, so he tries to evoke that kind of vibe. His vocal style and voice is obviously 100% affected, so it's really up to how you take it as a listener. Is he successfully evoking a style or is he unintentionally parodying it? You be the judge.
B) The notion that the only kind of jazz worth listening to is the kind that is built around improvisation. I happen to quite like vocal jazz of the kind that was popular before jazz became too weird for mainstream audiences. It's just a problem that a lot of jazz like that is incredibly, offensively dull.

And that kind of brings us to this record. It's not quite horribly dull, but I'm not exactly riveted by it either. It's very mannered, very controlled, very carefully manicured to sound in a very particular way. Old Hollywood romanticism and exactly that kind of romantic ideal of jazz that Waits was all about in his early years. I kind of like it from a conceptual standpoint and could mention a couple records of a similar style that do it right, but One From The Heart really threatens to put me to sleep. Aside from a few scattered moments, the music is pretty much just... there.

I'm not too sold on either vocalist either. Waits can do better, but I don't know anything about Crystal Gayle. I'd guess she's a country singer, but I don't know. She doesn't sound like a jazz singer to me.

If I was watching the movie that this is the soundtrack for, I'd probably find the music perfectly fitting, but as an album experience, it doesn't quite work for me. I'm finding it nearly impossible to stay attentive for more than a couple minutes at a time. I'm just bored out of my mind long before the 42 minute mark, where the album bows out.

So what to make of it? In small doses, it's perfectly pretty and well made, but I'm also bored and can't really be bothered with paying much attention to most of the material on the album. That's not a good sign. What good is it going to do to defend it by pointing out how well made it is, if it just doesn't do much to move me? Music should be involving. I think my conclusion will be that this album is probably pretty good, but not my cup of tea. If I want to hear something similar, with a similar vibe, I'll put on the Joni Mitchell album Both Sides Now.

4/10. Just below average. Sort of nice, but also sort of boring. Like a wedding celebration with a bunch of people you don't really have anything in common with. Waits can do better - and in a similar style too.

I think that the jazz that this album calls back to like Holiday and stuff can be incredible. I was saying this album is for people who think that even traditional jazz is scary.

Ok, so I understand what you mean now. Like One From the Heart is the training wheels version of vocal jazz. Like Norah Jones. Superficially similar, but smoothed out to the point where it becomes sort of toothless.

Well said. Fantastic retort.

The problem with him, and I've said this before, besides the one song, Heart of a Saturday Night, he completely lacks substance. Everything about him. His voice, his song structures, the percussion he uses, and especially posing as somehow experimental or avant garde. Nothing about him is sincere, not even his falseness. He's hollow. Fool's gold. All facade.