Glee : The Music Volume 1 A Review

Here's a review about Glee : The Music Volume 1 by Pete Paphides. He rated it 3 out of five stars.

Read the article below.

“High School Musical with added irony,” cry Glee’s detractors, and they may have a point. But to those of us with children, who have spent the past three years putting up with the irony-free version, that would be no bad thing.

If you’re seeking to pinpoint the ironic intent of the series, in which a group of high-school outsiders form a singing ensemble, then it’s the music you’ll most likely alight on. Glee’s show-choir arrangements of 1980s FM rock mainstays such as Don’t Stop Believin’ have been central to its success. But does irony really lurk here? In a post-Guilty Pleasures age, British pop fans have come to realise that irony is really just an aesthetic quarantine into which we stick it before we welcome it back into our world. The scale of Glee’s US success suggests that America is learning, too. For all of that, a whole series — or, in this case, album — in which songs by bad-haired pop pariahs received the Glee makeover would be a little much.

The best thing about Glee: The Music — Volume 1 is the sense that the series’ music supervisor, P. J. Bloom, chose the songs most suitable for the treatment, regardless of genre, era or fashionability. It takes some vision to see showtune potential in hits as disparate as Avril Lavigne’s Keep Holding On and Jill Scott’s Hate on Me; borderline genius to turn Kanye West’s Gold Digger into a Sister Act-style massed-ranks psychic makeover and Billy Idol’s Dancing with Myself into a Gene Kelly-style meditation.

Bloom and his cohorts come more unstuck in their attempts to emulate the already preposterous harmonies of Queen’s Somebody to Love, while Rihanna’s Take A Bow struggles to be anything other than a dispensable facsimile of the original — but such glitches do little to detract from the celebratory spirit of the entire enterprise. If you feel you need irony to enjoy great pop, you might find this album more useful than you imagined.

Source : Timesonline.com