Customer Reviews

English Drinking Songs

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A collection of songs that sneaks up on you like a good beer-buzz from a English stout. A great CD to break out at the climax of a party and start singing along to. It's a chain reaction, the more people sing along to it, the more other people want to learn the songs and pretty soon the whole party is singing the songs, especially, Mary May.

OK---it's called "English Drinking Songs" so they've already built some leeway for sloppy singing.

These are the classic, old school, few-folks-know-all-the-words-anymore drinking songs, and I praise the producer for giving this a whirl. The song selection is excellent.

What I do not praise are the production values, which make it sound like the guy with the microphone had difficulty getting a good seat, or a good microphone, and the fact that the old fellow "singing" these songs seems to tiredly stumble through the lyrics, as if they started recording him too late in the evening or weren't paying him in anything but beer. I've been to English pubs where there was a good bit of singing, not just football or rugby or college songs, but the old songs, and this CD seems, well, tired. Honestly, Bob Dylan cannot sing, and admits it, but at least he has inflection. I've got monophonic banjo bluegrass CDs from the early 30s that sound like a Radiohead CD compared to this.

Perhaps, as someone has suggested, this could be used as a karaoke recording, and those listening could voice over the vocalist with more zest!