Customer Reviews

Strike!

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I saw a group called The Baseballs on Italian TV show "Ti Lascio Una Canzone". I have always loved 50's music and I really liked the song they sang (Hot N'Cold).

I went to the internet to look them up and got the CD "Strike", their rock'n'roll versions in the style of the 50's of modern hits such as Don't Cha by The Pussycat Dolls and Umbrella by Rihanna are awesome!

This is a a great album!

Great covers and perfect for hangouts and possibly bbq's. Very hard not to sing along too, Im well over 6 feet tall and sport a shaved head, so needless to say I get some rather odd looks when Im singing along in the car with the windows down to a 50's cover of "Umbrella"

So who would have thought 4 German guys could take contemporary songs like "You're Hot, You're Cold" and "Umbrella," charge them up and create amazing, high energy, almost-rockabilly versions that are even better than the original versions? That's just what the Baseballs do here -- and if you're hesitant to believe, go listen to their version of Hot/Cold on U-Tube. Great sound, great energy, a joy to listen to. (And all sung in English, btw.) I'm loving it now, and I know this will be great road music when warm weather returns in the spring.

I hate the radio. I hate MTV. I hate modern music with its "artists" that spend more time concocting tired and shockingly predictable publicity stunts to sell records, but I love this album. I literally cannot get enough of it.

One of the things that surprised me is that even though I've been fairly unplugged from the music that's been popular for the past decade, I still found myself familiar with all of these tunes. Even though I was familiar with them, I was not familiar enough to know what the lyrics were until hearing these versions.

One of the things that seems to make this album work is that they maintain my two unwritten (but now written) rules on how to remake a song. These are:
1) Do not slow down the tempo
2) Maintain the melody of the original

Of the songs with originals of which I am familiar, these remakes seem brilliantly rebuilt while maintaining the core melody of the original. More often than not, these remakes have a faster and peppier tune that really breathes new life into them.

I'm sure both rules can be broken with success, but I believe it is so difficult to do that it should not be tried. For example, there's a band named Cake that remade the 70s tune "I Will Survive". I was expecting a rocking and fun version of that cheesy tune, I mean the band's name is Cake, right? Who hates a good cake you know? Well, they completely blew it. The tempo was slowed to the point the song was as energetic as a funeral dirge. As for the other rule, just listen to the beginning of any US sporting event and you will surely hear what happens when an "artist" reimagines the melody to the national anthem. It almost seems like the arrogance of your typical successful band forces them to ensure that their remake will suck to one degree or another.

That said, their followup album, "Strings N Stripes", does not hook me. Like this album, the songs are expertly performed but I think the slow tempo of the songs just fails to make them as enjoyable as they should be. I still haven't been able to sit through the entire album while I can play Strike repeatedly without a problem. Generally I get about 5-6 songs into "Strings N Stripes" and then go back to Strike.

So instead of buying an ensemble of 3rd world children to stage as fashion accessories or walking around in a suit made of meat, this band is actually taking the unconventional route and using musical talent to achieve success. Yup, this band really is old fashioned!

The description of this CD shows track listings for two discs. You will only get one disc. Why do they show the listing for disc two? I am very disappointed. I bought this cd because I like their version of Chasing Cars, but it doesn't appear on the cd I got.