Customer Reviews

Us An' Them

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This collection of fifteen national anthems and an Esperanto anthem for world peace were assembled by Gary Dial and Terre Roche as an investigation of how alien things become familiar, and the results are quite beautiful. Arrangements vary, drawing inspiration from indigenous musical traditions, and while the producers started by recording themselves performing the songs (that was nearly twenty years ago), in time they met musicians and singers from the countries represented and taped them playing and singing. Some of the songs have been rendered by American singers (Maggie Roche, for instance) in English (Austria, Jamaica, Israel, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Greenland, and France's anthems are performed in English), which in some cases is too bad, but the Italian entry's in operatic Italian, the Brazilian entry's in Portuguese, the Irish entry is in Irish, the Tibetan entry's in Tibetan, and so on. The United States anthem, performed by Terre, is quite fine.

Imagine Paul Winter getting drunk one night and going home with Enya... only their version of "doing the dirty deed" is to butcher the anthems of unsuspecting nations until dawn.

I ordered this CD after hearing an interview on NPR. The anthem played on the radio was the Brazilian one... sung by a Brazilian... in Portuguese.. in a style native to Brazil. And that's what the CD opens with. Nearly all the rest are performed (nearly always in English) in the rather vaguely dissonant, lazy, pseudo-jazzy style ideally suited to the temperament of a group of Bay Area New Age practitioners.

The most unbearable of the anthems is that of France. Not only is it performed in the aforementioned style, but it is performed in English with an uber-rhotic "r" that I have heretofore only ever heard from a Czech high school student trying to imitate an American accent. Austria's is nearly as bad, and would no doubt bring most natives of that country to their knees, begging for another Anschluß with Germany.

There are a couple of exceptions (Israel for example, which somehow sounds like it was arranged by the manager of a South African "Up With People!" tour), but by and large this album is redundant and just bad. Don't buy it. I'm only glad that I bought it from a vender who was unloading it for under $2.