Monday, May 24, 2021

These Terrible Elvis Tributes Made Me Cry In The Chapel (Part Three)

It's time to re-visit some really bad Elvis tributes! I've done some of these before (here and here), but I've accumulated a few more to tackle, and this is probably the worst batch so far. So let's get to it!


The Kool Kats - Music of Elvis Presley

Well, the cover has some shiny embossed gold lettering on the cover which is nice, but it doesn't scan well. Honestly, this CD is the best one of the lot. The covers are actually quite faithful to the originals, but you can tell this isn't Elvis. They were kind enough to make "Performed by The Kool Kats" in small dark text to fool all the baby boomers into buying this. How nice of them to rip off people on a fixed income.

Listen to Love Me Tender


Big Ross & The Memphis Sound - Elvis Presley's Golden Hits

Pickwick was kind enough to boldly state that Big Ross is the one singing on this album, but somebody obviously saw the name "Elvis" on this record at Woolco and wasted their $1.77 on it. Pickwick did a really excellent job mixing in a low buzzing noise throughout the whole recording.

The song "Suspicious Minds" is absolutely flat and lifeless, and the back up singer (yes, there's only one) sounds like she's bored out of her skull. On the plus side, they actually did the false ending on it. Most Elvis tribute albums don't bother with it because they already have the shopper by the balls with the word "Elvis" on the cover. "It's Now or Never" keeps the lifeless trend going, but Big Ross tries to make it fancy by doing his over-the-top vocal performance. All the other songs are pretty mediocre.

Listen to Suspicious Minds

Listen to It's Now Or Never


Jesup Singers - Heartbreak Hotel, Don't Be Cruel, and others

We know who this is just by the extremely loud cover art.. It's our friends at Fantastic F / Deville / Thunderbird Productions! Why did this company need so many different names? What are they trying to hide? Drugs? Deep fried peanut butter & banana sandwiches? 8-tracks that kill people during the first play? Who knows!

These covers are pretty bad, but we've come to expect that from Fantastic F. The guy talking through "Are You Lonesome Tonight" sounds like he's reading out a list of camping supplies that he can't use because of the pandemic. When he's singing "Hound Dog", he sounds like he's got a really bad chest infection. The guy on the guitar thinks he's Jimi fucking Hendrix. After the singer downs a bottle of Tequila, he slobbers his way through the song "Love Me". What glorious talent!

Listen to Are You Lonesome Tonight

Listen to Hound Dog

Listen to Love Me

Listen to Love Me Tender


Elvis Wade - It's Been 10 Years

So what's even better than a bunch of shitty Elvis covers? How about a bunch of shitty original songs about Elvis sung by a guy trying to sound like Elvis? The original songs occupy about half of the album with the other half being mediocre covers. My copy is autographed by the fake King himself. Each of the original songs are about how dead Elvis is, and make this album a truly miserable listening experience. One of the songs (The King is Gone) was written by another Elvis Impersonator named Ronnie McDowell who I covered in one of my previous entries. There seriously needs to be an intervention to stop Elvis impersonators from writing songs.

Wanna know something crazy about this guy? He's married to Sandy Posey! Honestly, I'd rather listen to her music instead of this piece of junk.

Listen to What's Gonna Happen To Your Memory

Listen to Memories of the King

Listen to The King Is Gone

Listen to It's Been 10 Years


Various Artists - Tribute to Elvis

There's a lot of people in the record collecting community who scoff at Pickwick's albums. Little do they know that Pickwick was simply distributed much better than the grotesque steaming shit that came from Canada's Arc Records. Personally, I found the Pickwick Elvis album to be of better quality than this one. This disaster was distributed by Arc International and apparently made it's way into my hands from England. I feel like I must apologize to all the Brits out there on behalf of Arc Records for stinking up their country.

The most unique thing about this record is that it contains Elvis songs that aren't generally found on other Elvis tribute albums. Some of the odd choices are "Wild in the Country", "Wooden Heart", "A Mess of Blues", "King Creole", and "Let's Have a Party". Not only that, all the artists are actually credited on this album. Although it's a sign of decency, it's not a sign of quality.

The covers are fucking terrible. The performances are fucking terrible. The quality of the vinyl is fucking terrible. I've had bad luck trying to clean records from Arc because the vinyl usually degrades with every cleaning. I wouldn't be surprised if they chopped up previous performers who didn't sell enough records and threw the body parts into the vat of molten vinyl to help keep the costs down. In summary, I transferred a fairly dirty and noisy LP.

The singer of "Hard Headed Woman" decided to sing "Ah-heh-heh" instead of "Uh-huh-huh", making it sound like he's giggling from someone tickling his balls with a feather. "I Got Stung" sounds nothing like the original. "It's Now or Never" has become a really bad spanish song with a shitty Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator singing it. "Jailhouse Rock" is sung by a guy with a bad case of rabies. I wouldn't be surprised if he ate the band after the performance, which may actually be a good thing.

Listen to Jailhouse Rock

Listen to Hard Headed Woman

Listen to I Got Stung

LIsten to It's Now or Never

Listen to Stuck on You


Wow, that was really bad. Perhaps we should take a break from the knock-off artists and review some genuine ones. Could it really happen??? We shall see...

Monday, May 10, 2021

Let's Chew On Some Turds

It's been a while since I posted something. My job has been driving pine cones up my ass, and I've been trying to get my new workspace finished which will probably never be finished at this rate. Anyway, here's some crappy albums. Unfortunately for you, most of these artists play country music. Sorry.

Kenny Parrott - Favourites

NONE of these songs are my favourites.

This is the first Kenny Parrott album I ever purchased (around 10 years ago) and I'm only getting around to it now. I've since reviewed Vol.2 and Vol.3. I think it's absurd how many people from Manitoba (the city of Brandon specifically) are willing travel to Branson Missouri, see Kenny Parrott live, and buy his crappy albums (this one is autographed. Watch me rake in the dillies when I put it up on ebay). I believe this album predates Vol.1 which makes me question Kenny's ability to count.

You know what else is crazy? Kenny's been recording albums since the mid-1980s. You'd think that each one would move him an inch closer to superstardom, but unfortunately Kenny doesn't have a ruler (nor can he count) so he's stuck playing music in Branson Hell for all of eternity.

This tape is nothing but mundane country and adult contemporary garbage. There's no stand out tracks here, but I'll let you guys have one anyway...

Listen to There's a Tear in my Beer


Travis Barre

When my kid was in grade four, he had a teacher named Mr. Barre. Imagine my joy when I found this at the thrift store! Apparently he's just an elementary school teacher by day, but he's a terrible country music artist by night. I think I would have been happier if this album was full of songs about bratty kids who smell like Cheetos. Yes, 60% of all children smell like Cheetos. If you don't believe me, just walk into an elementary school and take a whiff (and then get kicked out like the creep that you are).

On the back of the album, we see that Travis is staring longingly at the guitar's neck, hoping to nibble on it and get it in the mood to play. We also notice that it's an HDCD just in case you crave some extra bits of Travis. Also, why the hell is there a "radio version" of one of the songs on here? Who the hell would want to put this on the radio? He's not singing about fucking someone in the ass, so I don't know why there's a problem with the original version other than it being a lousy song

Listen to Grow Old With Me (the non-radio version)


Lorne Power - My Yellowknife Home

There's no power in this music. It's just wimpy imitation Newfie music with a really bad mix. The rhythm section is brought to you by Casio. I'll give the guy credit though... Nobody else wanted to write a song about Yellowknife.

Listen to My Yellowknife Home


Mark Prindle - Smilehouse: The Tragic Remains of an Abandoned Masterpiece

Whenever I'm working on an album that I'm reviewing on Classical Gas Emissions, I usually skim through each of the songs to make things go faster. With each of the songs on this album averaging one minute in length, I was forced to listen to it from front to back, and it's a VERY difficult listening experience.

So here's how I got this CD... Mark Prindle has a music review site where he used to review entire discographies. I sent him one album he needed to complete a discography, and to show his appreciation, he sent me a copy of this album. It made me question his level of appreciation. If you've ever heard the sound of a garbage truck emptying itself, there's no need for you to pick up this album. It is without a doubt the musical equivalence. 

If my memory serves me correctly, the song titles are just the descriptive file names that Mark used on whatever piece of equipment he made the music on. Then he went back years later and wrote lyrics based on the file names. Here's a few amusing quotes...

Xylodark: "This is the song of Xylodark, Hi everybody my name is Mark"

Popviolin: "My pop plays a violin. He plays it all day! He plays it all night! He plays it for you! He plays it for me!"

President: "Assassinate the president" (looped)

60snoisx: "Let's Put The "60s Noise X" back in "Sex""

8riffs: "This song has 8 riffs and all of them stink"

Keybord: "I was typing on my keyboard. Typing an important word. Along came a bird. And yeah he dropped a turd."

Every song title has a comment in parenthesis at the end of it. Some examples are "country version", "with orchestra" and "karaoke". There's quite a few songs about violins and you get to hear the occasional nice harmony, but most of it sounds like 12 dogs vomiting at the same time.

Listen to Xylodark

Listen to Popviolin


Jack Nelson and Country Line - Recorded Live

So what could be worse than the noisy Mark Prindle album? Well, here's an album that apparently has some sort of a noise gate on it. You only get to hear the loud parts of the songs while the quiet parts are almost completely muted. It's not even a nice and clear loud sound, it's a distorted pile of muddy shit. It also doesn't help that it's country music. I find it hard to believe that these assholes said "Yes! This is a quality product! Let's release it for everyone to be annoyed by it." If I had a recording of my band that sounded this bad, I would keep it for myself and record another live show to hopefully get a better recording. My only guess as to why this thing sounds the way it does is that there was a bunch of hum, hiss, or crackling in the recording, and they filtered the piss out of it to make it sound "better". They should have filtered the whole goddam thing and threw the master recording in the trash.

Listen to Elvira

Listen to Lay You Down


Well, that was fun! I'm thinking of doing another entry on recorded records fairly soon. I've been finding a ton of them lately, and I'm curious to see what kind of ancient recordings are on them. However, I also haven't done any knock-off albums lately, so perhaps I should put that in my sights. Be back soon!