Customer Reviews

Perry Como Today

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

 

 

Perry Como Today, is an excellent album for all Como fans. While Boy George and The Pet Shop Boys were hogging the UK charts, Perry Como was in 1987 between the 2nd and 3rd of Feburary crooning his heart away on his 5th and final RCA victor album of the 80's and his last album ever to be recorded!
This CD contains some fine tracks including Making Love To You - a meaningful ballad, Sing Along With Me - A happy-go-lucky tune, The Wind Beneath My Wings - A powerful Bette Midler classic, and, The Best Of Times - A triumphant, knees-up tune!
It's not just the tracks on this album that make it special, this was another first for Mr. C, his first album to be also originally released on CD.
Perry was also 75, 76 that May, and what a way to finish off with such an excellent album, superb!
He rekindles a couple of old classics such as: My Heart Stood Still which was also on the 1968 album 'Look To Your Heart'.
Another great reason to get this album is it shows Perry, unlike Sinatra, Crosby, or Martin, still going at 75, with an album! What an achievement!
His voice is as golden as ever, and I myself am only 15 at present. You can have your Slipknot, Eminem or Marilyn Manson, but the golden voice of Como, digs them deep down in the ground for me!
And by the way, my final thought is, buy this album, before it's too late. Amazon unbelievably have this album in brand new original stock, buy now!

God Bless You
Perry!

x

(Review by: Matthew Long)

Perry Como Today, is an excellent album for all Como fans. While Boy George and The Pet Shop Boys were hogging the UK charts, Perry Como was in 1987 between the 2nd and 3rd of Feburary crooning his heart away on his 5th and final RCA victor album of the 80's and his last album ever to be recorded!
This CD contains some fine tracks including Making Love To You - a meaningful ballad, Sing Along With Me - A happy-go-lucky tune, The Wind Beneath My Wings - A powerful Bette Midler classic, and, The Best Of Times - A triumphant, knees-up tune!
It's not just the tracks on this album that make it special, this was another first for Mr. C, his first album to be also originally released on CD.
Perry was also 75, 76 that May, and what a way to finish off with such an excellent album, superb!
He rekindles a couple of old classics such as: My Heart Stood Still which was also on the 1968 album 'Look To Your Heart'.
Another great reason to get this album is it shows Perry, unlike Sinatra, Crosby, or Martin, still going at 75, with an album! What an achievement!
His voice is as golden as ever, and I myself am only 15 at present. You can have your Slipknot, Eminem or Marilyn Manson, but the golden voice of Como, digs them deep down in the ground for me!
And by the way, my final thought is, buy this album, before it's too late. Amazon unbelievably have this album in brand new original stock, buy now!

God Bless You
Perry!

x

Perry Como at 75 retains much of vocal prowess in this 1987 recording, but his song selection could have been better. He sings about 'making love' in two of his 12 selections and at other times has to compete with an ever present all-girl chorus. The Wind Beneath My Wings, Butterfly and Bless the Beasts and the Children are all superb. His big band take on That's What Friends are For works, but his Hawaiian love song is wildly out of place.

I agree with my compatriot below that "The Wind Beneath My Wings" is a great record and could have been a hit - coming two years BEFORE Bette Midler's platinum record of it. Still, I think some of the other fine recordings on this album deserve attention too. "Do You Remember Me" is a wonderfully sentimental ballad well-suited to the septuagenarian Como. "Bless The Beasts And The Children" is a song with a message; in my view, there's a clearly discernible argument here in favour of the humane treatment of animals. It should be remembered that Como was always a devout Catholic. It was rare that Como ever touched material with a social message, but it's nice that he chose to do so for his last album. "My Heart Stood Still" is, of course, a key entry from Rodgers & Hart in the Great American Songbook, but Nick Perito's arrangement is unusual, even a bit quirky in comparison to other more grandiose arrangements, such as that by Nelson Riddle for Sinatra. Como clearly understands the low-key arrangement and sings it effectively. The key performance on this album, however, is, in my view, "That's What Friends Are For", in which Perito opts for an up-tempo big-band arrangement, very different from the arrangement in the best-selling recording in which Stevie Wonder's harmonica is central. This recording proves how well Como could swing - something he unfortunately never did often enough. The female vocal chorus on the track sounds somewhat anachronistic, but, otherwise, it's an outstanding recording, reminding us that although he may not be making new records any longer, we can always count on him to be there for us through the records he made!

This is Perry's final album for RCA recorded in February, 1987. It was a joint production of Perry's own company ( Roncom ) and his talented conductor Nick Perito. All of the songs were arranged and conducted by Perito and the overall recording quality is superb. Recorded at Evergreen Studios, Burbank, California, the final album was mastered in New York by RCA's Jack Adelman. Two of the songs "The Best of Times" and "You're Nearer" are new versions of earlier recordings, the latter having been recorded almost twenty years earlier for Perry's beautiful album "Look To Your Heart" RCA LSP-4052. Amazingly, Perry's re-recording of "You're Nearer" is a virtual mirror image of the original performance . . . demonstrating very little change in Perry's voice at age 75 than when he was merely 56 at the time of the original recording. The highlight of this album is surely "The Wing Beneath My Wings" which could easily have been Perry's last "Gold" single had BMG been more attentive to business . . . or so the story goes! But that song and this whole album are Como classics nevertheless! This is Perry's only album released simultaneously on vinyl and compact disc. Strangely, BMG has not re-released even one of Perry's popular music albums in the CD format within North America . . . though many of them have been re-released in Japan. Buy this CD quickly before they decide to eliminate it as well!