I don't have a lot to say about today's offering, particularly not the first of the two I'm sharing. The singer is Eleanor Shaw, who we last heard doing the utterly ridiculous "Ohoo Made a Sing Out of Sex". For this song, "Fountain of Hope", I have listened a few times, and I really don't know - or much care - what she's singing about, not only because it's sounds pretty vapid, but more so because as the song goes on the drummer is killing it. The guitarist has some nice moments, too. This is the same basic minimalist lineup that appeared on Tin Pan Alley for over a decade, but they rarely sounded this good. And for song poem drumming, I usually only expect to hear playing like this on 1960's Preview releases.
Download: Eleanor Shaw: Fountain of Hope
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The flip side is "A Soldier Dies", and I liked this less and less as it went on. First, Eleanor Shaw does not appear to be the right singer for this type of material. But more than that, the gung-ho view of Vietnam soldiers - even at the time of this release (1969 or 1970), but certainly in retrospect - doesn't sit well with me. I daresay at least a good portion of soldiers who found themselves mortally wounded at that point in the war did not consider themselves willingly doing a job "they had to do" or that their deaths allowed others to be free. And when, in the end, the song-poet ties the soldier's death into the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers", that was way too much for me.
Download: Eleanor Shaw: A Soldier Dies
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