Before I start this review I would just like to thank everyone for being patient with me. I will do the 7 reviews I missed before the end of the year!
This week I listened to Collective Works by the Boston Common. The Barbershop style has always been a passing interest of mine. It is such a unique style of music; four people singing together in complex harmonies. It also tickles my fascination of older and historically significant forms of media, as Barbershop has been around for a long time. I will not pretend to be an expert on the style, as my interest in it has always been from the perspective of a distant observer. My first real introduction was, like many in the modern day, through clips of the quartet the Newfangled Four about 7 or 8 years ago. Since then my interest for it has come and gone, but in recent months I've come back to it. It is always something that is there when I need it. As a part of this recent exploration I decided I would try to listen to some other quartets outside of the few that I tended to favor. Through this exploration I had heard a snippet of the refrain from the song "That Old Quartet of Mine". I thought the harmony was beautiful and the topic seemed interesting to me, wondering about your quartet from years prior. I went to the internet and the main result was a performance from the 1980 International Quartet Competition by a quartet known as the Boston Common, this performance being significant for them as it was this competition where they won 1st place, a performance that seems somewhat legendary from what I have gathered reading about them online (like I said, not an expert). I quickly fell in love with the performance, listening to it over and over; such beautiful harmonies that blend so well together. Since it was an older performance, it was also in a more older style of Barbershop that I've started to prefer during my recent fascination with the style. From here, I took it upon myself to listen to more of this quartet as I really felt that I would end up falling in love with more of their performances. This (finally) brings me to this week's album, Collective Works, being a collection of all of their studio material. Now, I try not to do compilation albums for these reviews as I believe in the sanctity of the album format, but I did not have much of a choice in the matter as the most easily available recordings of the Boston Common are either this or a 1982 live performance, which was a good choice, but I wanted the full experience. I would say that I enjoyed a good majority of the tracks in this compilation, but there is a very clear distinction in the songs that I enjoyed more than the others. The slower, more ballad-like songs were certainly the ones I preferred overall. This is very good for me if I only listened to what is considered Disc 1, as most of those songs fit into that category. But in Disc 2 there are significantly fewer of those songs, which was somewhat disappointing as I feel that is what the Boston Common sing best. There is a certain sense of forlorn in the way the Quartet sings, especially the lead, that fits the ballad-like songs very well, but then sounds somewhat out of place on the upbeat, stereotypical Barbershop sounding songs. Two that come to mind from the album would be "There'll Be No New Tunes on This Old Piano" and "Barbershop Strut". These songs in particular just sound so strange being sung by the Boston Common, they don't really sound very upbeat or happy singing them. Not that they are bad performances by any means, but certainly not as good as their ballads.
It's also now a good time to mention something important about the history of this quartet. In 1982, their lead Rich Knapp was in a devastating motor accident that left him unable to properly tune his singing voice for a long time, so for a while they had another singer, Tom Spirito from the quartet the Four Rascals, fill in. The last 10 songs on this were songs with Tom Spirito singing lead, including the only version of "That Old Quartet of Mine". His voice is quite different from that of Rich Knapp's, much bassier than Knapp's. It certainly creates a unique blend between him and the rest of the quartet, but I much prefer Knapp's more reedy voice. The sudden change kind of brings a bit of a sour end to the album. I understand that this was likely just the chronological order of all of these recordings, but it feels a little wrong. I went through more than hour of listening to one singer, for it to suddenly switch. It is fine though, as the album ends on the song that started it all for me, "That Old Quartet of Mine". I was already familiar with this version of the song, and it is just as beautiful as all their other versions. That is a song that, despite the somewhat melancholic nature of its lyrics, still brings me joy to listen to.
This was a good album, but I cannot see myself coming back and listening to it front to back like I have other albums that I have enjoyed as a part of this journey. The insane length paired with there being a lot of songs in a style I'm not particularly fond of from this quartet stop me from being able to listen to it more than the two times I did for this review. I will, however, be certainly coming to individual songs that I have enjoyed. I will never stop thinking about my own old quartet (while not a Barbershop quartet just a quartet of friends), nor will I stop thinking about this old quartet either. 7/10 album
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