St. Alban's 'A-Team' - Related Image.
I have to say the A-Team CD just blew me away.
Now there are a couple of caveats I have to divulge.
One, is it’s just first impressions - a more thorough review will have to follow, as I just spun it on the commute yesterday and listened to the first half on the commute back in to work today.
And I have to admit I was shocked that I was blown away, and for two reasons.
One, is it’s done by a 'boys and girls club', or to be specific, by St. Alban's Boys and Girls Club. Of course, as I found out later, it does have its own recording studio!
Two, as a balding middle-ager with less than a year left in my forties, I’m hardly going to be on my most familiar turf reviewing a CD advertised as featuring mostly hip hop, R and B and gospel music. I mean, c’mon, I have John Denver in my collection and have had more than one guitar smashed over my head attempting to play Annie’s Song around a campfire (okay I’m half joking there).
And to elaborate on the first caveat, I have to plead that when you put in a CD from an organization listed as a ‘boys and girls’ club, if that’s just about all the information you’re going on, you have certain expectations. And those expectations are that you’ll be reviewing it from, quite literally, the kid-glove perspective that should be quite legitimately afforded our youth.
But this CD was absolutely nothing like that.
The closest experience I can relate to it, for me, is both American Idol and Canadian Idol, which, by the way, I love. Well let me add a caveat to that. I love the talented performances but am sick of all the other shenanigans including the requisite bad auditions and staged judges’ fights. For me, the performances are enough to keep me glued to the screen, make that the only thing that keeps me glued to the screen.
So to me, and I almost apologize to the artists at St. Alban’s, I was kind of shocked at how professional – and good – it was. To me it was like not only listening to American or Canadian Idol, but obviously listening to the best of American or Canadian Idol, albeit one geared more to hip hop, rap, R and B and gospel.
How I found out about this CD is that one of our publications had a story by Dina Diab and photos by Manny Rodrigues on the official CD release party at the Trane Studio, so if you hit this link it will take you to both the story as well as another photo from the opening night.
Here’s a link to St. Alban’s studio music player although I couldn’t seem to get the songs to play on my work computer.
(The above photo included with this blog is of vocalist ‘Whitney’ performing at Trane Studio on Bathurst Street during the St. Alban’s Sound Studio release party for its new CD, ‘A-Team’ on Thursday, Nov. 26.)