BLUE SKIES – SETH MACFARLANE (Verve Records/Republican Records)
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Yet another album from Seth MacFarlane, his seventh since 2014. The album is filled with some standards as well as some lesser-known songs from the likes of Irving Berlin, Sammy Cahn, Edward Heyman and Frank Loesser, all given the big band jazz treatment that we come to expect from Mr MacFarlane.
Tracks are: ‘It’s You or No One’, ‘No Moon At All’, ‘You’ll Get Yours’, ‘A Hundred Years From Today’, ‘If I Were a Bell’, ‘Out of Nowhere’, ‘On Green Dolphin Street’, ‘That Old Feeling’, ‘Blue Skies’, ‘It Could Happen To you’, ‘I Didn’t Know About You’, ‘You Turned the Tables on Me’, Never In a Million Years’ and ‘Unless I Do It all With You’.
The musicians (Chuck Berghofer, Peter Erskine, Larry Koonse, Dan Higgins and Tom Ranier) give great backing to the tracks, but I feel we have heard it all before. MacFarlane has a pleasant voice; however it is always in the back of your mind as to whether his albums would be as popular if he weren’t such a well-known actor and genius behind Family Guy, American Dad, etc. A man of a million voices, one always thinks of Sinatra when listening to his tracks and you can’t help feeling that the mimic is to the fore and that we are never hearing the real MacFarlane. I may be doing him a disservice. Perhaps he does have a natural voice like Sinatra and Bublé mixed but, even so, we have heard it all before.
I know this will be as popular with his followers as his last six outings, but it is one I won’t be keeping on the record shelf – sorry.
Nick Wakeham
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