Best Crooners Juke Box Hits Collection - Classic Music for Relaxation & Nostalgia | Perfect for Home, Parties & Vintage Lovers

This is a near-worthless box of haphazard tracks from an unknown Dutch label that, regardless of its deceptive title, contains hardly any original hits. About half of this sloppy compilation is poorly recorded radio broadcasts, film soundtracks, and live performances, but most of the studio recordings are just as muffled. Highly compressed, they sound as if they were taped from a tinny speaker and mastered at the lowest possible fidelity.The stars include such estimable names as Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Billy Eckstein, Mel Tormé, Sammy Davis Jr., Perry Como, and Nat "King" Cole, but they are interspersed with lesser lights and lounge singers like Johnny Ray, Matt Monro, Frankie Laine, Nelson Eddy, Gordon McRae, Dick Haymes, and Al Martino. Vic Damone's rendition of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" is embarrassingly cheesy, and his painfully lugubrious six-minute demolition of the already-mawkish "MacArthur Park" is the absolute low-point of the set.Nat Cole's "The Man I Love" is an instrumental, and Dean Martin's "Embraceable You" isn't a song so much as it is a minute or so of raucous banter and guffawing from a Las Vegas show by the Rat Pack. There are a few cuts by Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, Al Jolson, and Jimmy Durante, not one of whom can be called a "crooner" as far as I'm concerned, and pop singer Gene Pitney is advertised on the side of the box despite appearing nowhere in the collection!You can easily find reasonably priced and thoughtfully assembled anthologies of this kind of music -- of far higher quality -- from reputable labels like Time-Life or Reader's Digest. But avoid this mess!