Well, it was bound to happen eventually. I’ve found a Fats Domino album I don’t like. It’s hard to know who to blame for this, Domino, his producers, the record label. The problem is that someone had the bright idea of adding strings to Domino and, at this late date, there’s probably no way to know for sure who that someone was. Regardless, it was an awful decision. The very first track, Put Your Arms Around Me Honey is just godawful. The strings are just cacophonous, playing things that don’t seem to mesh with Domino’s song at all. The rest of the songs aren’t that bad, but the strings are intrusive and unnecessary on all but a couple of tracks. The other contender for worst song on the record is Magic Isles, a molasses slow Hawaiian baIlad; if Fats Domino seems not particularly well suited to luau music, well, you’re not wrong. It’s not really a bad thing that they’re trying to change things up a bit; in 1960, Domino had been recording for a decade and he found his lane early and stayed there for most of that time. And maybe I have to give them a bit of leeway because the strings are used really well on one song on the record, Natural Born Lover, which is an absolutely perfect and very unique recording. It’s easily Domino’s most emotionally complex performance; he has a lot of melancholy, but, at the same time, the song is about the narrator having just gotten over a break-up, so there’s hope and optimism as well. It’s almost five minutes long, which is an insane length for a Domino song; there are six songs on this album that aren’t even two minutes long. It’s like no other Domino song I’ve heard and it’s one of my favorites for exactly that reason. So, the strings perhaps aren’t a bad idea all by themselves, but they’re certainly poorly used on every other song. The strings don’t show up on The Sheik of Araby, which is a stripped down recording and it’s my second favorite on the album, politically incorrect as it is. Anyway, this is the first Domino album I genuinely wouldn’t recommend. The song choices aren’t great and the strings sink most of the tracks. That said, it is, as they all are, only around thirty minutes long, so it still moves pretty quickly and mainly stays disappointing instead of getting annoying. Bottom line though: this just doesn’t sound like Fats Domino; sometimes changing up their sound works wonders for artists, but not in this case. I must say, it has the best cover of any of his albums so far. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – heavily drenched with intrusive strings and featuring several very weak songs, this is an album that doesn’t even sound much like Fats Domino; a disappointing, mediocre work. 2 ½ stars.