#002 – Beauty by Santa Esmerelda

Holy shit.

I think I’m in love with this. This was… unexpected.

You should probably listen to the first side of this album right away so you see what I mean.

So, Santa Esmeralda kicks ass, apparently. I have seen this floating around in one of the dollar bins and thought the cover was horrendous, so of course I had to pick it up.

Seeing as I know NOTHING about Santa Esmeralda, I did a little digging. Turns out they’re a disco band from France and they really really love doing disco covers of pop songs, like The House Of The Rising Sun. The comments, man. The comments are the best part of Youtube.

You can really tell that the band (or a serious fan with a distinct style) has edited parts of their Wikipedia article (so many periods!!!)

They were signed to Casablanca Records, which was known for being a really successful disco label in the 1970s, which is when Santa Esmeralda released this. Kiss is also on this label! It kinda petered out in the 80s, but they did put out the Flashdance soundtrack along with a Robin Williams comedy album.

It went through a revival in the early 2000s, with notable releases coming from Lindsay Lohan and Mika. It was revived yet again with a focus on EDM!

So, back to Santa Esmeralda.

The cover features a hairy beast-like vampire with a normal looking woman hugging him from behind. I’m obviously sensing a Beauty and the Beast type story here. She has a pink flower tucked behind her ear, while vamp dude has a red rose pinned to his jacket. She is wearing a wedding ring, which makes me wonder why she would be a wife to a guy with fangs.

In my search to find out more about the cover, I found this on their Facebook page. It’s so important.

From what I can tell, the hairy guy is named Jimmy Goings and he took over as the lead vocalist for the band in 1979 until 1983. So technically he wasn’t in the band at this point, but the back says “Beauty starring Jimmy Goings” so maybe this was his trial record. I think he passed.

The most expensive copy on Discogs is going for 57 Euros, which means I got a great deal from the dollar bin!

I found Jimmy’s Facebook page on the first page of Google results, and he’s listed as attending “The School of Hard Knox”  but it’s unclear if this was before, during, or after recording this album.

I know that most of you are here in search of a good wine pairing for this album. If you want to stare at the album art in silence, I would suggest a reasonably priced Cabernet Sauvignon.

Verdict: Weird. But – good. Another 4/5 on the weird scale.

#001 – National Anthems Of The World

Title: National Anthems Of The World

Artist: The Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Released: After 1961, before 1979

Acquired: Pile of discarded records at record store

This was an accidental find in a pile of unplayable records I scooped up from work for an ongoing project. There’s a few scratches, but it was mostly the dirt that bothered me. After a clean I found it to be playable on one of my crappy systems. Sounds okay.

I’m super confused when it comes to the date it was released. The Vienna State Opera Orchestra recorded an updated version of national anthems in 1994, and when I visited the iTunes page for the album it gave no indication of this earlier release.

I can’t find Uinted Kingdom on a map!

After doing a quick search on the label, Everest Records, I found this 1961 catalogue and couldn’t find it on there, but I’m super interested in the “Classical Spice Shelf” release they have listed… someone has to have that around!

This album really sparked my interest because I have a weird lifelong interest in flags (stemming from one of the only “computer games” we had as kids… it was an interactive atlas with a quiz function) and because I love history. It’s weird to think about how Russia was the Soviet Union, and how the Soviet Union’s flag was just accepted as it was, whereas we are accustomed to Russia’s current flag. These are things that keep me up at night.

So it looks like Everest Records is a now-defunct classical music label based out of Long Island.

I also found the conductor on IMDB. Hans Hagen (who was born at 8:15 a.m. and is an Aquarius, which, according to Glamour Magazine’s horoscope compatibility meter, means our friendship would be “difficult but rewarding”) died in 1979, so there’s no way this could really have been recorded after.

The back of the album features notes written by Giveon Cornfield, who was a former executive at Everest. Some interesting highlights:

• The oldest existing national anthem belongs to the Netherlands. Called Wilhelmus Van Nassouwe (William of Nassau), this anthem has been around since 1626.
  • If you think that O Canada is hard to remember, well, this baby has fifteen stanzas. They name drop a lot in it too – six different guys are mentioned. If I wrote about six guys in one song, people would think I’m weird.
• “Quebec’s nationalists, of course, have their own fiery anthems, but these are unlikely to gain wide currency.”
  • Cornfield seemed pretty unbiased up until this point (he even just talked about anthems during Hitler’s time in Germany and Mussolini’s time in Italy without much opinion). What happened, Cornfield?

Verdict: This is my first one, but it is definitely one of the weirdest I’ve ever found. I’m rating this a tentative 4/5 on the weird scale.