Various - Acoustic (Album)
All those people who bought the Café Del Mar compilations from Volume 7 onwards should be shot. The rise of the chillout compilation cd has gotten to such extreme lengths that you can’t even walk into a café without hearing Moby’s Porcelain or Dirty Vegas’ Days Go By. What’s going on? Some guy with an acoustic guitar or some girl with a piano or synthesiser records some lo-fi bullshit about lost love, add it to 15 of the exact same songs from similar artists, slap a picture of a surfer at sunset on the cover and you’ve got yourself a cd that’ll be bought by 15 year-old boys still getting hard-ons over Jack Johnson and 16 year-old girls who think Missy Higgins is the ultimate soul singer of our generation.
This month’s latest offering, effectively titled Acoustic, carries on the trend with depressing efficiency. You can envision the meeting at Mushroom Records when they dreamt up the play list for it: “Why don’t we just get all the major singles that have been played on Triple M, the Net 50 on Triple J and that sold well at HMV and just make a cd with them?” and then some intern with tattoos who’s taking orders for the mornings coffees will say “Yeah, but that’s been done already, that’s why we have such travesties like Music from the Panel and More Music from the Panel and shit like Coastal Chill.”
So the studio execs will drink some coffee, eat some cookies and then get the brilliant idea to add some of the more obscure, like Grandaddy and some of the 80’s classics, like Ron Sexsmith and they’ve got the next feel-good compilation for the summer. If they were really smart, they’d include a trucker hat or pair of Havaianas and go quadruple platinum. They put on Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah for chrissake. If I see one more gushing girl enthuse over how brilliant a songwriter Jeff Buckley was and how Hallelujah was the best song he ever wrote I’ll slap her with her Havaianas and burn her Billabong miniskirt.
I didn’t know whether to be glad when the occasional good song like Tex Perkins and The Dark Horses’ Lucid or Grandaddy’s I’m on Standby made a guest appearance or devastated that they’d been commercially molested on such a bland shade-of-beige compilation. Maybe if they explored some of the bands’ back-catalogue instead of just choosing the songs that got the most airplay it would be a more worthy collection. If they had just delved beyond the songs played on high rotation for bands like the Panics, The Eels, and Magnet, the whole compilation could’ve served as a wonderful little appetizer to each group/artist – introducing the listener to new, fresh sounds that haven’t been played thousands of times over by over enthused radio announcers. Instead I had to fight back the tears when I heard Jamie Cullum cover Radiohead’s High and Dry and thought for a second that I was in David Jones department store. And Xavier Rudd covering The Wind Cries Mary? Fuck, they may as well have included Pete Murray doing Redemption Song and I’d personally deliver the album to all the Jetty Surf stores in Australia.
