Glee: The Music, Volume 1
Glee cast
Sony Music
The TV season isn’t halfway over, but a 17-track CD of the musical highlights from the Fox comedy “Glee” is already in stores. The show isn’t any kind of runaway hit, but it has attracted a devoted fan base. Fox is doing its best to promote the show — to the point of having cast members sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the network’s broadcast of last Saturday’s World Series game.
Equal parts “Melrose Place” and “American Idol,” the show follows the aspirations of a motley group of teenagers in the glee club of a suburban high school in western Ohio. The Machiavellian maneuvering of the status-obsessed youth is exceeded only by that of their teachers. The show can be darkly comic, but is basically good natured, and conventional in its use of teen stereotypes.
There’s the quarterback whose participation in the glee club gets him in hot water with his jock pals. There’s the pious cheerleader who, despite holding the presidency of the school’s Celibacy Club, winds up pregnant in the show’s fourth episode.
But it’s not the plotlines or acting that makes the show a cult favorite. If you were among the millions who watched a YouTube video of a gaggle of groomsmen and bridal attendants sashay into a church as the auto-tuned strains of Chris Brown’s “Forever” blared away, you know that the simple joys of the impromptu song-and-dance number are making a comeback in popular culture. The show preserves the sense of spontaneity that makes musical theater so joyful — the sudden, seemingly unrehearsed bursting into song.
The leading voices on the show have authentic Broadway voices, and the performances are full-throated and convincing. Matthew Morrison, who plays the glee club’s faculty adviser Will Schuester, does a passing impression of Kanye West on “Gold Digger.” Amber Riley as Mercedes Jones belts out a powerful cover of Jazmine Sullivan’s “Bust Your Windows,” complete with the tango-tinged gypsy violins from the original. Lea Michele as club diva Rachel Berry rocks Celine Dion’s “Taking Chances” as if she were going for the win on “American Idol.”
Like “Idol” songs, the covers of contemporary pop tunes and classic hits are assayed here with an almost aggressive lack of imagination. Few of the arrangements veer very far from the original versions — with the notable exception of a soft-shoe version of the Billy Idol hit “Dancing With Myself.”
Vocal harmonies are used cleverly to mirror string and synth orchestrations on tracks from Journey and Queen, and the ubiquitous hand-clapping is suggestive of the school chorus milieu. Still, listeners who aren’t big fans of the show will be forgiven for thinking of “Glee” as an exercise in professional-grade karaoke.
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