May 06, 2008 @ 9:00 am

Dame Shirley Bassey, "Get the Party Started"

by: Michaelangelo Matos

When she really goes for it, the results can be ghastly.

Of course Shirley Bassey recorded three James Bond themes: Her big, empty voice provided a perfect overture for movies that lived and died on overblown grandeur and showy gimmicks. She’s the female Tom Jones, a Welshwoman whose walloping pipes are permanently set on overkill—only Bassey lacks Jones’ good-time brio and agreeably clunky rhythmic sense. Get The Party Started is billed as Bassey’s first album in nearly a decade, which is and isn’t true. Apart from two newly recorded songs, this is a remix disc, and despite some talented participants (Belgian electro-disco duo The Glimmers, London broken-beat combo Bugz In The Attic), little of it works.

Bassey’s sonorous belt is part of the problem—the smartest stuff here is the subtlest, as with Dobie’s remix of Bassey’s cover of Lionel Richie’s “Hello.” Much of it, though, is trip-hoppy lounge-pop not worth the two-drink minimum. And when she really goes for it, the results can be ghastly, as on the new, badly misconceived title cut, a version of Pink’s 2001 smash. When Bassey declares, “I can go for miles, if you know what I mean,” it’s hard not to respond, “Can you, now?”

Article tags: Dame Shirley Bassey, Revolutions