Artist: Roy Orbison
Album: Unchained Melodies
Label: Sony/Legacy
Release Date: 11.16.2018
Last year Roy Orbison’s sons put out a A Love So Beautiful, a collection of Orbison vocal outtakes digitally paired with arrangements for the Royal Philharmonic, to (deservedly) tremendous success. Now they’ve followed up with another in the same vein.
Unchained Melodies begins with the almost title tune, “Unchained Melody,” which—for Roy Orbison—comes across bloodless, and therein lies the problem with the entire CD. Roy Orbison’s operatic vocals, his dynamism in uptempo songs, his theatricality and his enormous ability to communicate passion is strangely lacking in many of the choices—mostly ballads—here.
About half the songs were written or co-written by Orbison himself, and they fare the best among the 15 tracks. Orbison breathes life into “Falling” and “Careless Heart” (co-written with Diane Warren and Albert Hammond),“Walk On” and “Crawling Back,” co-written with frequent collaborator Bill Dees (“Pretty Woman”).
Unexpectedly for this syrup-averse writer, “Danny Boy” moved me. Thank Roy, the CD finishes off with “Heartbreak Radio,” an upbeat number with a strong baseline and a welcome duet with country music singer/songwriter Cam. The album might have benefited from a few more tempo changes in an disc that, overall, blends nicely into the background of an elevator. You can’t really go wrong with Roy Orbison, but this doesn’t do a legend justice, and this elevator goes down more often than up.
—Suzy Nelson
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