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Michael Buble

Michael Buble's third studio album is the Big One, through which the Canadian singer and upscale heartthrob emerges as a thoroughly contemporary pop traditionalist.

Respectful of forerunners like Frank Sinatra and Bobby Darin, but not beholden to them, it finds musical common ground among Sinatra, Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, and Leonard Cohen. It is the kind of record that Harry Connick Jr. might make if he took his recording career seriously and didn't insist on being a jack-of-all-trades.

The driving big band arrangements with strings are almost as tasty as the classic Sinatra-Nelson Riddle collaborations of the 1950s. This time Buble, an endearingly cocky performer who likes to play the clown onstage, slaps on the aftershave, straightens his tie and shines his shoes for a heavy date, perhaps a marriage proposal. The album offers the most alluring Sex and the City music to be heard in quite a while.

The smart song choices include a big band version of Cohen's I'm Your Man, which he transforms from a sneak attack into an assertive boast, and a tender Always on My Mind that lifts the song from Nashville to the Rainbow Room. The 1972 Billy Paul hit, Me and Mrs. Jones, is an impassioned, almost frighteningly persuasive ode to adultery in which Buble's real-life sweetheart, the actress Emily Blunt, makes a cameo appearance.

If purists object to Buble's cottony vocals, imperfect enunciation and sometimes casual phrasing, this is how it's done nowadays. The pre-rock tradition has acquired so many layers of cultural implication that singers who take it too seriously tend to sound more like curators than entertainers. In this night at the museum, the fossils come alive.

-- Stephen Holden

New York Times

Posted on Sun, May. 27, 2007



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