Based on the beautiful, if somewhat bizarre, cover shot, listeners may expect this to be one of the weirder
Vic Damone albums ever released. The sleeve pictures a downcast but dapper
Damone looking so melancholy that he doesn't seem to notice that he inhabits a surreal world of Roman columns, multi-colored tapestries, and sexy beatniks recast as Italian maidens. It truly looks like a still from a movie collaboration between
Michelangelo Antonioni, Salvador Dali, and a cadre of Madison Avenue hacks. Alas,
Vic Damone was a lot of things during the 1950s, but neither eccentric nor bizarre were among them. That's not to say
Angela Mia is a bad record, just not a very exciting one -- especially if you're expecting an Italianate musical recasting of Camus' The Stranger. What
Angela Mia does offer is a button-down view of white ethnicity aimed at 1950s Italian Americans and open-minded WASPs who want to take a bedroom tour of Italy from the safety of the suburbs. Thankfully,
Vic Damone is the right man for this job.
Damone has a gorgeous voice, a true feeling for Italian standards, and while he comes from the same American mean streets that produced
Dean Martin and
Frank Sinatra, he projects the kind of country-club cool that Boston bluebloods have to go to prep school to learn.
Damone doesn't possess
Dino's easy good humor or goofy charisma on these Italian standards, but he's got great pipes and an intimate, romantic feeling for the material. With
Angela Mia,
Damone creates a Technicolor Hollywood version of Italy brimming over with eternal summers, factory-produced lunchmeats, and the promise of statuesque sex goddesses. And while the Italian social realism of The Bicycle Thief may be more "artistically satisfying," the languorous dream world that
Damone paints with
Angela Mia isn't really such a bad place to spend 45 minutes.