Review Summary: Just chip-chip-chippin’ away at our eardrums
Throughout the history of music, there have always been bands that push the envelope of atmosphere, creativity, and rebellious spunk; this is in no way, shape, or form, one of those things. When your entire appeal revolves around taking classic songs, toning down the instrumentals to a mind numbing degree, replacing the vocals with “chipmunk” voices that sound so painfully nasally, high pitched, and garbled that you would actually question whether they had rabies or not, you know it’s a bad album. There is nothing of quality to be found here, and those who have a nostalgic flair for the 80s will have a particular distaste for the material here.
The famous voices of the chipmunks are not even slightly appealing; they never have been, and any melody within the song is completely lost due to the board scratching levels of annoyance in their vocal tone. Any harmonizing done or any other tricks thrown here and there are completely lost due to the fact that no matter how this tone is produced, it still sounds like a squealing possum being hit by a semi-truck looped over a track; that doesn’t matter anyways, because the production is downright embarrassing to begin with, even for 1980s standards. When your guitar tone attempts to mimic popular distortion filled mixes from the time without the budget or ambition that those had, it leads to something similar to a fourteen-year old forming his first garage band. The drums sound like hollow tea bags being hit over a coffee mug with no impact whatsoever, and the bass is so high in the mix that it almost strangles the guitar.
Let’s talk about the instrumentals themselves; they actually rewrote portions of the songs in different tempos, and simplified a majority of them. In their cover of “How Do I Make You”, the entire track is slowed down in a painfully obvious way that’s immediately apparent as soon as the drum roll begins at the start of the track. This approach is taken with quite a few songs and it takes away any comedic fun that may have been salvaged here. It would have been slightly forgivable if they just took instrumental songs, and mixed the vocals over the top to sell to their audience, but that sadly was not the case.
There’s nothing of value to be found here; this is easily one of the worst, if not the worst cover compilation I have ever listened to. I doubt that even the Chipmunks large fan base would be jumping at the seams to listen to this album, as there’s not even catchy instrumentals to go behind it due to the terrible re-recording with absolutely awful production values. This is one of those albums that Alvin and the gang should have hidden in a tree near a cliff, and never spoke of again.
