Into Paradise

by Sharon Mawer It must have been nearly Christmas as a plethora of CDs were released to capture the market in harmonic, angelic, easy on the ear singing and here was the second offering from the teenage quartet of young ladies known as All Angels. With an almost identical sleeve design as the previous years' All Angels album, the beautiful, angelic looking girls dressed in all white against a white background, to make them appear like, well, All Angels, the girls returned with a second helping of beautiful singing with a mixture of traditional classical pieces including Handel's Sancte Deus, and Zadok The Priest and Mozart's Canzonetta Sull Aria and contemporary pop classics done in a choral style, Nothing Compares 2 U, The Sound Of Silence which they perform totally a cappella for the first half of the song until the strings meld in during the second half, and even Coldplay's The Scientist, yes they really did perform this modern classic rock track as a choral piece. The classical pieces worked quite well, particularly for those who dabbled in serious music once a year and needed the album to be racked in abundance at the local supermarket rather than having to go hunting for it, particularly the track Lift Up Your Voice with the musical accompaniment being The Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba. Beautifully sung though it was, there was a sense of not really being new and innovative any longer, their fifteen minutes of fame being nearly over and the album lasted only during the month of December in the charts, after which it was consigned, not even to the bargain bins, for this was the sort of music that one was either prepared to pay full price for and own a CD to love and to cherish it, playing it on Christmas day, or one would have to be paid to soil a CD player with the disc. There will always be a market for beautiful young girls singing with angelic voices, just not necessarily All Angels.