Big Dog 92-7 Music Guide

Love Eyes: The Moods of Romance

RELEASE
1960
LABEL
Columbia
GENRES
Easy Listening, Instrumental Pop, Mood Music, Exotica, Orchestral Pop

Album Review

Dominic Frontiere followed the exotic and eclectic Pagan Festival with this album of program music in which each two- to four-minute piece musically expressed its one-word title. The album title promised love and romance, but the song titles went somewhat beyond that charter, including words like "Teen-Age" and "Beatnick." Frontiere approached his subjects with a Hollywood film composer's sense of using musical signifiers in obvious ways. A prominent influence was Henry Mancini, whose jazzy sensibility informed "Sultry" and "Beatnick." "Teen-Age" employed a pre-rock & roller's sense of what rock & roll was all about, strapping a hard rhythm under lurching strings. "Childish" made extensive use of nursery-rhyme tunes. All of this was the kind of musical shorthand understood by the music departments of the movie studios, and Love Eyes was, in effect, a demonstration record displaying its composer's understanding of what constituted appropriate musical accompaniment to film in the early '60s. No wonder, then, that it was Frontiere's last album as a leader, after which he occupied himself primarily scoring movies and television shows.
William Ruhlmann, Rovi