Having
Chubby Checker sing variations on "The Twist" theme in different languages was a brilliant marketing move when
ABBA's multi-lingual success is observed in retrospect, and while
Madonna and
Barry Manilow might have made bigger splashes with "La Isla Bonita" and "En el Copa" respectively, none of them got this adventurous. Sure, it looks like Cameo-Parkway kept their big hit singer typecast, but
Checker, aka
Ernest Evans, racked up 23 hits from 1959-1988, and despite this appearing to be all marketing, it works years later as a charming combination of performances by an underrated artist. "Tea for Two" is great adult contemporary and shows what a smooth and appealing voice this singer owns. "Alouette," for "all you twisters," is a stretch, and it is in English and French, but in some strange way it works too.
Chubby Checker in performance is an amazing act, and the production by songwriter
Kal Mann with
Dave Appell is solid as a rock. Covering the favorite melody of
Elvis Presley, "O Sole Mio," which "the King" turned into "It's Now or Never," is also engaging, with its half Italian/half English, unlike
the Beatles when they did full translations of their originals from English to German. "Twistin' Round the World," the title track, throws a little nod to
the Beach Boys with a "twistin' U.S.A." line thrown in for good measure, but it's half English, half French. The pronunciation might've started to wear on
Checker, as his French sounds like it's flavored with German inflections. "Let's Twist (A La Paloma)" has enough Anglo-Saxon to keep the U.S. audience happy; it's half Spanish with musical flavors from south of the border. This is quite a fun record from
Chubby Checker. His version of "Hava Nagela" sounds pretty authentic, but he veers off of the Hebrew here, too, to sing some lines familiar to people only familiar with the language of his hits, English. Maybe mixing two languages isn't a bad thing -- it's certainly innovative and isn't as much a jolt to
Checker's fan base as, say, Captain & Tenille's Love Will Keep Us Together album, recorded entirely in Spanish, was to theirs. As for the performance on disc, as usual,
Chubby Checker delivers.