The cut that everyone seems to love on this CD illustrates this better than anything. The ukulele and the humming that begin the “Over the Rainbow/Wonderful World” medley are about the closest thing to perfect ever recorded. Then Iz begins to sing and it becomes apparent that he does not know the song. He mangles the lyrics to “Over the Rainbow” so badly that they cease to make sense. At the end of the song, he falls into a series of grunts that show the recording session was just a big goof; he may have loved the songs but he didn’t respect them enough to learn them.

The rest of the material, with the exception of his version of “Take Me Home Country Roads” which is not very good at all, is not bad though nothing really pops off the disc like the intro to “Over the Rainbow.” And Iz tends to go on too much about the utopia that we all like to think Hawaii was before the evils of civilization (you know, those evils that actually allow us to visit the islands). So I’ll dock it a star for its recurrent naive Rousseau-inspired noble savage claptrap. All in all it’s an okay collection, but it could have been so much better.
Rating: 2 / 5