Purporting to be the soundtrack to
Elvis
' second film, this album collects songs used in the film on one side with new material on the other. The weakness of a couple of the movie tunes and the fact that the new songs were leftovers from the sessions used to produce
' first gospel EP and latest single add up to his weakest album offering, although any album with
"Got a Lot o' Living to Do"
is alright. If you think of
Loving You
as simply an
Elvis Presley
album, rather than a somewhat misleadingly packaged soundtrack, it was actually one of his more coherent and cohesive long-players, assembled from sessions all conducted in the first two months of 1957. By this time, he was doing precious little that was wrong, and his range and control were growing geometrically -- thus, amid some powerful rock & roll, including
"Mean Woman Blues"
(which could almost have passed for one of his
Sun
tracks),
"Teddy Bear,"
the electric guitar-driven
"Got a Lot 'o Livin' to Do,"
Ivory Joe Hunter
's
"I Need You So,"
and a hard, brittle-textured outtake of
"I Beg of You,"
the King
does some brilliant ballad singing on
"One Night of Sin"
and
"Is It So Strange,"
and belts out one of his great blues performances on
"When It Rains, It Really Pours"
-- which boasts a killer
Scotty Moore
guitar part -- and moves into
Sons of the Pioneers
territory with the hauntingly beautiful Western ballad
"Lonesome Cowboy."
He doesn't do badly with
"Blueberry Hill,"
either. [
Sony
's 2009 edition included eight bonus tracks.] ~ Neal Umphred & Bruce Eder