How About Love

AMG Review of How About Love

Dave Thompson
All Music Guide

Alma Cogan's third album, from 1962, was an exquisite successor to the remarkable Sings with You in Mind, a swinging, finger-snapping collection of standards that retained that album's eye for cool tunes, but lightened the mood somewhat, to present Cogan at her most well-rounded. From the drama of "I've Never Been in Love Before" through a playfully strident "The Lady's in Love with You" and on to Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Hello Young Lovers," How About Love is also Cogan's acknowledgement of the musical forces that were building around her. Her version of "Can't Help Falling in Love with You," cut just weeks after Elvis Presley's hit version stormed the U.K. charts, is one of the loveliest renditions that song has ever known, a showcase for Cogan's voice at its most pure and unaffected. Indeed, one can only curse the various forces that insisted there would be no further Cogan albums until the posthumous Alma in 1967. There, too, she takes contemporary pop and transforms it into something even lovelier. Had she maintained that same approach through the intervening years, an almighty comeback would have been a foregone conclusion.