Sarolta Zalatnay – Sarolta Zalatnay

A compilation that brings an icon of Hungarian pop to an international audience. Everybody cheerful. Or perhaps not. For a start, the track titles are loaded with awful typos. All of them, considering that the Hungarian rule is to NOT capitalize the first letter of all the words in a title. But Finders Keepers are too cool to give a damn. (Not any different from Discogs.com in thinking the English standard should suffice everybody. A strange disregard on a site with enormous amounts of anality going on otherwise.) The booklet is heavy on purple prose and light on information, which again is infested with factual errors – the most blatant being that during her London days Zalatnay worked with the Gibb brothers, who penned material for her. Sadly, that never happened. (She expressed regret years later, in her memoir, that she wasn't pushy enough to ask for songs from the people she was mingling with – the very aristocracy of pop and rock history: Hendrix, the Gibbs, Clapton, Jagger & Faithfull, Joplin, Tina Turner, etc.) More problematically, this selection of songs is not at all representative of Zalatnay's career. Some of these tracks are actually her weakest – with moronic lyrics and bad prosody, and no musical idea apart from an intention to sound Western. And that is exactly why they are included here. Which leads us to the larger problem with the concept of Finders Keepers. Why bother at all if you are only interested in what is already familiar to you? There is no merit in presenting products of other cultures as extensions of your own, ignoring all that doesn't suit that outlook. The whole thing stinks of self-serving cultural narcissism, only made more apparent by the aforementioned lack of proofreading, which carries over all four editions of the album.