First of all can I just say that I think album covers should feature more dogs, they are an underused warm and fuzzy resource in the age of lacklustre digital retouching and stick thin models. Second, I must say that having been recently forced to listen to both the Mr Hudson album and the Cheryl Cole 'number one best selling single' (why oh why…) I found this album a wonderful breath of clean, talented, fresh air.
This is the album of someone who has been through the commercial music mill and come out the other side with a reflective view of the industry and life in general. It’s a mature response to a music market flooded with nothing but synth samples, 80s drum pads and a load of children who couldn't even handle a Friday night cider let a long a good couple of years of full blown alcoholism. It’s fun, it’s meaningful and it sounds like proper music with lyrics drawn from real experience and sung with real depth.
Having said that, if I had to criticize something, I felt like there were one or two tracks I'd heard before. Left & Right In The Dark, whilst a great track, has more than a whiff of David Bowie to it and the first five seconds of 11th Dimension just IS Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now (ok that’s not such a steal). Some of the other tracks have a sense of déjà vu in the structure or the engineering but there’s also some pretty original choices in there too – Ludlow Street starts out with an oriental vibe and then dives straight into country and western with a little snappy clap sample to bring it smartly up to date. Glass, another of my favourites, kicks off with a lovely simple electro-esque composition and then builds into a big old dramatic emotional singing your heart out affair that wouldn’t sound amiss in a stadium.
This album may not be groundbreaking but it has some real, talented splashes of ingenuity in there and compared to all the talentless guff I have been subjected to recently, listening to this was like finding all the answers to the cross word puzzle in one go. Yes, I thought, this actually makes sense, I can see why this album has been made. The popularity of the Cheryl track on the other hand defies belief as far as I’m concerned - its just a dodgy old sudoko with all the numbers printed in it in Wingdings: Wrong.
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