A long time ago, I promised carl_lazarevic a music entry into his I’m Sorry, But You’re Just Plain Wrong W/O, with the intention of tracking down a copy of a CD by someone who gets a lot of critical acclaim, and the everyday consumer seems to love, Jack Johnson. I don’t understand why people love his music so much. Personally, I find it terrible.
Then Simon and Dave came along with their “Excellent and Excruciating W/O”. Because I posted a music review as my first “Excellent” entry, then the rules of the W/O state I must also post an “Excruciating” review in the music category.
Thanks to Carl’s W/O being open-ended, I probably would have got round to it eventually, but Dave’s has a deadline, so with that motivation I headed to the library to see if I could find a CD by Mr Jack Johnson, and no, I couldn’t. So I looked for an artist I knew I hated but music critics around the world seemed to love. When I saw Dido’s face poking out at me, I knew I had found my target.
Now, it should be obvious that I have a stubborn side to me. I borrowed this album expecting not to like it. However, I'm also brutally honest in my reviews. If I had ended up liking this album... God forbid... then I would have done the honourable thing and posted a positive review while continuing to search for an album critics loved and I hated so I could fulfil my obligations to the respective W/Os. So don't think I'm just giving this one to achieve just that, it's simply that this time, my expectations were right and I didn't like the album.
I can still remember the first time I heard the album’s opening track and lead single White Flag. It was around 7pm on a Friday night, and I was so sick I couldn’t be bothered getting out of bed to watch my favourite soap, and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. Dido was exactly the kind of music I didn’t need to hear at that stage. It was slow, boring and just didn’t seem to end. I had a throbbing pain in my head and I know for a fact that was not from my illness, so it had to be Dido’s music. The first time I heard White Flag was the true definition of excruciating, and it never got much better the other times I listened to it either. Unfortunately, it also sets the tone for the rest of the CD. Every song on here is slow, boring, and overly long.
However, Stoned does seem to explain a few things. Perhaps it describes her mental condition when writing this song / album. It starts off promising, with some OK drums and a beat, but this instrumental drags on for far too long. Then Dido’s voice comes in and my problem here is that she has absolutely no stamina, stopping for a breath every three seconds. When saying she can’t sing, it’s not that her voice is bad to listen to, its just too infrequent and I have no patience for that kind of thing. Stoned, and the following track Life For Rent perfectly demonstrate Dido’s vocal range: she doesn’t have one. The one note she hits doesn’t sound too bad, but it’s the only note she hits, so things get very mundane after a while. To mix things up a bit she goes from singing that note slowly to quickly, but it’s a very superficial change and she’ll have to do better than that to impress me.
Lyrically, these songs are about as deep as Britney Spears’ wedding vows. They sound good on the surface, but really mean nothing. The problem there is that Dido wrote every song on this disc, so you’d expect the title track to be deeply profound. Well, maybe not, but it should at least contain some kind of message like “I’m hurt” or “I’m lonely, this is why” etc, but we get nothing,
Mary’s In India gives us a bit of relief from Dido’s voice to start with, with the overly-sythesized music drowning it out, but such relief is short lived as her voice starts gradually coming over stronger and drowning out the music. Well-balanced, this ain’t.
Track five (See You When You’re 40) and I’m well and truly bored of this album. Nothing’s changed at all from the last track. Things have slowed down since Life For Rent, which isn’t a good idea. Said track is as close as the album comes to being up-tempo. See You When You’re 40 is the album’s only necessary track, as it defines everything else that’s on here. It’s slow, it’s boring, Dido has nothing in the way of a vocal range and loves proving it to us and the music is so far over-sythesized it’s impossible to tell which instrument is which.
That last detail unfortunately carries on over into the next track Don’t Leave Home, where the producers have seen fit to create strange noises all throughout the song, which gets very distracting, kind of like that little beep-type thing in Nelly & Kelly’s “Dilemma”. We should probably think them for small mercies though, because the rest of the song really isn’t worth listening to.
Same can be said Who Makes You Feel. At this stage it’s worth noting only the lyrics have really changed since Mary’s In India, with every song sounding exactly the same, but here’s where Dido tries putting emphasis on the lyrics, which would be fine if not for the fact it just sounds like “Who makes you feel” over and over to the point of insanity.
A guitar helps make Sand In My Shoes easily the stand-out track on the album… but that’s not to say it’s any good. It’s just better than the rest due to the slightly up-tempo music, faster singing and that distinguishable guitar. Don’t get confused when I say up-tempo though, because that only applies to the chorus, and if every other song on this album is a zero on the one to ten tempo scale, this is only a zero point five, and the song is still not any good.
Of course, that therefore means the rest of the album is all downhill from here so thankfully there’s only a few tracks to go. Do You Have A Little Time features another instrument, and there’s the obvious inclusion of drums as well. Shame then, the guy on the other instrument (I think it might be a harmonica) is so terrible I want to strangle him. The producers of this track also have a lot to answer for, with more of those strange noises making an appearance and annoying the crap out of me. How Dido’s voice sells so many CDs is totally beyond me, as it just doesn’t change!!!.
Finally, we hit the last couple of tracks and the ending is in sight. Unfortunately, the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is in fact the oncoming train as Dido attempts to drown us in a soothing voice, which doesn’t work at all and just makes me want to skip the rest of This Land Is Mine and hope things will get better in See The Sun. However, upon endurance of the penultimate track, we discover Dido knows the end is in sight and as such tries upping the tempo back to zero point five for the chorus. The reason this doesn’t work is because the rest of the song gets completely lost in the background, and what’s left just sounds repetitive. See The Sun isn’t any better, despite the fact it’s hard to imagine things getting any worse. Have I mentioned how long and boring this music is? Honestly, it’s so boring I want to go to sleep, and that’s never a good thing with music.
and I promise you they’ll see the sun again
See, here’s the scary thing. I think, in the above lyric, the sun refers to Dido, meaning this won’t be her last album. Oh no, looking at record sales figures she’ll be back, but her new record won’t be any different than this one. I mean, why change a successful, if horrible, formula? Comparing this album to such songs from her last as Thank You and Here With Me, they’re pretty much the same as anything and everything on Life For Rent. Bland, dull and totally boring is what Dido excels at, and what this record is full of.
She has a sweet, warm voice and a knack for tuneful modern folk-pop that sounds intimate while being confidently catchy and nice. Songs like White Fla...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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