“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all“. It’s an oft used cliché, and maybe many of us would do well to live by such a rule, but I’m NOT going to say nothing. I’m going to focus on the positives…
Um…
Er…
…it’s a great album title anyway.
I’m not an unreasonable man, however, and I will admit there are some nice enough tunes here, but – and here’s the crunch – it’s a little too Ed Sheeran for my liking (an artist who, perhaps unsurprisingly, Hamilton has previously collaborated). It’s just too damn clean. I guess it’ll stand him in good stead for consideration as Taylor Swift‘s next squeeze, if nothing else. You remember Spandau Ballet in their ‘True‘ period? Where they wore their hair slicked back and seemed to embrace and celebrate the repulsive yuppie culture? Well Frank Hamilton‘s overbearingly polished production makes the Spandau boys sound like they’ve been working as chimney sweeps for Kevin Rowland circa 1982.
But therein lies the problem – there probably are some decent tunes here, if only you could ruffle their hair up a bit and make them wallow in mud for a couple of hours. They’re catchy enough tunes, but where you get the impression that he’s trying to sound something like Bright Eyes, instead the sound is often closer to that of Noah And The Whale or Just Jack. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but sometimes the whole thing just comes across as a little too smug, like a more annoying Lily Allen (take, for instance, the opening prose of ‘Songs We Fall Asleep To‘ – “you’re a dick but I love you, it’s just that sometimes I wish that we didn’t dissect things, I feel sick when we argue“).
But really Frank, maybe it’s not you, but me. The truth is that the chances of you losing any sleep over a lacklustre review by a forty-something online music journalist like me is pretty remote, especially when you consider that this is just the kind of thing that would light up dollar signs in major record company bigwigs’ eyes all day long. Perhaps the only problem is that Ed Sheeran already exists. Does the world really need another one?
It’s not completely bereft of appeal to me though; ‘What If‘ contains some quite wondrous lyrics, such as “What if living in the past was made illegal? If the world was square and everyone was equal? What if radio played songs about our lives, and television shone a light into our eyes?” – it’s tremendous, that. I could probably become a fan if Hamilton scuzzed things up a bit and focused more on the social conscience than the attempted humour. Or maybe I’m just a miserable twat. Your call. Man, I wish I hadn’t said that…
