All that late night partying in Ibiza has definitely robbed him of his
song. He'll sell copies this time too alright, but he's headed in
Britney's foot steps.
http://music.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,2168236,00.html
James Blunt, All the Lost Souls
Alexis Petridis
Friday September 14, 2007
The Guardian
Vast success traditionally has an alienating effect on rock stars.
Fame and wealth removes them from the real world, insulating them from
public opinion. You would be forgiven for assuming such a fate had
befallen James Blunt. Two years into his recording career, he lives in
an Ibizan mansion with a nightclub in its basement, paid for with the
proceeds of the biggest-selling album of the 21st century thus far:
his debut, Back to Bedlam, has shifted 14m copies. If you believe the
gossip columns, his life seems to primarily consist of getting his
aristocratic leg over with celebrity hotties: Lindsay Lohan, Paris
Hilton, Mischa Barton, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and a Pussycat Doll,
names that rather suggest intellectual profundity may not be uppermost
in the former Household Cavlary officer's check-list of feminine
prerequisites. But despite the rarefied lifestyle, news has clearly
reached Blunt that a lot of people seem to hate both him and his
music. Me and my guitar play my way, he wails, midway through Back
to Bedlam's follow-up, on a song called Give Me Some Love. It makes
them frown.
It's difficult to know how upset Blunt is by the adverse reaction to
his success. He certainly sounds upset: he sings Give Me Some Love in
a tremulous warble, replete with pregnant pauses, suggestive of
brimming eyes and quivering lips. But then James Blunt sings
everything like that. The tremulous warble replete with pregnant
pauses is his default vocal setting. Live, he has tremulously warbled
the Pixies' visceral Where Is My Mind? and tremulously warbled
Supertramp's jaunty Breakfast in America. In the admittedly unlikely
event that Back to Bedlam's follow-up contained a cover of Boney M's
Hooray! Hooray! It's A Holi-Holiday!, he'd tremulously warble that as
well.
Nevertheless, Give Me Some Love offers further evidence of the effect
the opprobrium has had on the singer. It seems to have brought on a
debilitating attack of dyslexia. Won't you give me some love? he
sings, adding bafflingly: I've taken shipload of drugs. Perhaps a
shipload is like a shitload, only bigger, evocative of the vast
container vessels that sail the world's seas. Perhaps he's substituted
the letter t with p for reasons of probity: this is, after all, an
artist beloved of censorious Middle England. Or perhaps his detractors
are right and it doesn't mean anything. Perhaps it's just a crock of
ship.
Still, not even his loudest detractors could call him sloppy. As
befits a former military man, All the Lost Souls is a model of
ruthless efficiency. A crack team of co-writers has been assembled:
his collaborators have variously worked with Britney Spears, Dr Dre,
Robbie Williams, and - rather more pertinently, cynics might suggest -
Daniel O'Donnell and James Last. The results are slick. It would be
churlish to deny that One of the Brightest Stars has a nice tune, or
that there's something compulsive about the piano riff of I'll Take
Everything. Occasionally, however, Blunt appears to be following a
successful formula a little too mechanically for his own good, as if
he's ticking boxes. A song about the end of a relationship that
implies the other participant may be dying: check. Song pondering the
ramifications of Blunt's role in the Kosovo conflict: check. Song that
attempts to assert Blunt's love of music by making slightly clanging
references to classic rock: check.
Elsewhere, songs ruminate about celebrity, among them the deeply
peculiar Annie, on which the titular heroine's failure to achieve fame
is bemoaned -Did it all come tumbling down? - and Blunt, gallant to
the last, offers her the opportunity to fellate him as a kind of
consolation prize: Will you go down on me? More bizarre still, he
offers her the opportunity to fellate him in the kind of voice
normally associated with the terminally ill asking a doctor how long
they've got left: tremulous, replete with pregnant pauses, suggestive
of brimming eyes, etc. The overall effect is so bizarre that it
overshadows anything Blunt may have to say about the fickle nature of
fame. You come away convinced that the song's underlying message is:
give me a blow job or I'll cry.
But then, as has been established, Blunt always sounds like that,
which may be All the Lost Souls' big problem. If you sing about
killing a man, as Blunt does on I Really Want You, in precisely the
same voice you use to sing about fellatio, it's bound to have an
emotionally levelling effect: you're going to come across as if you
don't mean any of it. And perhaps that, rather than his class or his
looks or his success, is the reason so many people dislike James
Blunt. There's something weirdly insincere about what he does.
