Various Artists
George Michael knows he can't make you love him (you just can't make your heart feel something it won't). Someone should have told the soundtrack committee to listen to Mr. Wham-bam-thank-you-officer's contribution a little more carefully before they assembled their line up of dance, country and western, dad-rock, nasal emoting and acoustic pooschtick. Soundtracks work as music when there's a single vision behind them, like Simon and Garfunkel's The Graduate. Yes, if you hate the vision you hate the album, but there is at least a smidgen of a chance you might fall head over heels into the path of an errant cyclist for the love of it. For anyone to even like all the tracks on this album would require not just Broadmindedness, but its malignant complication, Profound Lack of Critical Judgement.
Paul McCartney does a cover of Maybe Baby in the style of a good karaoke singer. Elvis Costello, Roxy Music and Madness unite around this desperate appeal to Mondeo Man. The acoustic stuff (Birth and Hobotalk) shows how eminently ignorable music can be when there aren't any loud noises in it. Westlife's constipated straining provides the usual 'guess the next monosyllabic rhyme' fun, which is neatly followed by a song beginning 'I never lived through the great depression, but sometimes I feel just like I did'. This, by Kasey Chambers, and Mel C's parpingly cheerful Suddenly Monday are the highlights of the new music. The rest is an aural bedbath. It was never going to be pleasant, but it shouldn't be this hard to bear.
25th May 2000