Saints should stick to singing
Reviewed by David Vatchev. Honest is a real oddity. Three band members of the All Saints play sisters from the East End who dress up as men to go robbing 'up West'. It's hard not to be entertained by the All Saints' acting debut, but the truth is, you're laughing at the film far more than you're laughing with it....
Music: 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....
Music: Birth
Birth's one permanent member is appropriately named "DL". Appropriate, because it's an abbreviation of "DULL". Drawing on a tradition of gentle, R&B/soul- influenced rock, this would be fine if it succeeded in fitting snugly into the well-worn niche that lies between Let It Be and Joan Armatrading. It doesn't. Indeed, Gotten Bold's downfall is not in its failure to take into account anything that's happened to music since 1976; but in that its mimicry of its major influences lacks their capacity for invention.
Half of t
Music: Clearlake
Convening in suburbs like Rottingdean predictably leads bands to invent new backgrounds. Clearlake did just this, taking their name from the permanently wintry, magically paradoxical Narnian hamlet they 'inhabit'. Fortunately, and somewhat uniquely these days their music shows equal imagination. Starting with a simple guitar wail that grows into the most epic of crescendos, the warmth of the music adds to the desperate plea: 'Don't let the cold in'. By the fourth minute, however, it's as if the band members themselves have done just this, teetering over the frigid borders of pretension towards which their whole ethos rapidly drives them. The imitation road sign on the snow-strewn sleeve, then, serves as much as a warning to the band as it does an instruction to the musical pilgrim:...