Kristina Train, Dark Black (Mercury); Matchbox Twenty, North (Atlantic)
I happened to catch Kristina Train singing Dark Black on Loose Ends on Radio 4 on Saturday and was immediately smitten, having first noticed that it was based on the Whiter Shade of Pale/Air on a G String chord progression that serves so well. It was another factor in her favour that Kristina is a much better candidate to inherit the role of Dusty Springfield as the new white soul diva than was Duffy, that passing fancy who I once paid tribute to by going via Warwick Avenue tube station when going to Lord's cricket ground..
I understand entirely that studio maestros these days can do anything they like to make a consummate pop record because the suspicion remains for some of us of a certain age that pop music ate itself some time ago and can now only reproduce itself, only flawlessly, should it care to. But none of that sort of know-all, seen it all before world weariness can argue with the one and only genuine barometer of critical judgement, which is the involuntary thrill down the back of the neck which the first two tracks here actually restored after I'd been missing it for quite a while, especially in 'popular music'.
Dream of Me is a masterpiece that could have come from Roy Orbison's Mystery Girl album,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNyhWXrLv8Y. We readily suspect that Kristina doesn't actually live a life in which she needs to dream that there is a life where 'everything is bright' that one day she will call 'this life'. On the more bereft of these songs it is hard to believe that anyone would sound quite so gorgeous but that, I suppose, is part of the trick of cheap music's potency. And good luck to her.
I don't quite accept that in the dark grey of winter I'd ever 'Wanna live in LA' but each to their own.
The album uses the track ordering convention of CD's rather than that of LP's in stacking up its best pieces at the start rather than saving them for the beginning and end of each side and so it might be suspected that it trails off towards banality with those less immediate songs that might have been hidden in between their more attractive peers all grouping together towards the end but this is still music that passes pleasantly if not quite as memorably as the opening pieces, which I think will remain favourites.
And I do realize that these are two MOTR, AOR, mainstream, FM and presumably artistically unadventurous albums that would be bought by people that don't buy many pop records. Well, it's a long time since I bought The Faust Tapes, Psychocandy, Metal Box or The Velvet Underground with Nico and so perhaps I ought to be checking out the Katie Melua back catalogue because there's nothing better than music that you enjoy rather just than identify with because you imagine it gives you some credibility.
I hate to think how Matchbox Twenty came to settle on such a naff name for their band. It deserves some sort of prize in a putative award ceremony for the Uncool, and I'm sure they would qualify for the shortlist in other categories there, too. But that only makes Rob Thomas with his routinely impassioned songs of angst and self-examination more attractive.
I saw once that it was their ambition to be Fleetwood Mac and, on reflection, I wouldn't mind being Fleetwood Mac either. They also claim a rare place in popular music by being the answer when I was once asked if I could think of a pop song with the word 'jaded' in it. Yes, Bent.
In my daily considerations on candidates for the Top 100 Pop Songs, Last Beautiful Girl is the Rob Thomas performance that is nudging itself upon my attention but it is early days yet. The thing is that formulae work and this sort of relatively undemanding music 'does what it says on the tin' in that rather blase cliche and if you think you're going to like it, you probably will.
She's So Mean, detailing the attributes of quite an interesting sounding lady, and Overjoyed are presumably the two here that might become Matchbox standards. It's not immediately obvious that this album, their fourth, is one of their best three but in its honest way it does enough and, in that tame genre of mid-Atlantic rock (albeit Australian, it says on its passport), it seems to me at least to come with a bit more verve and spirit, a genuine will to do a little bit extra than some of the safer purveyors of the creaking tradition.
I daresay it will easily satisfy the existing fanbase without extending the franchise by much.
