Goodbye - Dubstar
This is a beautiful album, packed with great melodies, arrangements and just the right amount of "sing along" choruses. I've heard quite a few "full on pop" albums recently, from bands like Chumbawamba and Peach to name a few, yet can quite frankly think of a million things I'd rather not be hearing. Anyone making music that promotes the use of electronic musical equipment in mainstream popular music without making it into some plastic novelty item cannot be a bad thing.
Pet Shop Boys fans will be doing cartwheels when they hear tracks like No More Talk as Neil Tennant's voice seems to come out of Sarah Blackwoods mouth. I think it's the way she holds the note while forming the words. It's a truly endearing singing style, lovely to listen to and must be a producers dream, taking on every duty asked of it and coming out with flying colours. Stephen Hague does a great job as producer of the majority of the songs on the album but most of my favourites come from songs produced or co-produced by someone called Graeme Robinson. They seem to have the biggest arrangements and a kind of Smiths feel which I can never resist liking more than I should. Listen to Just A Girl She Said and Not So Manic Now and tell me Dubstar can't write songs. These two alone earnt the album over 180,000 points on our rating scale.
Lovers of "classic" electronic music may find the whole thing a little too easy to listen to but there again it's not designed for them. There are some re-mixes at the end of the CD but are mainly dance-floor oriented. Overall there isn't much easily heard breakthrough technical wizardry or ultra complex programming but believe me there's a lot of indiscernible stuff in there that you'd miss if it was taken out. We listened to this CD through a pair of new JBL LSR32 linear spatial reference monitors we received for review and were surprised to hear as much as we did.
Overall this is a great pop album full of great pop songs but will Dubstar continue writing like this and live happily ever after or will they go places where bands like Dubstar rarely tread. Either way they've got my vote of confidence. Here's to the next one.
Rating - 838,220 (out of a possible 1,000,000)
