THE DUKE LISTENS TO
CALL OFF THE SEARCH
BY KATIE MELUA
CALL OFF THE SEARCH
BY KATIE MELUA
You can’t blame a work of art for its eventual audience, is
what The Duke would suggest. When Paul was scribbling those
Emails to the Corinthians or whoever a couple thousand years
ago, he couldn’t have known that Jerry Falwell would be a fan.
It’s not Eminem’s fault that much of his fanbase exhibits
exactly the kind of bigoted, thuggish yob mentality that he so
subtly satirizes. And you can’t really fault Katie Melua for
the fairly certain inevitability that her debut album will
serve as the requisite soundscape at cheese-tasting parties
from now till whenever the hell someone digs up another round
of Eva Cassidy demos.
Young Miss Melua has a voice worth exhibiting, make no mistake
about it. When she lets rip over a self-penned ditty like
Faraway Voice, a song dedicated to the aforementioned Cassidy,
a song that should by all rights be cloying dreck, it’s
impossible not to be impressed as all hell with how she wraps
her larynx around some really rather complex melodic
tomfoolery.
But the occasional bursts of inspiration, be it in the form of
the 12-bar barroom blues of My Aphrodisiac Is You, a song that
brings to mind that old standard about I Get A Kick Out Of You
by, I think, Slipknot, or the subtly funky second track,
Crawling Up A Hill, are beaten asunder by the sheer stifling,
well, middle classness of it all.
It’s so conservative, so faceless, that at times you may be
fooled into thinking a song has an alarmingly evocative lyric,
but no, it’s just cause you dozed off twenty minutes ago and
had a dream about this time when you were nine years old. You
can’t be blamed though, man, most of these numbers are
indistinguishable from one another.
The whole thing suffers from an absence of heart, of the
“passion”. At times it feels like there’s something really
soulful and powerful underway, but no, it’s just another
production-line easy listening Norah Jones-lite affair.
You could pound this disc to fuck with a pickaxe for a month
and I doubt it would leave a scratch. It’s solid granite;
Impenetrable, bloodless and mighty painful when it gets you in
the ears.
The final track, for instance, Lilac Wine, starts with a
sinister tone and a raspy verse that brings to mind Bille
Holiday’s original recording of Strange Fruit. Katie Melua
doesn’t want to talk about lynchings or segregation, though,
she’s just concerned about some fella or other. The “love”
thing. You might yawn if you weren’t sniggering.
It’s enough to get a man as frustrated as all hell. There is
obviously a brilliantly talented individual at work here, yet
every attempt at grabbing the listener by the neck and saying
“Listen up now, motherfucker, this is some funky shit”, is
immediately smacked to blazes by another sickeningly
saccharine arrangement, another swelling orchestral interlude.
That lead single, Closest Thing To Crazy, is like something
you would imagine hearing at the end of Beauty And The Beast.
It’s not too hard to imagine Belle running around some CGI
staircases with some animated cutlery, singing about “How can
you treat me like a child, yet like a child I yearn for you?”
The moody cover image of the songwriter brandishing an
acoustic guitar and bathed in densest black could cause one to
imagine that what constitutes these 40-odd minutes of musical
shenanigans might be something folky, something a little
rough, a little gritty, like Gillian Welch perhaps. All your
gonna hear, though, is what Simon Cowell might refer to as
“Musical Wallpaper”. It doesn’t particularly want to unsettle
you when you’re trying to open that bottle of wine or discuss
The Journals Of Bridget Jones, it just wants to be there in
the background, tinkering away from one predictable note to
the next, never offering any surprises or any hint that a song
might take a direction you hadn’t been expecting since five
seconds into the first verse.
The charm of many of Eva Cassidy’s recordings owes something
to the fact that she simply couldn’t afford to have, say, The
Irish Film Orchestra bounding across her every syllable. There
was an endearing ruggedness to those recordings, a sensation
evocative of hearing the sound of daylight piercing through a
room shrouded in cigarette smoke and whiskey breath.
Eva Cassidy was a remarkable singer, and a fine interpreter of
songs on occasion, but there was nothing so extraordinary that
you couldn’t imagine hearing it in at least three pubs in any
given city on a Saturday night.
The same applies to Call Off The Search.
Sometimes, though, you wish you hadn’t been paying so much
damn attention, that it was just something crawling along the
ambience of a yack-heavy room. When you actually pick up some
of the things being said, it’s enough to make a man faint with
awe at the stunning daftness of it all.
Belfast, for instance, is obviously named after the town in
The Northern Irelands where Katie spent a few years of her
youth, but you wouldn’t know that unless you looked at the
inlay. Where is this Broadway that she talks about walking
down? Maybe I missed it on the at least numerous occasions I
have walked the length of Belfast. Also, “The Bells don’t
really ring”, apparently.
In fact, The Duke would be tempted to suggest that the title
Belfast was flung in at the last minute to play up the
Irishness of the songstress. The subtitle, Penguins And Cats,
is much more apt. At least she sees fit to mention the fuckers.
The only stand-out slab of instrumentation arrives in the form
of an over-earnest cover of Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going
To Rain Today. That piano intro is astounding, but when did
Newman ever write one that wasn’t?
The other cover, The Mockingbird Song, is pleasing enough, but
suffers from the over-familiarity of the number. Who can
listen to that and not see Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels pissing
into a bottle and then the police drinks the piss and then we
all laugh.
Sorry, Buddy Holly, but that’s just the motherfucking long and
the short of it.
There’s very little here that doesn’t sound like a B-Side from
Norah Jones’ Feels Like Home. It’s like as if it was one of
those “Alter-Ego” records, like the one where Garth Brooks
pretended to be Eddie Vedder for a while. Maybe Nora decided
to get away from all the pressure of being expected to offer
up a multi-million selling album by going and making a multi-
million selling album.
She looks like Norah, she sounds like Norah, but just like
Margarine spread sneakily across a piece of toast in a hotel
restaurant, you know damn fine that something isn’t right.
This isn’t real butter, you scheming sons a bitches.
The heart, the joyous abandon that runs through most of Feels
Like Home is absent here. I imagine that somewhere in the
offices of Dramatico Records there are a group of professors
marking out the next Katie Melua album, crafting and solving
any number of exotic sounding equations in pursuit of the
ultimate motherfucking easy-listening blockbuster.
That’s a damn misnomer, by the way, the whole “easy-listening”
thing. Something original, inventive, provocative, that’s
something that’s easy to listen to. That shit right there,
you'd be hard pressed to ignore it, is what.
This, though, this could have been playing on repeat for four
days and you’d only notice when the stereo leaped into the
nearest bathtub to rid itself of the insufferable torment.
Katie Melua seems really nice, seems like the kinda lass you
wouldn’t mind having a chat with for an hour or two. She
deserves her success, man, she’s got an astounding voice, but
she needs to tell those producer cats to get the fuck away
from her demo tapes, lock herself up in a room with some Hank
Williams, and not come out until she remembers why she wrote
the damn songs in the first place.
Was it just to act as an invisible guest at after-dinner
drinks sessions for the rest of forever? To sit in a designer
CD-Holder next to a copy of Kind Of Blue that someone bought
because the fella on the cover was black and had a saxophone
and hey, jazz is so decadent yet refined.
Meredith Brooks had a song about how she was a bitch, and
nobody took her seriously because every step she took, she
made sure Alanis Morrissette had stepped there first. Unless
Katie, and more importantly, her producers, stop taking notes
every time Norah Jones lets a half-melodic fart, she won’t be
taken very seriously either.
And that, my friends, would be a motherfucking shame, is
what.
Click Here For To Visit The Katie Melua Web-Page
Contact The Duke Via Electronical Email
what The Duke would suggest. When Paul was scribbling those
Emails to the Corinthians or whoever a couple thousand years
ago, he couldn’t have known that Jerry Falwell would be a fan.
It’s not Eminem’s fault that much of his fanbase exhibits
exactly the kind of bigoted, thuggish yob mentality that he so
subtly satirizes. And you can’t really fault Katie Melua for
the fairly certain inevitability that her debut album will
serve as the requisite soundscape at cheese-tasting parties
from now till whenever the hell someone digs up another round
of Eva Cassidy demos.
Young Miss Melua has a voice worth exhibiting, make no mistake
about it. When she lets rip over a self-penned ditty like
Faraway Voice, a song dedicated to the aforementioned Cassidy,
a song that should by all rights be cloying dreck, it’s
impossible not to be impressed as all hell with how she wraps
her larynx around some really rather complex melodic
tomfoolery.
But the occasional bursts of inspiration, be it in the form of
the 12-bar barroom blues of My Aphrodisiac Is You, a song that
brings to mind that old standard about I Get A Kick Out Of You
by, I think, Slipknot, or the subtly funky second track,
Crawling Up A Hill, are beaten asunder by the sheer stifling,
well, middle classness of it all.
It’s so conservative, so faceless, that at times you may be
fooled into thinking a song has an alarmingly evocative lyric,
but no, it’s just cause you dozed off twenty minutes ago and
had a dream about this time when you were nine years old. You
can’t be blamed though, man, most of these numbers are
indistinguishable from one another.
The whole thing suffers from an absence of heart, of the
“passion”. At times it feels like there’s something really
soulful and powerful underway, but no, it’s just another
production-line easy listening Norah Jones-lite affair.
You could pound this disc to fuck with a pickaxe for a month
and I doubt it would leave a scratch. It’s solid granite;
Impenetrable, bloodless and mighty painful when it gets you in
the ears.
The final track, for instance, Lilac Wine, starts with a
sinister tone and a raspy verse that brings to mind Bille
Holiday’s original recording of Strange Fruit. Katie Melua
doesn’t want to talk about lynchings or segregation, though,
she’s just concerned about some fella or other. The “love”
thing. You might yawn if you weren’t sniggering.
It’s enough to get a man as frustrated as all hell. There is
obviously a brilliantly talented individual at work here, yet
every attempt at grabbing the listener by the neck and saying
“Listen up now, motherfucker, this is some funky shit”, is
immediately smacked to blazes by another sickeningly
saccharine arrangement, another swelling orchestral interlude.
That lead single, Closest Thing To Crazy, is like something
you would imagine hearing at the end of Beauty And The Beast.
It’s not too hard to imagine Belle running around some CGI
staircases with some animated cutlery, singing about “How can
you treat me like a child, yet like a child I yearn for you?”
The moody cover image of the songwriter brandishing an
acoustic guitar and bathed in densest black could cause one to
imagine that what constitutes these 40-odd minutes of musical
shenanigans might be something folky, something a little
rough, a little gritty, like Gillian Welch perhaps. All your
gonna hear, though, is what Simon Cowell might refer to as
“Musical Wallpaper”. It doesn’t particularly want to unsettle
you when you’re trying to open that bottle of wine or discuss
The Journals Of Bridget Jones, it just wants to be there in
the background, tinkering away from one predictable note to
the next, never offering any surprises or any hint that a song
might take a direction you hadn’t been expecting since five
seconds into the first verse.
The charm of many of Eva Cassidy’s recordings owes something
to the fact that she simply couldn’t afford to have, say, The
Irish Film Orchestra bounding across her every syllable. There
was an endearing ruggedness to those recordings, a sensation
evocative of hearing the sound of daylight piercing through a
room shrouded in cigarette smoke and whiskey breath.
Eva Cassidy was a remarkable singer, and a fine interpreter of
songs on occasion, but there was nothing so extraordinary that
you couldn’t imagine hearing it in at least three pubs in any
given city on a Saturday night.
The same applies to Call Off The Search.
Sometimes, though, you wish you hadn’t been paying so much
damn attention, that it was just something crawling along the
ambience of a yack-heavy room. When you actually pick up some
of the things being said, it’s enough to make a man faint with
awe at the stunning daftness of it all.
Belfast, for instance, is obviously named after the town in
The Northern Irelands where Katie spent a few years of her
youth, but you wouldn’t know that unless you looked at the
inlay. Where is this Broadway that she talks about walking
down? Maybe I missed it on the at least numerous occasions I
have walked the length of Belfast. Also, “The Bells don’t
really ring”, apparently.
In fact, The Duke would be tempted to suggest that the title
Belfast was flung in at the last minute to play up the
Irishness of the songstress. The subtitle, Penguins And Cats,
is much more apt. At least she sees fit to mention the fuckers.
The only stand-out slab of instrumentation arrives in the form
of an over-earnest cover of Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going
To Rain Today. That piano intro is astounding, but when did
Newman ever write one that wasn’t?
The other cover, The Mockingbird Song, is pleasing enough, but
suffers from the over-familiarity of the number. Who can
listen to that and not see Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels pissing
into a bottle and then the police drinks the piss and then we
all laugh.
Sorry, Buddy Holly, but that’s just the motherfucking long and
the short of it.
There’s very little here that doesn’t sound like a B-Side from
Norah Jones’ Feels Like Home. It’s like as if it was one of
those “Alter-Ego” records, like the one where Garth Brooks
pretended to be Eddie Vedder for a while. Maybe Nora decided
to get away from all the pressure of being expected to offer
up a multi-million selling album by going and making a multi-
million selling album.
She looks like Norah, she sounds like Norah, but just like
Margarine spread sneakily across a piece of toast in a hotel
restaurant, you know damn fine that something isn’t right.
This isn’t real butter, you scheming sons a bitches.
The heart, the joyous abandon that runs through most of Feels
Like Home is absent here. I imagine that somewhere in the
offices of Dramatico Records there are a group of professors
marking out the next Katie Melua album, crafting and solving
any number of exotic sounding equations in pursuit of the
ultimate motherfucking easy-listening blockbuster.
That’s a damn misnomer, by the way, the whole “easy-listening”
thing. Something original, inventive, provocative, that’s
something that’s easy to listen to. That shit right there,
you'd be hard pressed to ignore it, is what.
This, though, this could have been playing on repeat for four
days and you’d only notice when the stereo leaped into the
nearest bathtub to rid itself of the insufferable torment.
Katie Melua seems really nice, seems like the kinda lass you
wouldn’t mind having a chat with for an hour or two. She
deserves her success, man, she’s got an astounding voice, but
she needs to tell those producer cats to get the fuck away
from her demo tapes, lock herself up in a room with some Hank
Williams, and not come out until she remembers why she wrote
the damn songs in the first place.
Was it just to act as an invisible guest at after-dinner
drinks sessions for the rest of forever? To sit in a designer
CD-Holder next to a copy of Kind Of Blue that someone bought
because the fella on the cover was black and had a saxophone
and hey, jazz is so decadent yet refined.
Meredith Brooks had a song about how she was a bitch, and
nobody took her seriously because every step she took, she
made sure Alanis Morrissette had stepped there first. Unless
Katie, and more importantly, her producers, stop taking notes
every time Norah Jones lets a half-melodic fart, she won’t be
taken very seriously either.
And that, my friends, would be a motherfucking shame, is
what.
Click Here For To Visit The Katie Melua Web-Page
Contact The Duke Via Electronical Email
