Yes, you're right: I'm rolling out all the older sections I haven't had a chance to look at recently, what with my new journal and the larger features I'm working on, not to mention Christmas and all those 2012 albums I had to catch up on. Still plenty more planned for the ol' Playlist, but for now I'd like to look back to an album that definitely deserves the above description. If I had a section called "Disappointing albums" I think this would certainly fit in that category. There are maybe two or three, at a stretch, good tracks on it and the rest I just don't like at all.
No angel --- Dido --- 1999 (Arista)
Look, you can't get more pretentious than to have the name Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong, but I suppose at least she wasn't just taking the name from history. I was always rather surprised to find that Madonna was the singer's real name; thought it surely must be an assumed one. But no, it's the one she was christened with, and here again we find that Dido is this girl's real name. Mind you, the third part of her name certainly suits her as far as I'm concerned, because I found her music, through this album, almost exclusively depressing, whiny and self-indulgent. I wouldn't even call it melancholy, because that suggests a certain amount of acceptance. Dido's music --- at least on "No Angel" --- comes across to me as "poor me" all the time, none the moreso than her big hit single which, though ostensibly a song of gratitude, if you dig not too far beneath the surface, is all about her and what she has to put up with every day. Not that we all don't have to go through the same thing, Dido: you're not unique you know.
But to the album. Let's dispose of the good tracks first. Won't take long.
First though, let's allow credit where it's due. Dido does at least write or co-write every song on this album, so she's not just singing someone else's songs. Paradoxically that may be a bad thing, as the ideas then, and the tone and mood of the songs can be at least partially attributed to her, and she can't blame anyone else for misrepresenting her. Not that I'm sure she cares one bit, but it's a common thread of doom and despair and, well, basically sulkiness that comes through this album for me at any rate.
Despite what I said above, I have to admit "Thank you" is a decent enough song, even if the whining does get on my nerves.
The opener too is okay, even though it bears something of a striking resemblance to the big hit single...
And the only track I really like is the closer, which is I think a bonus track, and the only thing that made the album worth the price of the purchase. A complete reversal of the themes of the other songs and --- shock! Horror! --- an
upbeat, happy song! How did that get in here?
Now the bad ones, and they're many. Start off with "Don't think of me", with its self-indulgent, wrapped-up-in-itself lyric...
Then there's "My lover's gone". I have to say, I'm not surprised.
"Honestly OK" is just annoying...
"Slide" is just painfully boring, like Sade on downers
"Isobel" is dreary as hell
and the almost-title track,"I'm no angel", just brims over with self-pity, as does most of the album.
There's no question that after having bought this I had no further interest in listening to anything Dido had to say or sing. It's one thing to be introspective and moody on an album, but this just takes the biscuit. Hell, even the Smiths lightened up from time to time! Just depressing, and not the sort of album you put on to help you cheer up, that's for sure. And what has she to be so pouty about anyway? Didn't she sell millions of copies of this, and didn't it lift her up into the bright lights of international stardom?
Some people are never happy.