Post by The Curmudgeon on Apr 26, 2011 14:55:30 GMT 2
The ridiculous meets the sublime.
When it comes to songwriting, The Curmudgeon holds few, if any, in higher regard than Burt Bacharach and Hal David. A collection of their work is like listening to the history of pop music itself, with lyrics, melodies and choruses so ingrained in your consciousness it's impossible to tell why you know them, you just KNOW them. Close to You, I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, I Say a Little Prayer For You, Make it Easy on Yourself, Walk on By.. amazing song after amazing song, the list goes on. Some songs are bigger than the artists themselves. All of Bacharach and David's are. It's not just pop hooks they expertly crafted, these songs often tell stories, with unique, genius wordplay (think of Do You Know the Way to San Jose, or What's New Pussycat, to name just two). Modern day "song" writers, going on and on about the exact same things (how many songs are about being in a club now?) should hang their heads in shame.
So, then, when it comes to joining with Bacharach himself and re-creating these classic songs, who better than.. Ronan Keating? Ooooh, I dunno... just about anybody?
See, when it comes to creating the quintessential pop song, Burt is the man. But when it comes to choosing talent to sing those songs nowadays, Burt clearly needs another man to do it. Remember, this is the guy who sat happily watching defunct British girl-band All Saints chew their way through "There's Always Something There to Remind Me" (you'd think that alone would have given Burt something to remind him - to never try this sort of thing again). So we now have to sit through boyband berk and charisma vacuum, Ronan Keating, a guy who would be more suited to singing along with Bert and Ernie, ruin 10 classic songs for absolutely no reason.
Yeah, OK, Ronan's got a nice enough voice for his own tedious blend of undemanding, MOR pop mush, but no WAY does he have the vocal range to tackle something like "Make it Easy on Yourself", and he does what no-one should do when covering a BB song; he makes them boring. Flat, uninspired, like the sort of thing you'd hear at the "entertainment" nights of some horrible hotel for the nearly-dead.
Covers albums are often the last refuge of the artistically bankrupt (see Phil Collin's recent, shameful rape of Motown, itself a sure-fire future inductee into Amazon Room 101), and Ronan is, of course, no stranger to this. Having built a career out of singing other people's material (his last THREE albums before this consisted entirely of famous hits), it's not like his songwriting well has run dry, but any interest in his own solo career clearly has. Basically, if Ronan isn't back with fellow pop numbskulls Boyzone or singing songs that are already famous, the public simply don't want to know.
The really galling thing about this album is the sheer pointlessness of it all. There are already fantastic hit collection packages of Burt Bacharach, from slimline "Definitive" collections to lavish boxsets documenting and celebrating the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Hell, one simple browse through iTunes or Amazon and you can have your own Hits collection, sung by the likes of Tom Jones, Dionne Warwick and the Carpenters. The name "Ronan Keating" just cannot be mentioned alongside those names, unless it's "Ronan Keating is not fit to scoop up the excrement of.."
So people shouldn't live in the past. I get that. So if we really must have a modern interpretation of Baccarach/David songs, why make them sound as devoid of passion as this? And why rope in Ronan Keating, not only a guy who doesn't have the vocal chops to do these songs justice in the first place, but also an artist who ceased to be even approaching relevant 10 years ago? There is no justification for this record to exist.
So what happened when Ronan Met Burt? A fading popstar was immediately out of his depth, singing songs he doesn't even deserve to have on his iPod, and the world as we know it just grew a little darker.
