It is rare, on this site, that there is a need for negativity because we largely get to deal with music we like or that is in the left-field of music and is, therefore, of interest. However, every so often we get sent something so abominable that tearing it to shreds is a pleasure rather than a sad necessity. Take Lady Antebellum which arrived with a press sheet promising “the power of Bon Jovi and the punch of Kelly Clarkson.” I’m sorry, what??? The punch of Kelly Clarkson? Not only is it wetter than the Monsoon season but it also provides the lamest collection of sub-Beverly Hills 90210 ballads ever committed to disc.
Opening with the title track it sees lyrical couplets such as “picture perfect memories scattered all around the floor / reaching for the phone because I can’t fight it anymore.” Yes, that’s right, it’s a trawl through the American singer-songwriter rhyming dictionary and the sugar-coated atrocities just keep on coming. ‘Our kind of love’ features the least likely cry of ‘here we go’ since the New radicals made their unwelcome introduction back in the late 90s. ‘American Honey’ is another guitar-tickled ballad that may or may not be about some lost soul, frankly it’s sappy and unconvincing, not least because this bunch of painfully middle-class American nobodies have almost certainly never been closer to pain and loss than charity adverts on Sky. ‘Hello world’ could be Take That, ‘Perfect Day’ sees the discovery of a distortion pedal (albeit briefly) before the god-awful vocals come in and spoil what would have been a perfectly dire American pop track.
And on and on it goes, like some kind of marry-go-round set to hell FM. It’s tedious, nauseating and distressingly unoriginal, managing to sound at no time any different from the backing tracks to a million terrible teenage love films. How, you cry, can music like this be huge? It’s a question I can’t answer. Undoubtedly the expensive production helps, as does the fact that it is so blandly inoffensive that it no doubt graces the CD player in the cars of a million bank managers across North America. It’s probably also heavily rotated on the devil’s own music channel, MTV, which seems to have gone from being a music channel to the conveyor belt of all that is unholy; or maybe it’s just the depressing fact that it’s the type of dull, heavily processed, say-nothing, thoughtless, soulless, heartless clap-trap that appeals to people who think that listening to Radio 1 in the morning somehow makes them a music fan. If you buy this album then you belong in hell, as all you will have achieved is to further the music industry’s bizarre belief that funding music that is fundamentally unmusical is the way to save themselves from extinction. Boycott this (and anyone who tells you it is good) like you would a dose of Anthrax. Utter tripe.
