No doubt it’s simply bad timing, but whacking a song called ‘Born
To Cry’ on an album released justDevin
two months after LDR’s complicated birth is portentous in
the extreme for this risible basket of focus-grouped, cod-60s,
hamgarage, pseudo-soul flimflam, which boils down to one-word:
‘product’. With a voice processedDevin
into a compromise between garage-era Van Morrison and Julian
Casablancas, NYC’s Devin is
trying very hard to pass himself off as an insouciant rock and roll bad
boy, quiff dishevelled just so as he
channels the dead and decaying heroes of yore. Devin
It’s all pretty dreadful stuff, but closing track ‘White Leather’ is the nadir – a
token slowy with the priceless line:
“Let’s get all trashed up on a Friday night, my baby’s all in white leather.”
Where are you off to, love? The
annual adult Erotica show at the ExCel centre? Supermarket rock.
Albarn himself refers to this music as “strange pastoral folk”, which is at least accurate,Devin
English hills and dales materialised for the rise and fall of Dee, as the album begins and
Devin
eventually ends with crystalline field recordings of birds nattering.
Dee died in poverty, by the way, having mucked about with séances and
wife-swapping.
Like the continual references to religion (Dee, like all Elizabethan’s, was never far from matters of God), it’s all here, I’m sure.
Although to really be aware of that you’ll need to not constantly be questioning what on earth to make of Albarn’sDevin
latest anti-popular record. On one hand, his defiance to create anything
other than what he wants at this stage in hisDevin
career is as valiant as it is daft; on the other, sparse and splintered, you can’t be sure that ‘Dr Dee’ makes for good opera either.Devin
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