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Serious songs

Tuesday 19th June 2007 22:13 in Music

Pretty Hate MachineA lot of people don’t like James Blunt. I don’t like his incongruous profanities on romantic songs, but it would be churlish or insensitive to deny he is talented. Proof enough of this is the song “Goodbye My Lover”, which is truly moving… The raw emotional honesty of this song approaches that of Nine Inch Nails’ “Something I Can Never Have”, which is as far as I am aware (and I am aware of more than 10,000 songs) in a league of its own.

This latter work is like a horror film in music. It almost needs a health warning. Sit back, turn out the lights, and listen to it through on some headphones… You will not hear anything deeper or darker, with more emotional intensity. Listening to it, you are aware that you are listening to a man who is in a truly bad place, from which there can be only one descent - a place which makes Thom Yorke’s predicament in “Creep”, Richard Ashcroft’s in “On Your Own”, and Robert Smith’s in most of his songs seem relatively pleasant. It’s a hard ride, but such a moving one, and it is a fine piece of art.

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