There are few books which really touch me in the way that this one does. It is gorgeous and painful, wonderful and tragic all in the same breath. Most importantly and skillfully of all, it captures that once-in-a-lifetime moment that we all experience - the moment where we should stop, act, grab hold of the things that are precious to us and hold onto them with religious fervour, but somehow we don't. We keep walking on, abandoning the beauty in front of our face, in the vain hope that there is something better round the corner.
At the heart of this novel lies one question. What if this moment, the one that is happening here, now, is the only chance I'll get? What if this is the… Read more
Billed as the 'feelgood album of the summer', this album is one of the most dire pieces of musical filler it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. It is utterly unremarkable from start to finish, has no bite, no energy and absolutely nothing in the way of musical innovation. Every song sounds like the one before, and all could have been written bespoke for one of the Pop Idol goons. I have heard this kind of music a thousand times before in everyone from Dodgy to the now painfully tedious Stereophonics, and have no desire to hear it again. In fact, the only reason I can bring myself to give it one star is for the noise the CD made as I snapped it over my knee.
There must clearly be 'something' about this album which has seen it hanging round the top of the charts like a bad smell for the last 6 months, but I'm damned if I can work out what it is. I've already got "Trailer Park" by Beth Orton, which this album is clearly striving to sound like, and it's a lot better than this dull-as-ditchwater offering, which I'll wager will never see the light of day again in my house.
"Thankyou" was vastly improved by the addition of Eminen and copious amounts of swearing, and even the once lovely-sounding "Here with me" loses it's impact pretty quickly. In the end, it falls into the increasingly rapidly expanding MOR… Read more
