Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 15/09/08
Label: Warner Bros

After "Bad Day", a Coke ad theme tune that became the most-played song on British radio of the last five years, it would be easy to dismiss Daniel Powter as just another package dropped off the major label production line. His scrubbed-clean, "X Factor" audition-ready songs are a throwback to a time where careers began with marketing departments, focus groups and brand synergies; superficially, his records sound like the last, dying gasp of a once-dominant but now terminally imploding entertainment empire.

And first impressions of this second major label album support such suspicions. The 37-year-old Canadian has opted to work with Linda Perry, the queen of the power ballad, a writer/producer not exactly synonymous with nuanced understatement. You can almost hear the old-school label mindset clicking into gear: for all its accessibility, Powter remains, despite considerable gifts (and almost 500,000 album sales), a one-hit wonder - so bring in Perry! She'll turn his self-titled 2005 album's latent Beatlesisms into chart-conquering lighters-aloft anthems, and boost those piano singalongs into pieces of teary chest-beating worthy of Elton or Westlife.

Powter retains just about enough of a sense of his own personality to overcome potential smothering, and Perry - whose recent credits include some of the more emotive and impactful parts of Alicia Keys' last album - shows that she's more than the songwriterly equivalent of a wind machine, there just to inflate average ideas with insubstantial self-importance. Instead, for at least one track, she seems to have helped Powter find something approaching his own voice. The opener, "Best Of Me", is wry and funny, Powter seeming to mock his three-year-old success and deflate his public persona. "I'm hopin' you'll sing along / Though it's not your favourite song", he skidaddles in the chorus of the kind of piece Robbie Williams used to revel in making more pointedly masochistic.

There is some confident songsmithery here, and nothing too flatulent, but something doesn't feel right. "Not Coming Back" is a Boston-ish FM anthem full of driving clichés, "Fly Away"'s acoustic approach doesn't convince, "Negative Fashion" is like Keane with an orchestra, while "Whole World Around" is one of those Jeff Lynne-like Beatles pastiches that recalls The Rutles or Oasis's "Live Forever". They're all decent songs, but despite the frequent imagery involving air travel, there are few moments where they truly soar; and, more troubling, while immediate and hooky, there's not a lot after that first song that gives any clear idea of who Powter is, what he thinks, how he feels.

Overall you're left with the aural equivalent of an unexpectedly comfy bed in a cheap hotel - relaxing, welcoming, unexpectedly pleasant, but eminently forgettable.

    by Angus Batey