In a strange and slightly depressing way there is something comfortably reassuring about a new Sheryl Crow album. Like a trusty old Volvo or a family meal in a Harvester, you know where you are with the first lady of country tinged rock…and it's usually on a clichéridden road trip along the barren freeway of American nostalgia rock.
The problem, of course, with such a lack of musical adventure is that inevitably the cosy sense of familiarity that Crow's commercial rock strains immediately invoke, soon turn to bored inertia when it dawns that this is where the limits of her musical ambition both begin and end.
Suffice to say 'C'mon C'mon' is a drab and depressingly familiar proposition. All the usual suspects are here. Mid-tempo rockers exuding fake emotion; a hackneyed brand of cod philosophy that gives rise to lines like "it's not having what you want/ it's wanting what you've got"; and a suffocatingly over-produced feel throughout, which merely stifles any raw spark of originality before it can even ignite.
No one is suggesting that Crow pursue an experimental line in nu-skool break-beat side projects, or indeed that she follow a road to Damascus conversion to Nu rock. Just some indication that her musical approach has moved on even vaguely since her 1994 debut 'Tuesday Night Music Club' would be nice, however. There isn't one song here that couldn't quite easily have appeared on any of Crow's previous three albums. The result is a CD that seems barely to have been thought through at all: cobbled together rather than carefully constructed.
Recently there has been a marked return to something akin to the concept album…a development that, in any other circumstances, would quite rightly strike the fear of dread into the heart and soul of any self respecting music lover. This revived trend, however, is about something different. It's about musicians taking a theme, an idea, or an obsession and exploring it, in whatever form, over the course of an album. The multi-layered rustic vibe of Pulp's 'We Love Life' is an example, as is the hustling amphetamine come-down feel to The Stroke's 'Is This It?'. Sadly, 'C'mon C'mon' has no such depth or texture. No peaks, and no troughs. No true emotional crescendos or pianissimos. Just track after track of highly polished, mid-tempo borderline soft rock.
