Album Review

David Ford – Go To Hell

• 30th Jul 2007

Go To Hell has all the ingredients for a classic but doesn’t quite find the right blend of sound and song writing.

It begins with a delightful ensemble of thin and tragic strings. Ford’s voice then offers a beautifully tired sounding post-rock gig vocal that certainly isn’t left wanting in the passion or tuning stakes. So it’s all set up for a crackertrack one thinks. But it doesn’t pan out that way, never reaching the heights that its early promise suggests. It becomes a B-side, where it should be a charter.

It’s difficult to be too critical of a song with weaknesses that are sparce and hard to pinpoint. The best way I can describe this music is to say that Go To Hell sounds like a Goo Goo Dolls ballad without the anthemic quality, or piece of memorable magic that makes a song stand out from the pack. Goo Goo Dolls is music that you can touch and David Ford needs to reach out and grab the listener in the same way. There seems to be a dilemna in the mind of the writer between being sonically leftfield, like Badly Drawn Boy, and maintaining a middle of the road commercial aspect to the music, in the manner of a Bryan Adams (God forbid).

There is definite potential in David Ford but at the moment he is a couple of chromosomes short of the finished article and if this release is deemed to be his most single-worthy tune then perhaps the music should be analysed more on its strength as an album.

This all draws me to the natural and obvious conclusion that Go To Hell is like a beautiful woman who teases you to the point of a heavenly climax before callously getting up and walking out the door, leaving you tied to the bed and unable to scratch that itch…..

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