Vanessa Amorosi - Something in the Real World (Album)
Terms like ‘clichéd’ and ‘middle-of-the-road’ get bandied about a lot these days. It’s easy to find yourself trying to navigate a giant treadmill of coolness, asking whether the latest indie discovery is indeed Cool or Fool. If you’re after some perspective, you might want to get hold of Vanessa Amorosi’s latest, where irritating, pointless vocal gymnastics collide with generic, over-engineered backing music.
You may remember the name from 1999, when her song Everybody was flogged incessantly enough on commercial radio and Channel 7 to send her first album 4x Platinum. It’s been a while between drinks, with good reason. Her latest offering, Somewhere in the Real World is aptly titled in a few ways. Firstly, it’s so damn confused. The opening track begins with a ‘Bushism’ about not being fooled again, then launches into vague musings about what ‘everyone wants to do;’ apparently, “play the sport / to win golds / and maybe just to rule the world.” How these phrases are actually associated is left up to the listener. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get much better from there. The lowest-common-denominator, didactic lyrics sound like they’ve been ripped from the Eurovision song contest far more often than is suggested by the claim that she’s written “hundreds of songs with some of the best song writers in the world” since signing to Universal in 2006. It’s little surprise, then, that Amorosi has achieved mild commercial success in Germany, where singing in broken English is half the struggle of actually being a cool band.
This is instructive when the 26 year old Melbournian actually sings about one of her experiences in the Real World, namely a meeting with an old friend who’s made it (presumably by writing interesting, insightful or lyrically elegant songs). The track The Simple Things (Something Emotional) is a hilariously ham-fisted acoustic guitar based avowal of good old-fashioned Love and Family Values over Bentleys and toy boys which might have been tolerable if the lyrics and vocals were even vaguely aligned. But Amorosi can’t resist showing off her taught vocal chords at every possible turn. Every song seems to descend into an overdetermined wailing before returning to an annoying breathy sigh.
The world clearly wants divas able to produce interesting, timely songs and actually sing accordingly. The enduring success of Madonna and Kylie Minogue, whose latest record has a nicely synth-infused track about dancing to tracks on your speakerphone, are testimony to this. Amorosi’s ambitions are obviously more wholesome, though this shouldn’t be a barrier to producing more coherent, less self-indulgent music about the trials and tribulations of being 20-something in a consumption driven society.
