A record that came out on Friday, Revel in the Drama, the second album from Broughton's Ren Harvieu. If asked to describe it I'd call it Post-Arctic Monkeys Pop Music. Knowing, as can be, not exactly mainstream but looking to shift units in tasteful rather than vulgar numbers, not wishing to remain entirely in the margins with the really cool kids who dropped out of school before it came to exam time.
Harvieu comes across slightly as a late night club singer framed in the spotlight. The songs are vaguely cabaret and seemingly destined to bring Harvieu to a broader audience and probably onto Later with Jules Holland if she hasn't appeared on it where she will probably get an appreciative but hardly ecstatic response.
I'm sorry if I'm being over cynical, this is a perfectly presentable record which I'm enjoying well enough as I listen to it at the desk on a pleasant day two weeks into Coronavirus quarantine It's just that despite the fact it's perfectly amenable, at the same time it's also utterly premediated and seems to have been filtered of any genuine human emotion because that's verboten in some quarters nowadays.
I didn't stop listening to the record. It's not a bad one in many ways. Perhaps it will endure. I didn't really like Sade in the Eighties but now I think she's great. I don't really think Revel in the Drama will stand the test of time, it's ultimately too non-descript, Alexandra Savior has already done what it does much better with the excellent The Archer earlier on this year. Give it a listen, you might think more of it than I do, but I probably won't be going back to it.
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