In case you prefer more info before making up your mind, if he was a shade of paint, he’d be magnolia, but not if he was a movie. If he was a movie, he’d be Pride And Prejudice. If he was an activity, it would be a Sunday afternoon out at the garden centre.
Unfortunately, he’s a singer-songwriter and his album of sometimes country-lite soft rock is about as exciting as watching a boring shade of paint dry on an especially boring fence.
On CD as much as anywhere else, first impressions should be everything. This means that on hearing the dreary opener Radio Proposal, followed by its excruciating soft-rock follow-up Falling, you might initially think that someone should have warned him that a punchier opening might have made more of an impact.
Unfortunately, this would have been dependent on the rest of the album containing anything punchier, rather than continuing on in a dull-as-dishwater fashion, one track after another.
On occasional moments the album raises itself millimetres above mediocrity. The title track is slightly catchier than the others, for example, but in the way that some brands of bread are slightly nicer than others: i.e. not by enough to really make any difference to your life.
Track five, Last Kiss, has a between-the-wars music hall cabaret beat that’s pleasant enough to listen to and, in a crazy alternate world you can almost imagine that covered by David Bowie, Marc Almond or My Chemical Romance it could drag itself up into a decent glam-rock stomper, but here it pervades the mediocrity of the fence-creosoting suburbanites it’s aimed at.
He gets quite Dylan-lite on Come In From the Cold, while the sudden hoe-down of Jesus Christ (a Woody Guthrie cover) explodes so unexpectedly in a Christian country fugue amid the MOR boredom that it at least grabs your attention.
Final track Disco Boat is a deep, dark Delta blues that nearly saves the album. But even here it’s not really Americana, as the press release may try and fool you into believing: the country elements are just the boring, safe, denim shirt and cowboy hat type.
In other words, TD Lind is the kind of man that a very average, slightly bored housewife wishes she’d married instead of her deadly dull husband, who’s probably called Keith and who works in orders processing at the local paperclip emporium. She entertains these dreams while dusting china ornaments of ladies in crinoline dresses, and hoovering under the telephone table she and Keith bought from MFI on a bank holiday day out.
You know that a raunchy affair with the plumber, a motorcycle trip across Eastern Europe or a good serial killer scandal to follow in the papers would make her happier, but she doesn’t. Until her imagination kicks in, a TD Lind album might as well fill the gap.
TD Lind MP3s or CDs
TD Lind on Spotify
