So says Veronica Dunne of the singing on Britney's new album. Did the other three musicians, also from the classical world, agree with her? This could get ugly, warns DARAGH DOWNES
HAVING been unable to make it to John O’Conor’s Schubert evening at the National Concert Hall on May 6th, you can imagine the excitement as we awaited Michael Dervan’s review in that Monday’s paper. How, we wondered, had several weeks of intensive exposure to the new Britney Spears album honed O’Conor’s musical instincts? Did he put soprano Ailish Tynan’s voice through digital Auto-Tune for Der Hirt auf dem Felsen? Did fat, stately bass-drum crotchets start pulsing through the PA system towards the close of the Trout quintet? Or had Malachy Robinson’s double bass introduced the dance-pop vibe as early as the second movement? Did O’Conor play Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A (D644) with all the boring notes left out?
When the review came in, there was shock and disbelief in the Album Club office. O’Conor had played his Schubertiad straight, with not a hint of Britneyesque brilliance in sight. Sources close to the stage were telling us that the man hadn’t even lip-synced any of his between-tune banter.
We wanted answers, and we wanted them fast. So we hauled O’Conor in for questioning, along with his fellow Album Clubbers.
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
Fast forward to four tense-looking guests sitting around the table. It’s painfully obvious that they’ve been blown away by Femme Fatale, but equally obvious that they’re too damned insecure to admit it. Having frittered their lives away on the cheap, easy thrills of classical music and its idioms, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the genius that has been taunting their ears over the past few weeks. Instead they go into Salieri mode and attack.
Or rather, nit-pick. “The vocals are meaningless,” declares Gearóid Grant. “Britney’s vocal range is an octave. Her voice is not human. There’s so much overdubbing, so much reverb and you can hear the Auto-Tune being cranked up to stun.”
Veronica Dunne is also into this quaint notion that a singer should be judged on their vocals. “I thought it was a child trying to sing. She’s singing through her nose. It’s all, eeeeeek!” She imitates the sound a mouse’s exclamation of surprise makes when put through a distortion pedal. “If she came to me looking for singing lessons? Jesus, I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Fionnuala Hunt joins in with gusto. “I’ve never heard her sing live, but I’ve heard from lots of people that she is really dreadful live. And I just think ‘then what did it take to put that album together?’ The number of hours that went into it to get any bit of anything out of her voice to make her sound actually reasonable. It must have been such a tremendous effort on everybody’s part.”
The long list of composers, arrangers, performers and producers credited on the album is grist to the mill of Hunt’s envy. “It’s because the money is there. It’s such a luxury for these people to record, you know? They can do whatever they want. If you’re not feeling well one day, that’s grand. Off you go and you can come back the next day and just do another two lines. We would never get away with that.”
THE TONALITY IS MODAL
Okay, okay, so Britney can’t really sing, play or compose. And she and her pals hide behind a barricade of studio trickery. So what? Can you guys really say hand on heart that you don’t find this album just, like, totally fantabulous?
“The hooks in each dance track,” says Grant, “are such that even tone-deaf mindless crowds at football matches would have no bother learning them at the midweek rehearsal for the league match on a Saturday.” Pointing to (Drop Dead) Beautiful as an illustration of the album’s utter lack of musical ambition, Grant goes all factinista on us. “The tonality is modal. It hangs around a B minor chord for three minutes, as if to say that one should not stray from one’s two square feet of the dance floor. And in case you don’t get the message, ‘You’re beautiful’ is repeated eight times to the same B minor tune in eight consecutive bars. I mean, it’s just unbelievable.
“I feel really sorry for young kids with the pop music they are being forced by knowing adults to listen to today. It’s all lowest-common denominator stuff – repetitive, basic and manufactured. Will any of the dance music of today have a life 50 years from now? Somehow I doubt it. Good night, Britney.”
THE FIRST CUT AIN’T THE WEAKEST
Hmmm. What’s that they say about the first stage of grief? O’Conor initially found the first track mildly interesting. “But then gradually as I went through it I became less and less interested. A couple of times when I got to tracks six or seven I just switched it off and put on something else. The constant thunk-thunk-thunk beat was driving me insane.”
Having just singled out Till The World Ends as “the only rhythmically interesting thing across the whole 16 tracks”, O’Conor demonstrates its complex six-against-four rhythm by singing the melody line while tapping four-beats-to-the-bar on the table. Big mistake. To his fellow clubbers’ horror, he starts really getting into the tune.
“Jesus, I know the fecking thing at this stage! God, isn’t that great? Now I know a Britney Spears song!” He has gone badly off-message. Hunt is quick to intervene. Can we please put on the next track? Look how its time signature and style are identical to Till The World Ends. We’re back to tsk tsk.
Hunt pushes the it’s-all-so-samey line for all it’s worth. “The synthesised stuff, it had a very specific sound going through it, which didn’t alter at all. Ten of the 16 tracks are exactly the same tempo and have exactly the same deafening beat about them.”
PASS THE ETHER
Dunne is trying just as hard to hide the fact that she has been bewitched by Britney’s beat. “My grandsons were there and they came in while I was listening to it and said, ‘I don’t believe it, you listening to that sort of music. That’s backing music. People don’t listen to the music, they just listen to the beat’. But, I mean, it’s just like if you’re going under an operation. Years ago when they used to give you the ether you’d get a pulse, and that’s what it reminded me of.”
The album, she concludes, is all “gimmicks. It’s not the lyrics, it’s not the voice, it’s the backing. The backing is more important than the voice. How can you sell a song if you can’t tell the story and be sincere about it and feel it?” Er, ask Britney’s bank manager.
Three of our guests make a point of returning their CDs. They don’t even hold on to the free sample of Britney’s Radiance perfume (it’s too “sweet”).
What can you do? Horse to water and all that.
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NEXT MONTHwe ask Jedward for their thoughts on the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra's new Mahler Sixth. (Only kidding: next up is Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes. Guests TBA)
With thanks to Tower Records, Dublin 2
