James Blunt gets a lot of shit for doing what he does. His name has become the first genuine addition to Cockney rhyming slang in a generation; Rolling Stone dismissed his second album as a collection of forgettable ballads that are less exciting than the Arctic Monkeys. The man is a pop-culture punch bag. And in all fairness, he's very nice about it.

Love, Love, Love ties in with the UK re-release of All The Lost Souls, which first came out last September (it went to number one, doncha know).  And it is – you’ve guessed it – another forgettable ballad so middle of the road he manages to make Maroon-5 and Coldplay look edgy, it seems Blunt's dubious “best” was entirely spent on You're Beautiful. It's not (just) that the song is insipidly awful; equally frustrating is that he actually has a great voice – but does nothing remotely interesting with it. Love... is a relentlessly upbeat and entirely inane romantic track that takes its cues from The Beatles’ most unremarkable material. And did he really think the song was good enough to merit naming three times?

Blunt actually sounds rather like a bewildered TV talent show contestant wandering through Angels or Imagine for the umpteenth time, bereft of the wit to do anything original with the material. It couldn't happen to a nicer chap, of course… but perhaps that's the problem.

 

2/10

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