Laura Critchley - From Home To Hollywood
Laura Critchley is Liverpool’s latest export, not that you’d know it listening to her. Before releasing her first album she went to America to record the soundtrack to a Naomi Watts film and ditched her accent, and possibly her more memorably hooks in the mid-Atlantic.
The songs on ‘From Home To Hollywood’ are chilled. Only a few are faster than the rest; all are about being the girl next door (most explicitly on ‘girl next door’). But t t problem with this album is that it is just languid, too languid, and so all the songs sound a similar ineffectual blend of being laid back and reflective.
The chorus of ‘Today’s Anther Day’ sounds like a hoedown. Brilliant. But the verses are let down by an electric guitar comes and goes like a weirdo at a party. The songs toward the end of the album are a bit better, though they have the same faults. ‘Don’t Say’ had a good vocal melody. Her singing accent is dispiritingly androgynous but, on demand, Critchley can sing in her own voice.
Too bad she doesn’t use it that often and relies on plodding music to take charge. The songs have their own merits but share the same fault. This album is just boring. The occasional flash of brilliance shows Critchley has talent or at least potential but the good drowns in the dull.
Critchley’s next album could do with a bit more of the personality she must have to have dazzled so many of Hollywood’s glitterati. But maybe since arriving the vacuum of Sunset and Mulholland is taxing her efforts. If so, some advice • come home.