Dido

Dido is an interesting one for me.

When I first met the person who is now my wife, I was suddenly introduced to a world with cable television and the dark underworld of American syndicated network shows.

One of the series' that Maria followed was some horrible thing called Roswell and it was a true teeny-bopper, fit-girls, hot-guys thing that's only sole purpose was to kill an hour of your day.

But the theme tune caught my attention. A little bit of investigation on the web soon offered up the name Dido and the title Here With Me. Only a few weeks later Maria and I were buying the No Angel album on CD.

No Angel was okay. Not what I would call ground breaking in anyway, but certainly not overdone. Dido seemed a relatively frsh act compared to so much of the production line trash filling the charts.

An old friend of mine, someone I used to work with about 9-10 years ago, Gary, heard me telling someone about the CD purchase and said, "But, Rob, don;t you find it depressing? I mean, listen to it. She's been dumped, like, a thousand times."

And he has a point. If you actually listen to what Dido says, she's just so terribly cut up and bitter that it kind of makes you think, 'Wow, just chill, babe." It gets in the way a bit.

So when the second album came out, we bought it hoping she'd gotten over her prior problems and we found out pretty quick that she was still terribly unhappy. Sand in my Shoes, White Flag, Mary's in India... Crikey, this girl has issues.

And while she was still all caught up in her problems, she wasn't really offering up anything new. Had she told us all her woes in a nslightly different way, I might have been able to forgive her, but alas, Life for Rent fell flat for me.

She went quiet for a long time and then suddenly Safe Trip Home hit the shelves. This time, I read reviews before trying to buy it. And I saw exactly what I feared, more talk of very personal songs unleashed upon the listener in her underwhelming trademark style.

While No Angel was a good debut album and Life for Rent was a Luke Warm follow up, Safe Trip Home was definitly a step forwards for Dido. The album gels together better than her previous works and there are a couple of tracks that really stand out. As a collection, it works. Individually, Northern Skies and Quiet Times shine like brilliant beacons of light.

It still suffers though. Dido sings songs that carry a strong emotional message. yet she consistently fails to sing with any emotion in her voice. Listen to other singers as a point of reference.

Rob Dougan really makes you feel the anger he portrays in a lot of his songs. There's a real sense of anguish and pain that communicates amazingly well.

Dido however, much like the German singer Black, has the same tone to everything, so whether it happiness, sadness, joy or misery, it all sounds the same.

So all in all, I find Dido a safe and easy choice of CD for journeys in the car when you don't want your ears chewed off by the radio, or even as some simple unobtrusive background music for when you have a few friends round and you want to fill those annoying quiet gaps between conversations.

I eagerly await for her to really do something different. More along the lines of Safe Trip Home, but with some real feelings.

Rob.

I heard White Flag on the radio today, and thought, I hadn't listened to a Dido song in a long time. And then I see this thread.