| Mr Hudson & the Library – A Tale of Two Cities
Do you remember playing with poster paints as a schoolkid? In your art lessons at the age of six or seven? You learned that mixing red and blue made purple. Or that mixing blue and yellow made green. Straight away, you tried mixing all the colours up at once because something amazing was bound to happen … and all you got was a sludgy brown mess. Well, the same principle applies to music. Crossing genres is great, until somebody decides to try them all at once.
Mr Hudson & the Library’s debut album A Tale of Two Cities starts off with the background sounds of a city. A car door, a beeping horn. A crunchy hip-hop beat drops. A male voice comes in, laid-back, maybe a little cracked. It’s an old Sinatra standard, with the occasional lyric altered to give it a contemporary resonance. Dubby bass stabs away in the background, opening up slowly in to a reggae thrum. A string section swells over the next verse and a Cure-like piano refrain slams over the second or third chorus. A horn section shows up before the song’s out, adding a Madness vibe to the end parts. It’s all a little much. It’s trying too hard. Everything at once just never quite gels into a cohesive song.
That’s the scene set for the rest of the album. The tempo speeds up or slows down, the order of the introduction for the many elements of each song changes, but it’s always the same everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic. It’s endearing, on repeated listens, and most effective when Mr Hudson himself keeps his vocals brief and to the point. Lyrically, he fancies himself as an urban storyteller, following a lineage from Ian Dury down through Mike Skinner, but he lacks the personality. It’s the dreary details of a dreary life and the specifics just aren’t specific enough to argue that the devil is in the details.
A Tale of Two Cities contains two reworkings of Sinatra standards, making it clear that Mr Hudson sees himself as a pretender to that throne. His vocals though are distorted here, as if recorded on one of the Beastie Boys’ famed cheap plastic mics. He’s most effective in the lower registers, as on the introductory bars of Everything Happens to Me where he half-sings, half-speaks. When actually going for it and singing, he brings to mind nothing other than a second-tier boyband. Westlife, maybe. That level of blandness. See the terribly dull Picture of You for proof.
The constant reggae basslines end up grating against the mannered piano riffs and the too-clean, too-simple vocals. Such multi-genred magpie tendencies need an edge to hold them together. Mr Hudson lacks such an edge, sounding like he’d be most at home playing live in the Pizza Express Jazz Club. You just can’t take on Lily Allen at summer ska-pop at the same time as taking on The Cure at observational piano-led angst and Damon Albarn at sketching London life in lyrical couplets. Not without some balls to back it all up with. Mr Hudson is too nice. Too well-mannered. Too soft.
All that said, A Tale of Two Cities is a pleasant background noise of a record. It just doesn’t strike me as worthy of concentrating my attention on.
A Tale of Two Cities is out now on Mercury | |
