Mr. Hudson & The Library A Tale Of Two Cities

Is everything really so middle of the road these days? Has the alternative really been appropriated by the mainstream? If you want answers to that question, try asking the polite couples you encounter on a walk around where you live, or maybe go to a taping of Later... With Jools Holland. These are big, big questions that I can't even begin to answer in an album review, especially by a group that I find so hard to get worked up about either way, Mr. Hudson And The Library.

A Tale Of Two Cities is an album that does it's best to defy categorisation whilst embracing the mainstream, trying to marry the broad social commentary and tough urban sound of artists such as Mike Skinner and Sway with polite dinner jazz, sung by a man who quite obviously holds up Sting and The Police up as the a totem of all that is good in mainstream rock music. Quite often this makes for an uncomfortable, slightly jarring listening experience, with Hudson's cod-cod-reggae styling often making you wince in recognition of those painful experiences you often have at a barbecue when somebody breaks out a copy of Synchronicity and starts aping the bass-lines like a demented Mark King (ask your dad - actually on second thoughts don't). Opening track On The Street Where You Live is a prime example of this, and is a fitting introduction for an album that is the closest anybody's came to a sonic 'meh' ever. It's a toe-curling marriage of dinner jazz, reggae and hip-hop, with Hudson describing 'a tower block feeling' when he knows his departed lover is near. What, exactly, is a 'tower block feeling'? Hunger? Desperation? Anger? Poverty? Well, at least the inhabitants that reside in these tower blocks have somebody as eloquent as Cambridge-educated Hudson to express their hopes and aspirations for them. Except they don't. This is deeply mediocre stuff. The cod-reggae vocal stylings don't stop there, however, with tracks such as Too Late Too Late and Ask The DJ, whilst actually being quite interesting track musically, are ruined by Mr. Hudson's incessant and embarrassing Sting impersonations (especially on the latter track, where Hudson refers to the aforementioned DJ as a 'Deeeejeh' in what can only be described as home-counties patois), which render the album almost unmistakable. Occasionally, on tracks such as 2x2 he manages to rouse me from my disinterest with some fantastic production and poignant lyrics about the occasional spark of life in an almost uniformly generic and lonely big-city existence, but then he loses me in the bland UB40-isms of Bread + Roses, so it's back to watching Through The Keyhole on mute and eating peanut butter bagels I go. If that's not a sorry state of affairs then I don't know what is.

An album so average, polite and middle of the road that it all-but asks you to tidy your room before you put it in your CD player (if you still have one, of course), A Tale Of Two Cities is the soundtrack to a dinner party where all the guests can't agree on what to play, but all agree that they want something that's riddled with contradictions, lacks any true focus and will just blend seamlessly into chatter about tracker mortgages and ISA's whilst making them seem edgy to anybody who happens to peer through their window. Generic major label edginess has rarely sounded so, well, bland.