Do we need another James Blunt? I don’t personally, but pre-pubescent girls are always with us, as are the sort of people who buy all their music from Tesco’s, so I guess there’s a need for soppy balladeering by non-threatening middle class boys implicit in modern society. Adam Barnes, a.k.a. Motion in Colour fits the bill with terrifying exactness. Does he actually exist, or is he, like The Archies, a sinister Music Industry construct designed to denude the readers of Smash Hits of their remaining readies?
All right, I’ll confess I find his ‘Airplanes’ rather pretty, with a piano and strings intro reminiscent of that of the Crash Test Dummies classic ‘Mmm, Mmm, Mmm’. Barnes’ singing is sweet, vulnerable and note-perfect, and the production is perfectly decent, if of the freeze-dried variety. Like every sixteen-year old, his lyrics aren’t much cop, though I’m not sure his target audience would appreciate ‘Thou hast conquered, O Pale Galilean” or “I can show you fear in a handful of dust” smuggled into their pop confectionery. Still the flood of self-pitying clichés can get cloying.
We’re into Fotherington-Thomas territory (“Hello clouds, hello sky!) with ‘Ballad of A Little Bird’, which isn’t quite as excruciating as the title suggests. It’s actually a mid-tempo shuffle that’s quite pleasing musically, although Barnes overdoes the ‘Take wing, and fly the nest” blandishments.
The remaining tracks are unremarkable solo-acoustic tunes, with the best specimen being ‘It’s Not the End of the World’. Without the full-band treatment, Barnes is revealed to be a competent rhythm guitarist, and his singing is undeniably natural and accomplished. Still, the end result is a bit of a bore.
The scary thing is that at the age of sixteen, Barnes seems to be the finished product. I can’t think of any way that he could improve ‘Airplanes’, because it fulfils the brief (namely, write a three and a half minute pop song that will make teenage girls go weak at the knees) so perfectly. Against that, the song is largely wafty, sentimental claptrap and we should want even schoolkids to be immunised against that. Shouldn’t we? Or am I being a pompous ass again?