Worldview is the current stage name of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Oliver Shaw, who specialises in preachy, abstract three-minute pop nuggets, whose levels vary from the tediously generic to the accomplished facsimile. This current crop is not his best (I’d look up his ‘Paying for It’ album to find his smartest work), but it’s very well-produced and musically varied enough to be worth a few listens.’One Rule for You’ attacks the smugness of those Christians who think they have God’s personal protection, while He dishes it up to the less deserving at the other end of the world. From that hypocrisy, Shaw points the moral that God doesn’t exist and anyone that believes in Him is a cretin:
And if life can be quickly cut short
Well then, what could life really be worth?
But you can’t draw from this the obvious conclusion
No, you have to live within the mist of positive illusions
(Quite a clutch, these cretins: C.S.Lewis, Graham Green and Evelyn Waugh for example, all wrote after Darwin’s evolutionary theory became widely-accepted and still believed, to say nothing of various theistic scientists such as evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky and Francis Collins, who ran the successful Human Genome Project). If I am spending a lot of time on the lyric, that’s because the music is pretty but forgettable, a pastiche of Oasis with some smart programming work to give it a twenty-first century sheen. As mentioned before, Shaw’s singing isn’t very good in the main, suffering from limited range and emotional expression and this may point a clue as to why this song and others seem so dry and desiccated. They are like tiny theological treatises rather than songs with a living, breathing consciousness behind them.
Still, if you ignore the weedily hectoring polemic, there is some good music in here. ‘Jam Tomorrow’ is decent dance funk, and ‘Tourist’ is a successful floor-filler in the mould of New Order with a dash of Ultravox. In this last tune, Shaw’s lack of oomph in the vocal department is a positive good, making him sound rather like The Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie. The chorus, which benefits from added percussion, is the best thing on the record. ‘Designed For Life’ borrows heavily from Spandau Ballet but benefits from clever production work, incorporating bell chimes and synthetic strings to create a smooth, digestible confection. The lyrics, focussing on woolly concepts about ‘standing out from the crowd, but not too far’ or the idea that in life we are ‘just managing the damage’ are competent but uninspiring
Elsewhere, things are adrift. ‘High Hopes’ has a powerful rocky groove, but the vocals are blown out the water by over-loud rhythm guitar, while ‘Buy Into It’ is more half-hearted, wobbly-sung Christian-baiting to cookie-cutter folk rock.
Shaw’s work, it will be seen, is never terrible; he’s too professional a producer for that; but the level of inspiration doesn’t seem very high here. The concepts are big, but the songs don’t do them justice- there is no plausible illustration of his world view in song, just a repeated assertion of it. He can only berate, he can’t seduce.