Tom McRae - 'Bright Lights'

‘Bright Lights’ is all shiny happy jangliness; breathy, Lion-King style vocals and, yes, cliché wagon clatters past, "a place I once called home."  Yup, this song is really, really irritating.  Like the jazz-hands, 3-minute equivalent of everything that’s vile about musical theatre, this features the sort of grating ‘everything will be ok’ sentimental nonsense loved by those with either very little sense of realism or those who love watching romantic comedies (these are not mutually exclusive).  This may well be a little harsh, but there do seem to be few redeeming features about this single.  The cheesy, soaring strings, lines such as "shadows where the best things hide" the David Gray-esque piano, the heinous sense of stadium epic just yearning to escape from wee Tom’s wholesome soul.  Shoot me now.  And before McRae corner defendants start blithering about how ‘its really not depressing!’, this is not the point.  The song may well be, in parts, morose, but depressing is fabulous!  Pop-noir a la Joy Division has long cemented itself as smoulderingly glamorous, worthy of every break-up mixtape and mascara dragging tear.  ‘Bright Lights’ is not so.  This is the sort of record you buy your Mum on Mother’s day.  If you don’t like her too much.

Released 11/06/07 on V2 Records