Dido - Safe Trip Home
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Free Music Notes for Safe Trip Home
Free Music Review: A great CD!
Hit: 5 Stars
Dido's CD is excellent ....as good as her 1st CD. Alot of thought went into this one!!!Free Music Review: 5 stars
Hit: 5 Stars
5 stars for Dido enjoyed the entire cd. highly recommend. I enjoy her voice :)Free Music Review: Smooth
Hit: 5 Stars
The music is very easy to listen to, and very smooth. I love this CD.Free Music Review: Hauntingly beautiful and emotional.
Hit: 4 Stars
Dido's previous two albums, "No Angel" (1999) and "Life For Rent" (2003), sold an astonishing 21 million copies in total.
Only her third album in nine years, "Safe Trip Home" somehow distils the essence of Dido even further.
Dido has been taking some time to mature, both musically and emotionally.
Where "Life For Rent" was a series of snapshots from the life of a newly single girl , "Safe Trip Home" is overwhelmingly coloured by the death at the end of 2006 of her father.
The renowned producer Jon Brion (who has worked extensively with Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright), and her brother and long-time collaborator co-producer Rollo Armstrong know how to make the most of a distinctive vocal talent.
On first acquaintance, it is almost sombre, such is the understatement of her arrangements.
She has reined back on the electronics, with more real instrumentation. Even with a band playing silkily syncopated grooves, often underpinned by lush orchestration, the overall effect is one of quiet stillness.
Her musical palette may have embraced the soft sounds of ambient electronics and the flowing melodiousness of folk, but she has a real gift for conveying simple, emotional truth with deceptively artful songs and the touching purity of her gentle, aching vocals.
Her songs are about everyday experiences and relationships. These mostly deal with loss: of lovers, of time, of a more hopeful younger self, and also of Dido's father, who died in 2006.
It's potentially affecting stuff, and the gentleness of the production - several songs sound as though they were recorded by candlelight - heightens the atmosphere of desolation and fragility.
The album, as you'd expect, stays to her tried and tested formula of minimalism, ennui and trademark pathos - from the opening emptiness of "Don't Believe In Love" to the brooding closer of "Northern Skies" - driven by a club-heavy bass line, and adorned with bubbly keyboard trills - there's barely a chink of smiling light to be found in the dark opus.
The outstanding song of the album is the piercingly beautiful, Celtic-flavoured "Grafton Street", a six-minute hymn to loss co-written with Brian Eno and featuring Mick Fleetwood on drums. Listen to it once and it will catch at your heart as a wrenching lament for a lover who will not return.
The deceptively relaxed 'Burnin' Love' sets Dido's delicate tones against the warm, crackling vocal of Citizen Cope, a Brooklyn-based guitarist, DJ and keyboard player, bringing the best out of an affecting melody.
On "Look No Further", she lays out the credentials that have endeared her to so many - spurning the high life that's surely within her grasp, she conjures a classically-cushioned, mellow beat-driven vision of hearth and home.
Most affecting is "Let's Do The Things We Normally Do", "from your rebel songs sung out of tune, so my hand held longer than you need to".
It is simply as fond as farewells can get.
Dido plays keyboards, drums and/or guitar on most of the tracks.
My favourite tracks: "Let's Do The Things We Normally Do", "Burnin' Love", "Grafton Street", and "Northern Skies", co-written with Rollo.
Life for Rent
No Angel
Free Music Review: Sad, uplifting, but always controlled
Hit: 4 Stars
Dido is one of those artists who is instantly recognizable just by listening to her cool, controlled and soft voice. Even when singing about tragic situations, the most emotion she allows to enter her voice is a wistfullness. For Dido, everything is steady as she goes. Even in the most painful moments, which this CD encapsulates.
Like many fans, this album has been a long time coming, filled with much anticipation. But I knew the moment I heard the tragic news of her father's passing that it would be awhile for the CD to percolate. And it's true, her father's passing has cast a pall over the songs here. It's a very somber album, moreso than her previous two. But it's also a terrific melding--finally--of her voice and the instrumentation.
I've always felt that, in the previous two albums which I love by the way, the music was there to support her voice. If you were to strip her voice, you wouldn't have much. Enter Jon Brion, a producer/writer who's worked with a variety of female artists through the years. He brings to the table some nice melodies that are distinctly his. It helps add to these songs in ways I never expected, whether it's the fun beat in "Us 2 Little Gods" or the sudden swelling of strings in some other songs.
The lyrics here are the best she's written. By far the most heartbreaking song is "The Day Before The Day," a song that seems to directly tackle her father's death. She sings, "I didnt get to say goodbye the day before the day / was trying to get to work on time, thats why I turned away / and missed the most important thing you've ever tried to say / I've lived my life without regret until today." It's moments like these that showcase a mature and powerful voice and its this dichotomy between the painful lyrics and her usually controlled voice. During this song, however, wistful sounds and even despair come into play.
Safe Trip Home is a terrific album, even though the last half turns very sad and slow. And Dido's voice is still the pure and beautiful instrument it has always been. One thing I'd like to see, though, for once is to see that constant voice break and see Dido really let out some emotions. But that's not really her. And that, I think, is ironically why I love listening to her.