FFWD Weekly
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| CD REVIEW MONO · Collaboration between songwriter and producer Martin Virgo and singer Siobhan De Mare. · It's not very hard to get a record deal in the UK. Apparently, once you've turned a few dials for Massive Attack, the world is your oyster. Mono is the brainchild of Martin Virgo, whose claim to fame was working with Nellee Hooper's production team doing a remix of Massive Attack's brilliant "Unfinished Sympathy." Since then he hasn't been up to anything, and this record proves it. Formica Blues is about as insubstantial as it gets. The songwriting is so weak that the songs threaten to fall apart under their own feathery weight. The instrumentation is a wafer-thin melange of trip hop and drum 'n' bass with lyrics more trite than the scribblings on a junior high school binder. Siobhan De Mare further strips the songs of any value with her annoying whisper of a voice which Virgo thoughtfully runs through the echo machine to try and give it some substance. Mono is arguably the most generic, Andrew Lloyd Webber-inspired product of the British music scene since the death of the neo-romantics in the '80s. 1/5 |