CityLife

Album Review: – Dido: Safe Trip Home (SonyBMG)

CityLife Rating: 4.0000 out of 5

IT'S easy to be dismissive of Dido’s elegant, grown-up English coffee table music.

There have been times when it seemed as if she, along with David Gray, provided the unobtrusive soundtrack to a million dinner parties in middle England.

Slap Safe Trip Home on, and you are soon reminded just why Dido is, commercially, the gentle giant she is.

Producer Jon Brion persuaded Dido to go to Los Angeles and immerse herself in the mechanics of recording an album.

The result is a typically understated confection in which natural sounds like strings, brass and woodwind shine.

Brion’s musicianship is all over the record, and Dido’s brother features heavily in the songwriting credits, but there is a catholic mix of fellow travellers, including drummer Mick Fleetwood, Sister Bliss and Brian Eno, adding his sonic imprint and songwriting know-how to Grafton Street, which oozes along ambiently, much like one of Peter Gabriel’s more reflective compositions.

Lyrically, Dido sings of love in its autumnal phase, recollections of better times, or just simple musings on the weather – much of which are sufficiently non-specific for the listener to import their own significance. Cunning stuff.

But there is one song which you are almost certain to hear a thousand times.

Look No Further has a chorus with the stirring quality of a hymn, a hook line of resolution “’Cause my heart has found its home” and a string arrangement which recalls the most gorgeous of Tom Waits’s lyrical 1970s phase.

By Paul Taylor

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Released: 24/11/2008

Reader Rating: out of 5

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