Hayworth; Paul: Dimentions

Well isn't Dimentions (Paul Hayworth's spelling, not mine) nice? Nice gentle guitar playing, nice gentle singing, nice gentle beats, nice gentle melodies and nice gentle, gentle bits. In fact if you are looking for a nice gentle album to gently - and nicely - while away an hour or so, then let the strangely one dimensional Dimentions be the album to do it to. Oddly enough Dimentions (no I don't know what it means either...) is one of those albums that I find singularly difficult to criticise, while simultaneously having nothing hugely positive to say about it. Hayworth, who boasts of releasing half a dozen albums or so in almost as few months, handles almost all of the sounds, and it has to be said that he's a decent guitarist, decent singer and he writes decent songs, placed squarely in (you guessed it) nice gentle indie-pop territory. Think jingly jangly early Bowie without the intensity, or Dodgy without the overtly fun filled attitude and you'll be pretty close to the eight songs that make this album totally fine, while completely devoid of event.

All of the songs plod along with a mid-paced strum providing an unobtrusive backing to the unforced vocals which never quite become dreamy, or threatening, in fact they are just...well...there. Not engaging, but then not distasteful. In fact Hayworth has the sort of voice that if you heard him crooning away acappella in an absent minded kind of way in the corner of the bar, you'd happily proclaim him to be "alright". You'd neither hush your friends to hear him better, nor would you aim your pint glass at him to quieten him down. And that's the thing, the utterly gentle (I'll let you add nice this time), unobtrusive feel of this album just leaves you nonplussed and uncaring towards the whole thing. It isn't awful, in fact it is a million miles from awful, but then you'd be hard pushed to find anything that draws your attention, or makes you want to spin it again. Middle of the road describes it well. Remarkably safe does too, but then so does "background music", something that other people actually called out as I was listening to it.

In the end, whether it is a laid back acoustic album, a drawn out prog epic, or a skull shattering slab of extreme metal, we listen to music to evoke emotions and interact with what is going on. Dimentions does none of those things, leaving you struggling to differentiate between one song and another. In a way I'd rather have hated this album than had the so-so feeling that it has left me with. Ever so nice, ever so gentle, and even a bit more nice, Dimentions fully deserves its neither here nor there score of 2 and a half out of five for being neither one thing or the other. Leaving it as not very much of anything.

Track Listing
1. Spaceboy
2. Petkovitch
3. Stick Together
4. The Cloud
5. The Old Haunts
6. Wish
7. The Sting
8. Small World

Added: July 21st 2012
Reviewer: Steven Reid
Score:
Related Link: Paul Hayworth on BandCamp
Hits: 1845
Language: english

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