There’s a rule that dictates as soon as your teenybop audience grows up, you mutate into an “all-round family entertainer”. Ronan Keating misguidedly tried to break that rule by taking on the persona of a rock star on his last album and landed on Planet Prannet. Now that he’s finally made it to his natural home, he’s actually blossomed, dropping the fake American vocal slurs and singing in a natural, warm and attractive voice, quite possibly for the first time.
He takes the Golden Horde’s Spector pastiche ‘Friends In Time’ and turns it into a real charmer, and actually makes the Goo Goo Dolls' soppy ‘Iris’ listenable again. On paper, the Kate Rusby-assisted ‘All Over Again’ seemed like a recipe for instant musical divorce, but it delivers real emotion. His compositional collaboration with Ronan Hardiman, ‘So Far Away’, suggests that he might shake off the boyband tag yet and take on new musical challenges, and Neil Diamond’s ‘Hello Again’ avoids the sludge.
Some credit must go to producer Mark Taylor for allowing Keating space to do his own thing, while avoiding the temptation to wrap him in candyfloss. Of course, he does hit the bumpers from time to time, like on the sentimental, country-tinged ‘This I Promise You’, and ‘It’s So Easy Loving You’. But all in all, it looks as if Ronan Keating’s found his own voice, and maybe we’ve found him. I never thought I’d say that.