Certain artists are blessed with an enormous appetite to say something, but are cursed by the inability to articulate exactly what it is they want to say. Now, only a fool expects Tolstoy from AC/DC, or demands Flaubert of Funkadelic, but the vocation of singer-songwriter, which venerates the poet-seers and protest singers, insists that the voice is mixed front and centre and the words get their own spread on the lyric sheet. So, if the songwriter lacks a natural facility with language, he or she ends up playing to their weaknesses rather than strengths.
Declan O’Rourke, like souls as various as Liam O'Maonlai, Richard Ashcroft and Noel Gallagher, has buckets of talent, but is scuppered by lyrical imprecision. The listener intuitively gets the thrust of what he’s saying, but feels unmoved by the fuzzy manner in which he says it.
Case in point: the title tune of this follow-up to the double-platinum debut Since Kyabram, a darker repainting of ‘New Morning’ boosted by an epic arrangement. Or elsewhere, ‘Just To Be Friends’, a waltz-time Dylanesque strumalong with obligatory harmonica ad-breaks between verses.
Naiveté can indeed be charming. Syd Barrett, Neil Young and Wayne Coyne have all perfectly conveyed the almost lysergic eyes-wide wonder of childhood in song. But if a songwriter is to address the personal and universal realpolitic, as O’Rourke does here, he needs to employ a lexicon up to the job.
There’s the rub. Big Bad Beautiful World tackles big subjects with tautologies. Here are songs about love (‘Make Something’, ‘Stay In Sight’, ‘Just To Be Friends’) and war (‘Man Of Peace’, ‘One Day In A War’, the latter stitched with rather literal military drum taps) set against backdrops that by turn evoke MOR FM rock, The Verve and Dream Harder-era Waterboys, over-egged with schmaltzy, showy strings.
O’Rourke is certainly capable of great things: ‘Save Your Soul’ is a sober and serious tune that showcases his beefy Ron Sexsmith-on-steroids baritone at its best. But there’s no avoiding the elephant in the room. The rudiments of these songs can’t bear up under the weight of their collective ambition.