Destination

Neil Young once sang the words, “Old man take a look at my life, twenty-four and there’s so much more”. Ronan Keating is only a year older, yet he exhibits the kind of world-weary resignation that befits a man several decades his senior. Few 25-year-olds, would even consider singing a line like, “If my time on earth were through, she must face this world without me.”

Thankfully, most of the rest of the former Boyzone boy’s second solo album is more upbeat and cheery than his ill-advised cover of Garth Brooks’ schmaltzy, overly sentimental ‘If Tomorrow Never Comes’.

Take the opener, ‘I Love It When We Do’ an upbeat, foot-tapping affair, that could’ve sat happily on his first album, or indeed any of Boyzone’s latter-day offerings. It’s not half bad as these things go, nor is the catchy ‘Love Won’t Work (If We Don’t Try)’, not surprisingly earmarked as the next single.

‘Time For Love’, the requisite big ballad, allows his vocal chops to shine through, which isn’t the case elsewhere. In fact the production doesn’t do him any favours at all on most of this – the suffocating arrangement on ‘My One Thing That’s Real’ spoils an otherwise fine pop song and he battles constantly with busy fills and frills courtesy of an army of synth-happy studio session heads.

‘The Long Goodbye’, the song he wrote with Paul Brady and currently doing the business for Brooks and Dunne Stateside, finally gets a solo reading from Keating but again he plays it safe, not straying too far from Brady’s version.

What else? ‘You’re Picking Me Up’ which isn’t included on this advance copy should be well worth hearing if only for the hilarious lyric “I drove 10,000 miles to jump off Niagra but I came back up because you’re my Viagra.”

Mainly predictable but with few surprises, Destination is the sound of someone who has yet to arrive, artistically speaking.