Daniel Powter - Daniel Powter

Genre pop Publisher Warner Bros. Records External Links Official Daniel Powter Website Official Warner Bros. Records Website

Lately my 9 to 5 day job has reared into long twelve-hour stretches, which has made it difficult to come home and write up a 300-word slag on the album waiting at the top of my review queue. I have procrastinated on this Daniel Powter album well past its due date. It was starting to look like American Idol will have been all said and done and "Bad Day" will have rolled past the credits for the last time and officially be deemed a one hit wonder by the time I got the energy to get this review in.

Ever since being assigned to review this album my creative muse has been lost on a distant island, it has two black eyes and has been rolled over by a freight train. At this point I'm uncertain if it will ever return. My writing hobby has never been more uninspiring than it is right now.

Daniel Powter has the number one song in the country right now with the aforementioned "Bad Day." There is no escaping that song. It's piped in through the grocery store aisles where I shop for my milk and Chef Boyardee. I can't even escape the song by turning on the TV to watch a little baseball, WGN plays "Bad Day" during Glendon Rusch pitching changes and very sadly that is a regular occurrence these days.

Daniel Powter is light-fare adult contemporary piano pop schlock, a cheesy groove-less Jamiroquai knockoff with non-descript surface level lyrics who happens to have been lucky enough to land in the swim of major label marketing dollars. Trying to figure out why Daniel Powter is on a major label is like wondering why Freddie Bynum is getting at bats with the Chicago Cubs. Sure he might get lucky with one bit hit out the gate but it's fairly obvious that those hits will dry up fast. The rest of the album is as bland as "Styrofoam" as one of the songs is appropriately titled. "Jimmie Get's High," is a cheap swig of Lenny Kravitz like soft-rock-balladry and "Hollywood" is inept with a watered down groove over faceless couplets like "hey hey this could be cool, we could be together, nothing lasts forever, me, I'll be a fool" Powter is really embarrassing himself to a worldwide audience with that one.

I guess my problem with Daniel Powter isn't that he has the number one song in the country right now. The problem is that his songs do nothing for me. They leave an emotional void in my skull. There are a lot of albums that have recently come out that I feel are so much better. I just listened to the new Neil Young album. Man does that "Let's Impeach The President" song twist up an empty pit in my stomach. There is nothing that gets under my skin, warms my heart, or makes me want to get up and dance on Daniel Powter's debut. It is Prozac music. It's what people would be listening to in Huxley's Brave New World and it's not for me. I need pain and thunder and clouds rumbling with a song called "Bad Day." I want it to get really bleak and mysterious with a really funky undercurrent, but Powter does not come through.

A lot of people would describe Daniel Powter as inoffensive mom-rock. But for someone who doesn't listen to FM radio or follow the Billboard charts or watch American Idol I find Powter's brand of rock pretty offensive to be judged on an artistic level. It is an empty pop record null of any artistic merit and I will be glad to delete it and crush the CD with a hammer when I'm finally done with this review.