You Sing a Sad Song Just to Turn it Around

It’s hard to get away from Daniel Powter these days as he battles with James Blunt for the most overplayed song this year. And even though Bad Day is a better song than You’re Beautiful, any song gets old after hearing it a thousand times over a month. So just time for the song to hit its tipping point, Powter has released his American, self-titled debut to give us something else to listen to.

What’s surprising at first listen to the album is how it sounds nothing like the morose, singer-songwriter on the piano vibe of his first hit. Instead, on most of the other songs on the album, starting with Song 6 (I assume that since he is Canadian, having the first song called Song 6 has something to do with some weird conversion with the Metric System) Powter goes into falsetto while channeling Stevie Wonder with a funky mix of soul and rock. The only problem with this is that Maroon 5 did a much better job doing the exact same thing a couple years ago on their first album.

That’s not to say that Powter doesn’t do a good job at it himself except when he gets overtly sexual on songs like Free Loop (And I will figure out that we can baby, we can do a one night stand) and Hollywood (you could be my star for weekends, do you like your Hollywood?) which come across as more creepy than romantic. But the biggest problem with this album is that, at just over a half an hour, it’s way too short. But of course the record company had no qualms of charging full price for it.

Song to Download - If you’re already sick of Bad Day, go with Lie to Me

Daniel Powter gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.