Hey Whatever, Indeed (or: How I Learned to Stop Loving Westlife)

A couple of weeks ago, I put a Westlife album in my trade-ins stack for the first time. What surprised me is that it ended up being such an anti-climactic thing. (Or was it? I am devoting a long blog entry to it, after all....) It's made me look at the last few albums they've put out, and ... well, don't take this the wrong way (remember that I have been, still am, and will probably always be a loyal fan of boybands) ... but why are Westlife still bothering to record and release albums? And more to the point, how can they still be topping the charts?

I mean sure, they are and consistently have been a very fine bunch of vocalists, and there's that one characteristic voice whose soaring resonance and tight vibrato make it one of the most listenable in pop. (Is that Mark's or Shane's voice?) But what good does it do to have talent if it's dragged out over an endless stream of bland, room-temperature ballads, only occasionally stirred up by a perfunctory, rarely-better-than-okay uptempo ditty? Surely I'm not the only one who's noticed their descent into that rut over the course of their last two or three albums.

To be entirely subjective, I do like my boyband pop more on the upbeat side: NSYNC, Five, V and Take 5 (short-lived though the latter two were) have always had more of a place in my heart than Backstreet Boys, Code Red, or the snoozer of all boybands, 98 Degrees. And yes, Boyzone may arguably have been as ballad-heavy as Westlife, but at least they knew to stop after three albums (Westlife's first three were arguably their best), and to take advantage of the fans' lengthy anticipation of a comeback with a reasonably strong single. Besides, they had Stephen ... how can you not like Stephen?

To be honest, my Westlife fandom did diminish for a year or so, until Mark's brave coming-out in 2005 reignited it. And that's part of a somewhat embarrassing fact about me: There was a time when I'd buy a CD just because the artist was gay. Although that period of "unwavering fag loyalty" yielded a few singers who continue to be favorites of mine (Rufus Wainwright, Will Young, Anthony Callea), most of them were passing fancies for me at best, or downright duds at worst (names withheld to protect the semi-innocent). And now, I almost have to laugh at how the total opposite seems to be happening: I've recently become a fan of a few different artists (Ferras, Sam Sparro, Dan Gillespie Sells of The Feeling), but didn't discover they're gay (or they didn't come out) until after the fact. Not that it matters, of course. But, I digress....

For as long as my buy-each-of-their-albums-as-they- come-out-no-questions-asked loyalty to Westlife lasted since buying "World Of Our Own" in 2001, it took comparatively little time for the spell to break. I suppose I should have sensed the first inkling of "the beginning of the end" when I heard "Hey Whatever", a goofily insipid butchering of a way-cool but little-known quasi-gospel anthem by Irish rock band Relish. But despite that travesty and their completely unremarkable cover of Barry Manilow's "Mandy", I hung onto the album anyway, since a few of its other songs are decent.

I returned to my buy-without-hesitation pattern with "Allow Us To Be Frank", since I pretty-much can't get tired of listening to boybands doing Rat Pack standards (or Motown hits, for that matter -- shout-out to Human Nature!). As it turned out, I also found quite a bit to like in "Face To Face": decent covers of The Eagles ("Desperado") and Nick Carter ("Heart Without a Home"), a couple of the best upbeat tunes I'd heard from them since "World Of Our Own" ("She's Back" and "Hit You With The Real Thing"), and a totally scrumptious Motown-styled song ("Change Your Mind"), which is definitely ranked in my Top Three favorite Westlife songs of all time. As you can imagine, by this time I thought that the mediocrity of "Turnaround" was just a fluke.

But then came "The Love Album", a release so pointless that one wonders why they bothered. Westlife specializes in covers, and sappy ballads -- so do we really need a whole album full of sappy ballad covers, and most of them from the extra-sappy '80s? The fact that I'm an '80s kid and do kind-of like a few of the songs is the only reason I haven't jettisoned that CD by now ... and believe me, it's hanging on by a meager thread. And let's face it, the forementioned first Westlife CD I traded in, "Back Home", isn't anything to write back home about. For Pete's sake, would it hurt Westlife to not have any covers on an album of theirs, or at the very least to not release any of them as singles? I still like Westlife's earlier work as much as I ever have, but at this point the guys are going to have to come up with something pretty remarkable to make me want to buy it. I think their taking a year off is a very wise move ... maybe it'll stir them into making some more of the bouncy pop from their good old days.

I honestly don't know if there's a point to posting this, but I kind-of wanted to get it off my chest ... and since I'm not posting as much as I used to, I thought maybe you'd appreciate something new to read in these pages. Plus, I have to say I'm curious to see if anyone comments on what I've said here. I just hope the staunch Westlife supporters can come up with a better excuse for why they still love Westlife other than, "Because they're Westlife!" Hey, New Kids On The Block are still New Kids On The Block ... but it sure as heck ain't making me want to buy their new album.