Patrick Cleandenim Baby Comes Home by: Steve Scully Mon:07-May-07 Label: Broken Horse Year: 2007 WB rating 48 out of 100

Patrick Cleandenim is as much a character actor as a musician. From the anachronistic theatrics of his songs, to the gangster-ish caricature on the album sleeve, there’s an immediate sense – perhaps an unfair sense – that it’s all very contrived. The tremolo strings and brass groove of the opener, ‘Baby Comes Home’, make for a dramatic beginning, almost in the same vein as the show-tune, dance-inducing Scissor Sisters mixed with the stiff, white-boy funk of Beck. Cleandenim doesn’t as much sing this tune as deliver it, in the same way a protagonist of a musical would deliver a show-stopper. You can almost hear the snarl emerging on his face and imagine a poorly choreographed dance to accompany it.
 
‘Hypnotized’ continues this theme, evoking a jazz/swing vibe and making use again of a very effective horn section, this time accompanied by a piano part taken directly from a saloon scene in a Hollywood western. While the song is one of the album’s more convincing, it is a perfect example of one of its central flaws: lax production. The band sounds brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but the vocals are far too soft, and Cleandenim’s voice is so underwhelming at times that it’s drowned amidst the turmoil inherent in the sound. The Bacharach-esque ‘Congnac and Caviar’ employs exceedingly kitsch vocal harmonies, and the over-the-top arrangement again overwhelms Cleandenim’s lack of real vocal presence. Similarly, ‘Until You Said I’m Gone’ is a song tailor-made for a crooner, and Cleandenim really doesn’t fit that mould either. I hate to say it, but Jamie Cullum would deliver this song better, and with more edge than Patrick Cleandenim.

‘Hollywood’, the album-closer, has Cleandenim singing of drugs and debauchery. While the band again does its best to create a punchy latino/samba groove, Cleandenim fails to match them, and his vocals are too flaccid to have any real charm. His choir-boy, straight-edge delivery of lyrics such as: “In Hollywood the drugs are good/In New York things are bad,” and “In Tokyo the girls are slow/In London they’re going too fast,” gives cause to cringe. When Tom Waits sings of debauchery and drunkenness, we believe every word he says. When Johnny Cash sang of the plight of the persecuted man, we felt his pain through every word and breath. When Patrick Cleandenim rambles on about booze and girls, you just don’t feel it; he’s putting on an act, and putting it on very poorly. It’s like hearing Pat Boone’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ after hearing Little Richard’s, there’s no energy, no conviction and no connection with his subject matter.

In ‘Whispers Only Hurt Them’, Cleandenim is finally expressive. Despite the unnecessary reverb on his vocals, when he sings the line, “you can’t believe what you hear at all,” there’s a sense that he’s now doing what a bourgeoning rock-star with such a dramatic adopted persona should do: spitting out the lyrics rather than just letting them dissipate into the ether. He sounds more like a brit-pop frontman here, and it suits him. A bit of attitude is all he needs, but that doesn’t mean he can’t do the jazz/swing thing that he seems to love so much – Morrissey, in his post-The Smiths solo career, managed to turn into the besuited crooner with great effect. This is the tongue-in-cheek, charismatically smarmy approach that Cleandenim needs to adopt, especially if he’s going to convincingly deliver songs about murder, deceit and self-destruction.

Cleandenim has handed us an album of considerable appeal and extraordinary ambition, but all the self-important, left-of-field, self-conscious wackiness is tiring. He’s talented, for sure, but an entire album of gimmicky, superficial retrospection? Please, Cleandenim offer something substantial first, then you can try to charm us with a frivolous big-band number. This is a concept album in as much as its songs all sound extremely similar, but that’s not the most painful part of it. The most painful reality here is that Cleandenim doesn’t seem to have fully grasped the concept himself. The album just comes across as a half-finished foetus of a record, and more a demo than a polished product.

Head bowed, shoulders slumped and hands pocketed, we’re left wondering what could have been. Baby Comes Home, for all its grandeur and big-picture scope, is ultimately just an amateurish effort to evoke the past; rather than swaggering through its 11 tracks, it just limps, trips and falls.