Dido - Safe Trip Home
Dido – Safe Trip Home (4.5/5)
Dido is one of those artists often unfairly ridiculed. Although thought of as slightly depressing, musically lightweight, artistically lowbrow, even vocally irritating, there is no disputing the fact that the woman knows how to shift records. Despite Safe Trip Home only being her third album she has sold twenty-two million albums, based on her debut No Angel (1999) and sophomore follow-up Life For Rent (2003), numbers that would probably make most of today’s artists drool. She has always held a somewhat strange place in my heart – her music has become uncomfortably associated with exes of mine, and listening to songs like White Flag or Hunter often leave me with thoughts and emotions best left in the past, not helped by the fact that her music often launches me on a huge downer anyway. So it was with slight trepidation that I came to Dido’s latest offering, wondering if in fact she had become somewhat irrelevant in the last five years since her last album. I could not have been more wrong.
What piqued my interest initially about this record was reading in The Observer that most of the songs were written during her father’s long battle with cancer, a battle he lost two years ago. Having lost my own father this year, I was intrigued but also anxious about the contents of Safe Trip Home. My own loss is still quite painful, and the last thing I wanted was a painful reminder of one’s own grief set to rather plaintive music. But that’s not the case here. Yes, some of the songs could have been extremely bleak because of their lyrical content, but they seem to radiate within the rather lush production that co-producer Jon Brion has enveloped around this entire album. And it is Jon Brion who really elevates this album from the rest of Dido’s work, with his sparse, shimmering orchestral arrangements and clipped, muscular rhythms that have worked so well on other efforts with Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright – two artists that I love.
Although on first listen the album may seem a little samey and very typically Dido (ambient, atmospheric, fragile vocals, mid-tempo beats) on repeated listens it gentle unleashes its musically layers, leaving you somewhat breathless at the ingenuity of the arrangements and the musical dexterity of the production. Don’t Believe In Love is the slightly misleading first single and first track on the album. Perhaps more sonically similar to earlier fare, it leaves the listener with few expectations. But as on other later tracks, the pessimism is lifted by the gorgeous string arrangement, and the hook of the chorus very slowly works its way into the mind. Other standout tracks on the earlier half of the album include Never Want To Say It’s Love, continuing the theme of a self-imposed exile from relationships. However, it has such a wonderfully lilting production with bass, guitars, horns and strings that it lifts the bleak refrain on the chorus as she sings “I felt the same today as I was feeling yesterday/It’ll be the same tomorrow, from then on it won’t change”.
Grafton Street, produced by Brian Eno and featuring Mike Fleetwood on drums, is really the album highlight. Expansive and atmospheric, full of echoing drums and glockenspiels softened by distance, the song is a lamentation on the death of her father, capturing the horrible realisation that he has gone and she will never see him again. The Celtic sounding recorders (played by Dido herself) build this song to an almost agonisingly sad climax. It Comes and It Goes is perhaps my favourite song on this album. The light flourishes of piano and drums again establish a levity that is completely undone by the extraordinarily sparse chorus with its broken falsetto, only to build up again with rousing strings and horns in the second verse and bridge – absolutely delightful. Us Two Little Gods is probably the most typical Dido song on the album, which is no bad thing, sounding very Sand in my Shoes, but whereas the latter track is lighter and clubbier, this song benefits from Dido’s more mature style.
The Day Before the Day is perhaps the most direct song about her father’s death, an acoustic ballad that reminds me very much of Nick Drake’s River Man, coupled as it is with atmospheric strings and bleak, poetic images of her father’s terminal cancer and his eventual death. The stark line - ‘I’ve lived my life with no regrets until today’ is one of those painful observations that sum up the death of someone close. Let’s Do the Things We Normal Do references Jon Brion’s previous work on Fiona Apple’s lost masterpiece Extraordinary Machine (V1.0), with its Eastern sounding riff and exotic sonic palette. Burnin’ Love, with Citizen Cope, is a wonderfully lilting ballad which at first I thought was written and sung with Damien Rice, as it sounds as though it could have come straight off his album O, though it is a song equally well-crafted as any on his debut album.
Northern Skies closes Safe Trip Home, a nine minute opus of ambient electronic beats that is sonically expansive, but shot through with poetic lyrics that are probably the best Dido has ever written. What I love most about this song is how towards the long build up at the end Jon Brion seems to take inspiration from Cliff Martinez’s soundtrack to Solaris, adding to the mix wide, ethereal, dissonant orchestral chords that are the trademark of the film Solaris. Safe Trip Home is by far Dido’s best album, showing that she has shaken off the long held image of being a sort of musical version of Bridget Jones – a singleton with relationship problems and affected, coffee-table book-like melancholy. It is more reflective and less self-indulgent, with the benefit of a wider set of experiences that only age can bring. The likelihood is that it won’t match the sales that her first two albums did, but with an album as accomplished as this I don’t think she will care too much.
Download: It Comes and It Goes, Grafton Street, Never Want To Say It’s Love, The Day Before The Day.
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