Polydor
Pop, 2006

Now, I like Ronan Keating’s voice a lot when he was in Boyzone and some of his solo singles like his cover of When You Say Nothing at All as well as his original hit Life Is a Rollercoaster are still some of the best pop ditties I’ve heard.

But over the years he is turning into a wretchedly boring old man. His angelic voice starts to mutate into the pained bleating of some long dead male artist that keeps playing from a haunted gramophone in a horror movie. And the songs he chooses to sing! I don’t know whether he has an innate bad taste or he has some terrible advice from his handlers, but he ditches the catchy tunes for those stuffy songs that will only find a home in some pensioner investment plan ad on some daytime TV ad that plays between Coronation Street and Home and Away or in endless loops in some supermarket.

On Bring You Home, his newest CD, things are no different. When Mr Keating is not sounding like a two-bit reject from Nashville Star bleating in a pained manner what sounds like the most dire pop-country tunes possible, he’s covering stuffy ballads and embarrassingly cheesy mid-tempo songs that are tailor-made for events where bad taste is the norm, like weddings. There is no exuberant tunes like Life Is a Rollercoaster, just an endless dirge of the most boring songs possible. Mr Keating is like a bad taste magnet that way.

His horrible, horrible cover of the Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris is no doubt the sign of the apocalypse.