Dido
Life For Rent (Arista)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Summer 2004

If Eminem was only ever right about one thing, it was in his justification for using the first verse of “Thank You” as the hook for “Stan,” which was simply that Dido is a terrific pop singer. With a voice that comes across as Delores O’Riordan without the screechiness mixed with Sarah McLachlan without the somnambulance, Ms. Armstrong possesses both a power and a subtlety that serves her pet topic of romantic longing extremely well. What Eminem didn’t say outright but merely hinted at by sampling a single verse is that, as a songwriter, Dido is hit-or-miss, and while the best songs on 1999’s No Angel (like the heart-as-a-shield “Here With Me,” “All You Want” and “My Lover’s Gone”) showed a great deal of promise, the rest of the album simply showed how a gifted singer can make fairly unimpressive material shine.

Which is why I await, somewhat impatiently, a version of Life For Rent that reflects the above. Instead of capitalizing on her primary asset, the album ignores it almost entirely, as Dido, perhaps attempting to sound seductive, spends most of the duration vocalizing in a breathy coo just this side of a whisper. Doing so completely sidesteps the handsomeness and power of her voice, which is far sexier when it’s captured in full bloom. As a result, Dido sacrifices the expressiveness that is her greatest strength, and she spends the album at a single, monotonic pitch. The songs are thrown into full relief by default, and there are no improvements in quality over the material from No Angel to counteract their creator’s seeming absence.

What’s confusing is that there were strong indications that Dido was poised to make an artistic breakthrough on her No Angel followup. On the road for an unconscionably long time to promote the album, she and her band began doing interesting things with the music, taking aspects of Portishead’s bass-heavy sound and applying them to her unabashed pop songs. None of that’s evident on Life For Rent, which follows No Angel’s model of throwing an electronic sheen on top of textbook acoustic-guitar singer/songwriter confessionals. There’s usually no shame in an artist simply continuing to establish his or her sound for their second album, but Dido’s muse was leading her somewhere that she had initially seemed eager enough to go, and in failing to follow, Life For Rent comes across instead as a step backwards.

Nowhere is that clearer than on “Don’t Leave Home,” which Dido has been singing since at least 1999. Popular performers usually have to beg audiences to indulge them when they perform new material and all but apologize when they finish, but at the Boston show I saw in late 2000, she introduced the song to cheers and concluded it to enthusiastic applause. I was one of the converts that night; as it turned out, I hadn’t heard Dido until then (I had come for the Bangles, thank you very much) and it was “Don’t Leave Home” that did it. But I would never be able to justify that to anybody on the basis of the version of the song on Life For Rent, which belies the fact that she had been successfully putting it over to her audience for four years. Sped up, augmented with vocal overdubs and chipper acoustic guitar and approaching its subject matter (something of a “Comfortably Numb” redux, a song to an addict sung by the drugs) like a cute lullaby (instead of a terrifying one), it suggests that Dido didn’t have the confidence simply to go into the studio and record the song as she had been performing it for nearly half a decade. Imagine a new Cheap Trick fan, pre-Budokan, seeing them live and falling in love with “I Want You To Want Me” only to discover that the only extant recording of it was the dinky version from In Color, and you’ve got a sense of my disappointment in finally getting a recording of “Don’t Leave Home” all my own. In frustration, I performed a very cursory Google search and, 90 minutes later, had downloaded five performances of the song from the inter-album gap, none of them resembling the album arrangement, all of them superior.

If I’m harping on a single song too much, that’s partly because it’s emblematic of the problems on Life For Rent and partly because I can barely wring enough enthusiasm for the rest of the album out of my disappointed heart. If pressed, I could tell you that “Mary’s In India” is sweet but a little stupid, “See You When You’re 40” is a sharp enough calling-out of an ex-lover’s behavior and “See The Sun” is a pleasant chin-up-things-will-get-better number. Nothing, however, can match up to what Dido is capable of doing, of which I now have documented proof. It’s not the first time I’ve been let down by an artist of great potential, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it never gets any easier.

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