I’ve long suspected that the tasteful and well-reviewed indie music of the past decade is essentially the dinner party music of the iPod generation. It’s got no strong ideology; most of it is essentially easy-listening music, perfectly designed for setting scenes in One Three Hill and featuring no hugely discordant notes likely to disrupt digestion (occasional moments of discord count as musical “roughage”).
Okay, there’s been an evolution of taste since dinner parties were invented which corresponds to an expanding mass-media. In the ‘70s, Demis Roussos and Nana Mouskouri were by-words for sophistication. By the ‘90s, it was David Gray and Dido and now it’s The xx, Bon Iver, The National and Fleet Foxes.
Talented teenager Birdy has fine breathy vocal and piano-playing skills, and rather than waste them in a piano bar playing to lunching business-folk, she’s decided to get straight into their homes with this rather beautifully produced and tastefully arranged album of easy-listening covers of only slightly less easy-listening bands (including all the aforementioned).
Now, this may sound like I’m building up to a bad review. However, I’m as bourgeois as they come. I’m an upwardly mobile, middle-class, 30-something journalist who now finds most gigs too noisy, likes to meet my similarly aspirational friends over well-cooked Jamie Oliver recipes and sometimes feels that the current centre-right government is making the best of a bad lot. My first thought about Occupy Dame Street was: “nice cardigans”. As a result, I get moderate enjoyment from listening to piano versions of music that has been well reviewed in liberal broadsheets. Honest to a fault, amen’t I?