Umbrella Reviews - Audioslave, Vandals, Roch Voisine While Interviewing Bjork for Cable Access TV, Drummer

Umbrella Reviews - Audioslave, Vandals, Roch Voisine while interviewing Bjork for cable access TV, drummer

Josh Freese at his weekly D&D game and a whack of other hilarious antics. That's when you love them more than ever but realize just how lame we all really are.

Keith Carman

Roch Voisine

Higher (BMG Canada)

Get ready for more than 50 minutes of

Mallzak for your listening pleasure - sappy, clichéd-ridden love ballads that are best suited as background 'noise' while battling fellow shoppers searching for that perfect holiday gift for your loved one.

Roch Voisine - French Canada's answer to Michael Bolton - returns with Higher, 14 ballads that beckon the listener to reach a higher plane of love. Well, I say love because

Voisine only uses this four-letter word 42 times on his fourth English album. That's an average of three times per song! "Love" also appears in the chorus of half of the album's tracks. Voisine croons about relationships, relationships, and more relationships. You could say that he has love on the brain.

The album teems with clichéd lyrics like this 'original' line http://www.umbrellamusic.com/reviews/rev_02dec5.php (8 of 9) [12/12/2002 20:11:07] Umbrella Reviews - Audioslave, Vandals, Roch Voisine from "Don't Give Up": "Don't give up/ No matter how hard it seems." Thanks Roch, never heard that self-help mantra before. Later in the song, he whispers, "Don't give up." Oh, I wish he would. Or, how about the powerful, yet simple, "I believe there's nothing stronger than love …" Doesn't it just make your heart beat faster?

The CD is enhanced with a CD-ROM where Voisine invites the listener to take an inside look at the making of one of album's bountiful ballads, "By Myself." In an interview clip, Voisine says, "This record is first and foremost about honesty …" Honestly Roch, this album is really about your newfound love and is one long epistle to your fiancée

Myriam St-Jean, whom he sings directly to on the album's closing track, "Myriam's Song (Will You Be My

Wife)."

As a famous bard once wrote, "If music be the food of love, play on …" In Voisine's case, love is definitely his food of choice, but as Higher indicates, enough is enough and it's time for a diet.

David McPherson

http://www.umbrellamusic.com/reviews/rev_02dec5.php (9 of 9) [12/12/2002 20:11:07]