The 14 songs are mostly pedestrian ballads: Life By Misadventure by Rag’n’Bone Man is a clear case of the diffident second album
Rag’n’Bone Man Life By Misadventure Out Friday
Once upon a time, hit songs were here today, gone in a couple of months. Now that music reaches us mainly through streaming and licensing, they can hang around for years.
Rory Graham, the amiable hulk better known as Rag’n’Bone Man, released the song Human in 2016, and it has been in the ether ever since.
It was a slow burner, as good songs often are. It reached No 2 in the chart at Christmas 2016. It won a Brit award in February 2018. It passed a billion YouTube views a year ago, and has amassed a further 280 million since.
Rory Graham (above), the amiable hulk better known as Rag’n’Bone Man, released the song Human in 2016, and it has been in the ether ever since
It’s still on TV every night, bringing sensitive masculinity to the business of selling razors.
Human deserves its success, as modern blues with a blazing vocal and a lethal bassline, but it has cast a long shadow. Rag’n’Bone Man has reached the top ten only once more, and that was by working with Calvin Harris, a hit machine.
After selling 1.2 million copies of Human the LP in Britain, Graham has taken four years to release a follow-up.
It’s a clear case of the diffident second album. The 14 songs are mostly pedestrian ballads, interspersed with the odd lumbering rocker. The melodies are vanilla, the lyrics worse; the sharpest phrase is the album title.
One minute Graham is assuring us ‘time will only tell’; the next, it ‘won’t wait for no one’. While pop stars often get away with cliches, it’s harder to ignore them when they’re hurled at you by a huge baritone.
The lone highlight is Anywhere Away From Here, an Adele-ish lament that appears twice, the first time as a duet with P!nk. If you’re a fan, I suggest downloading that, skipping the rest and saving your cash for Rag’n’Bone Man’s tour, which begins on June 25.