Confession time. Your reviewer's always had a bit of a problem with white-boy rapping. It just doesn't float his boat at all, truth be told. Yeah, there's exceptions: the earlier Chili Peppers and bands of their ilk like the great, lost energised NYC band Heads Up got away with it when they fused rap and rock in that fertile post-Beasties spell that led to Grunge, but as a rule...no, sorry, I'm outta here when I encounter anything of this nature.
Sadly, BROOKE'S "Coming Home" is no exception. It's a set of 12 ultra-professional, polished Californian pop tunes, put through the LA studio mincer, with huge choruses and consumer-friendly hooks dripping like the '80s never ended and even ropes Holly Palmer in to add a further layer of gloss, but it's lacking in that all important, ever-elusive quality: soul.
Consequently, a number of the tracks on "Coming Home" - usually the horribly rap-addled ones - are winceworthy in the extreme. The album's middle section (traditionally a dangerous area, creativity-wise) is particularly culpable: "Miss You" (no, not the Stones one, thankfully), the mawkish "I Still Remember" and an abysmal cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" bearing the brunt of this writer's displeasure. Actually, the only advantage of the latter's existence is to remind the world of Ms.Lauper's overlooked back catalogue.
Elsewhere, the rap quotient only partially mars several promising tracks. Opener "Here I Go" is one of the ballsier things here and has a sunny, keep-it-moving vibe that gets under your skin; "Coming Home" - graced by Palmer's airy cooing - sounds like a consummate radio hit; "Camera" opens with the devastating intro line: "I need a camera to take a picture of my love before she's gone" and has one of those undeniable "na na na" choruses and the yearning, rap-free "Not Ready To Go" is arguably the best thing here, even though it's trypically MTV-friendly.
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So "Coming Home"s not entirely a dead duck, then? No, but it's limping and lame at the best of times, and it commits the cardinal sin of tacking the shit on at the end. Indeed, if I have to suffer the marshmallow tosh of "Wanna Be Happy" or the naff, banjo-friendly remix of "Coming Home" one more time, I may well not be responsible for my actions.
Brooke's OK, but on this evidence he has little to offer that hasn't already been done to death and the commercial sheen of "Coming Home" merely impresses - and occasionally scarily reminds you of Train - rather than hits you in the gut with anything like emotional content and (yes!) passion. And however ancient these things make me sound, those are the qualities I demand from my favourite artists. Bottom line.
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