The Singles Jukebox

And so another Irish boyband passes from this world. Oh Danny boy, the pipes are calling…

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Jonathan Bogart: This is my first Westlife song. Were they always a Christian band?
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Brad Shoup: Who could have thought Gary Barlow would become our premiere CCM composer? With a couple tweaks, this could have been a farewell single from Deliriou5? This is punching many of the right gospel buttons for me, and I don’t care about its true boy-band ersatz-soul guise. 
[6]

Iain Mew: Fourteen UK number ones. 14! And with few exceptions (“World Of Our Own”, “Uptown Girl”), all by following the same dull and barely changing formula! Truly an inexplicable phenomenon. “Lighthouse” unsurprisingly makes little attempt to update the same, though it feels a bit looser and lacks some of the worst excesses. There’s not a painfully overdone key change, for a start, and the title metaphor actually makes sense. I still fundamentally don’t get it though.
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Kat Stevens: Now Westlife have finally thrown in the oh-so-lucrative towel  I feel the time has come for a critical reappraisal of their back catalogue (not that I started planning this three years ago or anything). Ta-dah! I present to you: bloggingwithoutwings.tumblr.com. Stay tuned for… GRAPHS showing how much better the ‘Loife became after Brian left! INVESTIGATIONS into their maximum possible bpm! IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS of why the lyrics to “Lighthouse” might refer to park benches as a safe haven! My ovaries are at full throttle and ready to go. MUMPOP REPRAZENT.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Given the textual content, I’m gonna assume the similarities to that other love-as-big-as-pianos anthem are deliberate. She’s his lighthouse over troubled water, and being laid down is in the subtext somewhere. Great, we solved the mystery! Next one: why would you do that?
[3]

Jer Fairall: I can generally appreciate that European boy band pop, from the little that I’ve been exposed to it, seems to skew closer to classical pop songwriting virtues than the more vulgar North American variant (didn’t Boyzone cover Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” way back when?), but this is schmaltzy soundtrack-ballad drivel of the most snoozy and maudlin sort, like a nightmare vision of an Elton John/George Michael duet executed at mutual career lows.  
[2]

Alfred Soto: I can’t remember the last time an artist has praised Elton John’s nineties albums. Westlife do their best to reanimate interest in Made in England and The Big Picture.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: There’s probably a way to celebrate a romance that restores “a man as weak as me, who has no self-belief,” but not when it’s delivered with such fecklessness that the self-loathing seems justified. 
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