Album Review: Daughtry - Baptized

Let's be honest, many of you dear readers are just as disdainful of gluttonous talent shows as I, but once in a blue moon, someone genuinely remarkable manages to punch through. But our haughtiness is always validated by the success of grunting, soulless hacks like Chris Daughtry, whose biggest talent is to make shitloads of cash off people who communicate in flannel shirts and body odours, who have but one expectation from their music: louder = better.

If Daughtry toned it down and wrote from his heart not for his next mansion, Baptized wouldn't be so addled with so much transparent vapidity. Comparing an argument with the missus to Battleships is agonisingly obvious, and just in case you don't get the point, the chorus's cannons go “Boom-boom-boom-boomboom”. The most offensive is the calculated anthem with the big sing-along chorus, Long Live Rock And Roll, with surgically inserted references to high school, Billy Joel and Bon Jovi to tell you exactly how good you feel. When Daughtry labours the emotions, he simply thieves Take That's Patience (in Wild Heart) or SMS's his own lyrics over Train's Hey, Soul Sister and renames it Cinderella. I desperately want to tell you it's not all so harrowingly bad, but after the over-wretched chorus of seventh song, The World We Knew, you're still only halfway through the contempt Daughtry seemingly has for his audience. Rather than simply boring in its lack of ideas, Baptized drowns you in an acrid stench of money.