WB Single Review: Bruno Mars
Title: It Will Rain
Label: Atlantic, Elektra
Release: 7th November
Following the storming success of album Doo-Wops and Hooligans released just over a year ago, Bruno Mars’s new song ‘It Will Rain’ is on the official soundtrack for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 which will be screening later this month.
Known especially for his feel-good, optimistic (and sometimes a little sickening) songs such as Just the Way You Are and Marry You, a darker, more reflective side of Bruno Mars is heard in this track. Some of the lyrics initially seem a little melodramatic, but considering this is the man who would ‘catch a grenade for ya’, it’s fair to say that this is just his style. In fact, Mars’s voice has a kind of purity and an honesty that brings new meaning to these clichés, striking intense subject matter head on. The opening lines of It Will Rain demonstrate just this: ‘If you ever leave me baby, leave some morphine at my door’. Cheesy as it may be, this image seems to capture perfectly the acute affliction and addiction of love that is felt so vividly in a painful breakup. On closer inspection the song’s desperation is nothing less than heart-wrenching.
Though arguably un-complex and at times a bit bland in terms of structure, layering and song composition, there is a clarity in Mars’s music that makes it undeniably infectious. I guess in the industry they call it ‘catchy’, but there’s something more here than a manufactured set of ‘hit song material tick-boxes’. It’s clear that despite being a far cry from the carefree joy The Lazy Song, the more sincere and contemplative tone of It Will Rain is a sound that Mars carries off just as effectively. Hauntingly good pop.
Rating : 7.6
Words and thoughts of Anna Lumsden
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