Rumer - Boys Don’t Cry Review

On Boys Don’t Cry, the follow-up to her million-selling 2010 debut Seasons of My Soul, Rumer has recorded versions of tracks written by men in the 1970s. It doesn’t quite have the subversive qualities that Tori Amos’ similarly themed 2001 album Strange Little Girls had – with the possible exception of her take on Neil Young’s A Man Needs a Maid, where the sense and meaning of the original are somewhat altered by its being performed by a woman in 2012.
Often, with its covers of songs by Todd Rundgren, Hall & Oates, Stephen Bishop, Paul Williams, Clifford T Ward, Gilbert O’Sullivan and Jimmy Webb, Boys Don't Cry feels like Rumer’s deep immersion in the pantheon of arcane US and UK MOR rock prompted her to construct an alternative canon of commercial tunesmiths requiring critical rehabilitation. In almost every instance she inhabits the songs to such an extent that they feel like her own compositions, even when the titles at first seem inappropriate....full text Some people believe that pop music is about rebellion, kicking over statues and sticking two fingers up to the oldies. They will not like the second album by Karen Carpenter soundalike Sarah Joyce, aka Rumer.
Boys Don’t Cry sees her apply that soothing, slightly mumsy voice to a clutch of nostalgic ballads dimly remembered from Dave Lee Travis or Graham Dene shows circa 1974.
It’s the sonic equivalent of sipping sherry with your parents’ friends while your schoolmates are out vandalising a bus shelter.
Rumer has previously collaborated with Burt Bacharach and here she tackles similarly classy MOR gems that hit the spot: Gilbert O’Sullivan’s We Will, Hall & Oates’s Sara Smile and Todd Rundgren’s Be Nice To Me....full text Rumer is the sort of artist who excels at reaching the wobbly bit inside people that is greedy for music's touch. Her voice is smooth but sad, full of loss elegantly borne, of nostalgia hazily recalled, of succour generously dispensed. Like Karen Carpenter before her, she has the biography to back it up – a childhood abroad, her parents' divorce, the death of her mother, the revelation about her real father, his death, her misdiagnosed bipolar disorder and, most recently, the break-ups with a number of key personnel in her career. Rumer's preferred medium is the easy listening of the 1970s – uncool stuff, but full of feeling.

She's clearly in no emotional shape yet to craft a proper sequel to her terrific debut, 2010's Seasons of My Soul. And so this follow-up finds Rumer playing fan-girl with a sequence of covers. She's probably needed tunes like these of late. It is, perhaps, false advertising to call an album Boys Don't Cry and fail to include a Cure cover on it, but the conceit is that these 12 tracks have all been written by hurting men. ...full text "It wasn't an easy sell," Rumer recently said of her new album. In an age where your second long player is just as (if not more) important than your debut, we can see why label big wigs would be reluctant to let her follow up the critically-lauded, million-selling Seasons of my Soul with a covers record traditionally released at the back-end of an artist's career to keep their head above water.

Given reports that the singer suffered a series of breakdowns while plugging her first record across the globe, Boys Don't Cry could be seen as a cop-out - but it's anything but. The likes of Tori Amos may have already pulled a similar stunt in the past by opting to cover only male songs, but where Amos stuck to one genre, Rumer cherry picks what the '70s had to offer, including soul, reggae and the southern rock heard on lead single 'P.F. Sloan'....full text