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Your support makes all the difference.How many times over the past year, do you think, has Darius Danesh thanked his lucky stars he didn't get sucked into the bottomless, career-crushing maw of Hear'say? The insults and humiliations of the Pop Stars judges, the risky assertions of stardom, the embarrassment over his bizarre Britney interpretation must all have seemed worthwhile when Darius finally scored a No 1 hit with "Colourblind". I'd imagine, though, that the eventual chart success was less satisfying than actually going into a studio to record an album of his own songs, perhaps the first real achievement of the entire reality-TV pop industry. Not that that should be taken as registering approval of his debut album, which, for all the "serious artist" packaging, merely demonstrates his facility with the same kinds of mealy-mouthed romantic cliché as his erstwhile competitors. None of the 12 songs strays more than a centimetre from the standard love-song gambits, and the only risky imagery occurs in "I'm Not Buying", in which a promising drug metaphor quickly peters out into infant-friendly legality: "So many fixes come too easy/ Leave us so unsatisfied/ Chasing the kite, addicted to high/ So many patches we have worn/ So many promises stillborn." Somehow, I can't help feeling that Darius is capable of much more than this; though it's questionable, on this showing, whether he has the desire.
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