I’m a fan of depressing music. I blame adolescence and the hours I spent making compilations of songs about suicide or listening intensely to another Manic Street Preachers song about the Holocaust. When you’re young the angst and drama of miserable songs is a grim and thrilling portent of the unlimited and wretched world of adulthood. As you grow up you realise these expectations are generally false and if your life ever resembled the melodramas of music’s great miserablists, you’d be too annoyed to listen to that bunch of whining, told-you-so merchants.

Still you can’t beat a good sad song and here US author Tom Reynolds runs through 52 of his favourites. Each song is given its own chapter that looks at the song’s history, the artists behind it and what makes the song so gloomy. However he seems to have confused depressing music with rubbish music. Most of his analysis concerns overblown songs with terrible lyrics, so why not just write about the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice? Well because each of the songs chosen concerns either death, heartbreak or drug addiction and thus touch on morose topics, but mostly the songs are depressing because they are terrible.

Reynolds is a reasonably amusing writer and he understands music on a technical level, which can be interesting. Each chapter will have one decent gag in there and he’s good at pulling up lyricists for their semiotic mistakes and scientific inaccuracies such as the phrase “resonating light” used by Evanescence (light doesn’t resonate). The introduction that references Homer (the Greek not the cartoon) and an infamous Hungarian folk song that has been referenced in over 100 suicide notes, is irreverent and witty. In one of the book’s best bits he lays into Celine Dion using an excellent horror film metaphor, and describes her version of ‘All By Myself’ as resembling “two tectonic plates battling over a continent”.

But for all the caustic asides and smart alec remarks, Reynolds insists on using words like “flop” or “poop” where the far more effective ‘shit’ would do. It seems like an odd complaint but it sums up the underlying sense that Reynolds is far too uptight to be genuinely funny. Many of the songs featured would be better known in the US so, despite his good research, much of the book will be of limited interest to most music fans on this side of the Atlantic. When he does cover the familiar he can get it horribly wrong, such as describing Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ as “a tad obvious”.

The key factor in any book about music is whether it makes you want to listen to the music being discussed. That’s certainly not the case here though to be fair it’s not what Reynolds set out to do. But then you feel, he’s missed the point altogether.

words: Colm Larkin