They're the band currently storming the US charts, and you know what that means: worldwide domination is pretty much an inevitability for Lady Antebellum, so get ready to hear their songs all over the airwaves very soon. It's just a shame that they're so unmitigatedly terrible.
First, there's the name. Lady Antebellum: sounds like some sort of butterfly, or perhaps a brand of women's sanitary products. In fact, this trio are going to be the biggest musical hit you'll hear this summer. Formed in 2006, Charles Kelley, Hillary Scott and Dave Haywood have already been nominated for numerous Grammys and sold over 2 million of this, their second album, in their native USA.
They're from Nashville, which usually means one thing: they're purveyors of country music. That's certainly no bad thing, but unfortunately, their specialist branch of country music is the kind that smears the whole genre with an impermeable mud - country-pop. Think Taylor Swift, multiplied by three.
Such scorn may seem prejudiced, but there is really very little on 'Need You Now' that rewards a recommendation of Lady Antebellum: this is schmaltzy, lowest-common-denominator clichéd musical hell, with lyrics so cringeworthy they'll make you want to force your own head through a window (the mawkish 'Hello World' and ode to being in a band 'Stars Tonight' are particularly bad) and music that's either peppy hoedowns ('Perfect Day') or soggy, soulless declarations of affection ('Our Kind of Love').
The best that can be said for Lady Antebellum is that Kelley and Leann Rimes sound-a-like Scott are admittedly satisfactory singers, harmonising smoothly in places and holding their own on solos. The worst? These songs - particularly the love ballads - are nothing more than wedding songs for morons. Lonestar, you've got competition. And if that sentence doesn't put the fear of God into you, then we really are all doomed.
