20 January 1995
What is singing, and what is merely shouting in tune? So far, most of our power ballad divas have been fine singers – technically and in that unquantifiable sense of bringing a song to life. Bonnie Tyler gives ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ its kitschy, wild-eyed fun. Whitney Houston, ’80s edition, charmed us with old-school soulful ballads like ‘Saving All My Love For You’ and fizzy bops like ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ while reading her power ballads like ‘The Greatest Love Of All’ and ‘Where Do Broken Hearts Go’ with relatable feeling. Even Mariah Carey, whose final chorus in ‘Vision of Love’ is the origin story of ’90s power diva-dom, was crooning in classic bluesy style for most of that song, and otherwise brings a playful zing to her poppier hits.
Celine Dion, though, has no such qualities. A typical Celine hit has her starting with a quivering voice, shorthand for ’emotion’, before ramping up to loud power-hosing and sand-blasting, with perhaps the addition of that weird nasally place she goes when she wants to do up-tempo. This modus operandi is applied consistently, irrespective of song. There’s not a note out of place, but I still think she’s a terrible singer, for whom a song is merely a builder’s hod on which to carry and dump her voice on top of us like a ton of bricks.
It doesn’t help matters here that ‘Think Twice’ is a rotten song anyway. That laborious pre-chorus rhyme of “serious” and “you or us” is visible from space. The second verse makes Celine cram in the line “Babe I know it ain’t easy when your soul cries out for higher ground” as an unintelligible single word, which is probably for the best given how corny it is. Equally bad is the pseudo-profundity of “‘Cos when you’re halfway up, you’re always halfway down”, which always calls to my mind Robin the Frog singing ‘Halfway Down The Stairs’. You can’t blame a non-native speaker for how clumsy and cringeworthy this song’s lyrics are. Then of course there’s the soft rock guitar bluster, and a last chorus where the music drops out to showcase Celine’s showboating. ‘Think Twice’ is a perfect storm of awful singer, awful song, and awful record. The video features Celine’s love interest sculpting a block of ice with a chainsaw; I’d sooner listen to that.
As it happens, Celine Dion’s next Irish number one will also feature a strong association with a block of ice.
