10 February 2005
You can’t say Brian McFadden, newly-hatched singer-songwriter, wasn’t racking up the chart-topping hits: ‘Almost Here’ is the fourth Irish number one in two years where he was holding the biro. This one happens to be turbo-charged with the nitro of celebrity gossip, as Brian and Delta were a recently-constituted item at the time. That’s an inevitable hostage to fortune, as the pair have since gone their separate ways, but you’ve probably done your own rash things in the first flush of romance – bought matching onesies, say, or had children.
It’s a romantic domestic ballad where the guy “took our love for granted” and both parties end up in tears, so ‘Almost Here’ is like Brian’s solo ‘Real To Me’ in being a rockier outcrop of the Westlife rom-dom ballad idiom. The verses, assigned to Brian, are stronger than the chorus Delta gets, so perhaps the taking for granted is hard-coded into the song. Anyway, ‘Almost Here’ is grand in its modest way, the schmaltz content is tolerably low, and if the benchmark is to do better than Westlife records then that’s ticked off the list. My sanguinity here is a function of my foreknowledge that 2005 brings a lot worse than this.
