Free by Rick Astley

Rick Astley came onto the scene at the tail end of 1987, looking like Archie Andrews and sounding like Luther Vandross. Music fans got over the shock of seeing the deep, soulful voice coming out of the pasty, slight Brit long enough to send his first two singles, Never Gonna Give You Up and Together Forever, to the top of the charts the following year. These songs were successful as much for Rick’s rich vocals as they were for the peppy pop production provided by the team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. This team-who also worked with Bananarama, Donna Summer and Kylie Minogue-had a bright, synth-heavy sound that, while popular for the moment, didn’t lend itself to long-term careers.

After one slightly less successful collaboration with Stock and Co. (Hold Me in Your Arms), Rick came to the conclusion that’s ended careers of pop tarts ranging from Paula Abdul to New Kids on the Block. He wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. Leaving the S/A/W team behind, Astley’s third album, Free, presented him as a mature adult contemporary balladeer. There’s nothing here that can compare to the high-energy sound of his first two albums, which undoubtedly threw listeners who were looking for another Never Gonna Give You Up off. As a result, this album didn’t achieve the success that Astley’s earlier albums did. Although no one can question Rick’s vocal prowess, you can definitely question the fact that Astley decided that being taken seriously as an artist was equal to becoming a less-constipated sounding Michael Bolton.

Eh, that’s not totally fair to Astley. He’s clearly a much better singer than Bolton is. However, many of the songs on Free are completely anonymous. You can say many things about the frothiness of his dance-oriented material, but you can’t say that you can’t hum a few bars of Never Gonna Give You Up twenty years after it hit #1. That’s the mark of a great pop single. Nothing on Free will give you that feeling. You get songs like Is This Really Love? a revved-up guitar-and-sax-spiced throwdown that sounds a little bit like Bob Seger’s Shakedown (complete with femme background vocals) and the reggae-spiced socially conscious track Really Got a Problem, which is well-intentioned but awkward coming from Astley. You also get plenty of anonymous but pleasant midtempo ballads like This Must Be Heaven. None of these songs is bad per se, but I bet you forget them the minute they go off.

There are exactly four keepers on this album. First, there are the two singles. Cry for Help is a heartbroken piano ballad with a gospel sound to it. Rick really lets loose with his vocals when the choir cuts in at the song’s conclusion. This was a deserved Top 10 hit. The less commercially successful Move Right Out has a tense undercurrent and a deeper vocal than usual from Astley. Then there’s the spare ballad Behind the Smile. With only piano (from Sir Elton John) and strings (from some guys and girls who play stringed instruments) backing him, Astley leaves no doubt that he has a strong voice (Astley later returned the favor by singing background on Elton’s Can You Feel the Love Tonight). Finally, In the Name of Love has a vague R&B edge to it, no doubt helped by the presence of songwriter and background vocalist Michael McDonald. The fact that Elton and McD are the support staff on this album should tell you quite a bit about the direction Astley decided to go in with Free…

…Which is the album’s fundamental problem. As good a singer as Astley is, this switch in sound (and hair lengths) didn’t extend his career, for good reason. It just made him just another one in a long list of perfectly good but unexciting singers of inoffensive pop/soul. With the two singles available on a Greatest Hits compilation and the other tracks attainable either a la carte on iTunes or on your p2p of choice, there’s really no reason to go out of your way to pick this album up unless you find it really cheap (which I did, fortunately. I only paid $1.75 for it via lala.com).

The lack of commercial and critical success of Free essentially killed Astley’s career in the U.S. (he only released one more album Stateside) and unfortunately proved that, contrary to the title of his biggest hit single, music fans were all too ready to give him up. Sorry, Rick. We’ll always have 1988.