Take One

Album review

Like many fledgling professional musicians, Adam Lambert needed to take any opportunity presented to him when he was trying to break into the business, so he recorded many sessions as a demo vocalist, singing songs others had written in hopes that they themselves would break into the business. Like many once-struggling musicians who happened to achieve stardom, Lambert was subjected to those early recordings being released just when the iron was hot -- hence, the release of Take One, a collection of demos he cut in 2005, in the same month of his proper post-Idol debut, For Your Entertainment. Take One has little to do with Lambert’s glamazon image but quite a bit to do with Idol-styled pageantry, with every one of its 14 tracks a crawling midtempo ballad, filled with a lot of pomp but not much circumstance. The songs aren’t horrible but they’re not memorable and neither are Lambert’s performances, but that’s unfair to him: these recordings were designed to sell middle-of-the-road pop with commercial aspirations and have absolutely no room for flair, since the whole point is to showcase the lyric and melody. Lambert acquits himself in that regard, sounding like nothing more than a demo singer because that was, after all, what he was.

© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo