Preston - Dressed To Kill

So no more Ordinary Boys for Preston then. Still it’s hard to see what’s changed in his world since the band’s last LP. Same label and an understandable evolution in sound from the slick pop of his band’s third album. The press release states that this is Preston’s attempt to become a pop star ‘on his own terms’, yet we’re baffled as to how this is any less compromised than he used to be. ‘Dressed To Kill’ follows up the from where The Ordinary Boys finished yet with an even more polished feel with keyboards galore and a Siouxie and The Banshees sample/stolen riff just to piss off the music snobs.

In all ‘Dressed To Kill’ probably isn’t a bad song. Preston is a pretty decent singer, and always has been, it’s just that frequently the style of music that he’s been creating an almost pastiche of has let him down. The strength of this song is in it’s chorus but it won’t be the ear burrowing dancefloor stop of “You’re dressed to kill and you know that you will” that sells this song. No, sadly it’ll go pretty much entirely to the man’s celebrity status, and herein lies the reason for this song scoring so badly. In under half a decade Preston has gone from bemoaning an over the counter culture as a member of a (arguably) not-half-bad indie rock band to simply creating music as a by product of celebrity status that seems fit to sit on the shelves of Tesco.

Now if only we could get the chorus out of our head. Argh!