Taub Judah Entertainment Palace

Get dressed! You’re about to be blessed with the best of the rest…in a vest…etc…

Most Controversial Review

JLS – ‘The Club Is Alive’

Y’know, I still don’t really get what all the fuss was about with liking this song. It’s clearly better than ‘One Shot’ or the Children In Need one they did (which came with its own comment storm), and even though it suffers from excessive autotune the tune it actually autos is a rather good one. Naturally, just shrugging and saying “ah well, horses for courses” was never gonna wash with the ChartBlog massive.

Key quote: “If the band are in the middle of doing what they do, and you, the audience, are concentrating on the words they’re saying over, say, how they look, what muscles are flexing, which way up Aston is, the beat, the music, the clothes, the bagginess of Ortise’s trousers, the hair, the teeth, the twinkly eyes, the voices, or what the song is saying even if the words are not, chances are you’re not really JLS’s core demographic.”

The weird thing is how long the reaction to this one opinion has continued to rumble on, really. I think the idea is that if you like something that someone else doesn’t like, then this exposes your soft underbelly, ready for spearing. But if you fail to like something that someone does like, then you’re cruel. How this theory has continued to thrive in an era of hateful YouTube comments and snarky Twitter feeds is beyond me, but there it is.

Plus that “hey!”, the one that pushed it from a 4-star to a 5-star review, is STILL brilliant. So ner.

Bubbling Under: Paramore – ‘Misery Business’ HOO-BOY!

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Most Successful Meeting of Minds

A Very Entertaining Chat With The Hoosiers…

If there’s anything we can learn from this marvellous interview it’s that it’s always a good idea – should you be lucky enough to interview a pop band – to call the singer a dwarf within seconds of the interview starting. It won’t work for everyone (waves to Kelly Jones), but the rewards are more than worth the price you have to pay to get them.

Bubbling Under: Los Campesinos! – Their Favourite Interview EVER

We Are Scientists – Bleeding-Heart Liberals, And Their Exploding Drum Carpet

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Mystic Meg Award For Predicting The Future

Wild Beasts – Bewilderbeasts

I don’t ever really try and predict whether things will be big hits or not. It’s not really for me to say, democracy being a strange beast that seems to explode in many different directions at once. And besides, just because one song sells more than another, it doesn’t mean it’ll make any more sense to you, the listener.

That said, I was pleased when, having written a big confused rant about why I kept listening to this early song by Wild Beasts when there were other, more poppy things to be getting on with, they then went on, a couple of years (and albums) later, to be quite popular, and Mercury nominated.

Quite why ‘Atlas’ by Battles wasn’t at No.1 for 10 weeks straight remains a total mystery, however.

Bubbling under: An Alternative Top 5

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Best Remix

Lost in Translation

It’s a simple premise. You take a song’s lyrics, use an online translator to convert them into a foreign language, then use the same translator to bring them back. Something gets interfered with along the way, and all sense is lost. LOST!

Bubbling Under: Important Moments In Pop History – The Saturdays Get Their Name

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Most Let Down By The Passage Of Time

Ringtone From Hell Generator – Glamorous

Remember polyphonic ringtones? Remember how they were a version of modern pop songs but always sounded awful and robotic, like Will.I.Am without the astonishing quality control? Well we made our own, and it was also awful. Trouble is, nobody has polyphonic ringtones any more. And quite right too!

Bubbling under: Fun With Press Releases

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Best Joke

A Peek Behind The Curtain…

Me and Steve ChartBlog were having a conversation one day about ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ by the Killers, and thinking of other ways you could’ve written that like “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier”. We batted them about for a while, laughed a lot, I wrote them up for the blog, everything was hunky dory.

THEN, Bill Bailey started doing the SAME JOKE as part of his stand-up act. I’m not saying it’s cause and effect, because clearly anyone could’ve come up with the same idea. But the fact that it’s now been used by a professional comedian means it’s empirically the best joke on ChartBlog.

Bubbling Under: Armband Van Halen

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Best Pun

How To Destroy…McFly

Come on, MCFLY SPRAY!! *highfive*

Bubbling Under: Edgy Soldiers

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Best Use of Onomatopoeia

Dizzee Rascal – Bonkers

I love it when a pop song is thrilling and brilliant and stupid and clever all at the same time, and even though ‘Bonkers’ ran out of lyrics halfway through, it remains exactly that kind of song. Dizzee himself may have gone on to make less-enthralling songs, but so long as he’s never too far from a man with a deep voice going “BONKBONKBONKBONKBONKBONKBONKBONK”, he’ll always be forgiven in my house.

Key Quote: “The way he shouts “I let sanity give me the slip” so it sounds for all the world like “I let Sunny E give me the slip”. Sunny E presumably being an even more artificial version of Sunny D. “

Bubbling Under: Mark Ronson and the Business Intl. ft. Q-Tip & MNDR – ‘Bang Bang Bang’

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Most Damning Review

Scouting For Girls – ‘Famous’

There’s no trick to writing nasty things about people and their hard work. In fact it’s really, really easy to do. You just subtract fairness, add imperiousness and have at it. It doesn’t make it a desirable thing to do. But sometimes, when you’re being prodded in the chest by a song that clearly wants you to fight it, or it will hurt you, you’ve got to be able to defend your fragile inner self from torment. Or, in the case of Scouting For Girls, point out how incredibly rude it is to write a song slamming the modern obession with celebrity, when you’re the singer in a pop band.

Bubbling Under: Black Eyed Peas – ‘The Time (Dirty Bit)’

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And finally…here’s where we came in. My head on a superhero.

The Art of Naming A Blog

So that’s that. The real final end of this thing. Thanks again to everyone ever, especially those pop stars and their (sometimes) astonishing music.

You’ve been great, I’ve had my moments…TATTY BYE!

Fraser

View full post on BBC – Chart blog

Oh come on, throw me a bone here, people! I LIKE you! I like BOTH of you! I was listening to ‘Boom Boom Pow’ only this morning, after a relatively long absence from the thing, and marvelling yet again at just how perfect a production it is. That wailing whooshy noise that runs through the whole damn thing, that’s basically ART, that is. And that’s before you take in the sheer sumptuous whoomp of the bass drum, Fergie tearing her throat out, Will doing something unspeakable with a leprechaun, it’s all fantastic.

In marked contrast there’s this. A meeting of two mighty talents, a sample from an international No.1 hit single from 1979 (it’s ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ by Buggles, in case you weren’t sure), and a lot of bragging. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I don’t like to be the one to say this, but there’s something fundamentally flawed about a song which demands that we check something out when there is literally NOTHING on display. I’ve looked and I’ve looked, and it’s the same result every time: Nothing. Zip. Nada. Another-word-that-means-nothing. Zilch.

(I can’t even show you the video because it is too sweary.)

And that’s not even where the ripeness ends. Nicki Minaj is definitely a force for good in the world of popular song, but it’s more than a bit much to sing “I’m a stereo and she’s just so monotone” when her voice has been squashed flat by the iron hand of autotune. And really, what we want when Will.I.Am sings “I can’t believe it, this beat is banging” is fairly simple: we want a beat and it is going to have to be a good one.

What we get is the most ineffective of boom-buh-boom-boom-kiks. The kind of beat which is probably best to not make too much of a fuss over.

And as a song, it basically forgets who it is about halfway through, taking a detour through some other beats and some other rhyme ideas (some of which are better, to be fair, especially Nicki’s second verse) in an imperious fashion, before suddenly coming to its senses at the end.

It’s definitely one of those songs where you can picture Will throwing ideas around in a wild fashion, daring people to question his production sanity, just so that he can smirkingly ask that we trust his better judgement, what with him being so fly and all.

Maybe it worked better in his head…

Download: Out now

www.myspace.com/nickiminaj
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

Digital Spy says: “When you cameo on more songs than you headline, forging a career of your own is a tricky business.”

Dallas Observer says: “It’d be great to see Nicki treating the track and Billy’s whole strut like the big joke that it is.”

View full post on BBC – Chart blog

So, the tabloid hooey that it would be uncharitable to mention in relation to this song can be summarised thus:

Nadine’s song is out a week later than Cheryl’s. It is like Blur vs Oasis all over again.

Nadine’s album is out a week later than Cheryl’s. It is like Take That vs East 17 all over again.

Nadine and the other Aloud girls might not be getting on as well as they would like you to believe. It is like Robbie vs Take That all over again.

Nadine might not do as well with her solo album as Cheryl will with hers. This is possibly because one of these women is a key part of a hugely popular weekly TV talent show, and is currently enjoying national treasure status, and the other has yet to prove that she can break out of the constraints of being Nadine from out of Girls Aloud. It is like Sabrina Washington vs Alesha Dixon all over again.

SO, having got all of that out of the way, what’s Nadine’s song actually like?

(Here’s the video. Somewhere there is an empty dressing-up box looking rather forlorn.)

Well it is clearly the work of someone who wants to make it very clear that they are mature, and that their music exists in a timeless sphere which is unaffected by current trends. There are grinding guitars in there, and real brass instruments, like grown-ups use in their songs, and there’s a lot of soul in Nadine’s pained howl.

There are no spiralling club-banger synths, there is no autotune, there is no mad chanting, and no-one sings “ayo”. Four things which would place Nadine at the very now-ness of popular music, and therefore ruin the idea that she’s a soul madam from always o’clock.

If we are to draw a parallel with her bandmate, based on the music alone – Cheryl’s hit songs seem to speak to a public idea of what her love life is like, while Nadine is attempting to prove that she is no longer the young girl with the big voice that she was in 2002. She’s now a fully grown woman with a big voice. And big voices and rocky-soul go together like Paloma Faith and hats.

And actually, if there is a comparison to be made musically, it’s probably with something like Paloma’s ‘Stone Cold Sober’, or some of Tina Turner’s ’80s hits, only you never heard either of those two making that strange “a-haow” noise with which Nadine begins proceedings. It sounds less like an emotive mic-check and more like one of those compression sounds people make when they’re clearing out their sinuses.

Work your way past all of this baggage though, and there’s a bright, engaging song here, sung by a woman whose voice deserves to be heard on its own merits. Whether there are enough people out there willing to do this, in the midst of a gossip tornado, is a different matter entirely.

Download: November 1st

www.nadineworldwide.com
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

It’s Pop says: “The track is clever precisely because it is not an instant smash, but a grower that takes a few listen to fully reveal itself.”

Reflective Inklings says: “What makes things even sweeter is the instrumentation done. The track does not sound like a rip-off of a Guetta-produced track at all.”

The Chemistry Is Dead says: “first thing it reminded us of was that Kiss cover by Tom Jones, then a bit of Echo by Girls Can’t Catch and Rihanna’s Umbrella in the verses”

View full post on BBC – Chart blog

OK, that’s it. I’m officially TIRED of songs about what it is like to have a nice time dancing in a club with a sexy lady. It’s a snake-eating-its-own-tail lyrical trick in any case, writing a song describing a club, so that it will go on to be played in a club, so it looks like you could’ve written the song about the very club in which it is being played.

We’re running dangerously close to having club nights which play nothing but songs about being in a club. Surely this will mess with people’s heads? Why not go the whole hog and namecheck the bouncers? You could do a special version for every club in the world, with a shout-out to everyone there on the night: hen parties, stag dos, the lot. That’d really shake things up.

Hell, put a mirrored-wall in and you’ve taken self-appreciation to dangerous, possibly even near-fatal levels. They’ll all be copping off with themselves! While they watch! And singing about it!

(Here’s the video. This club is a dump! Etc)

Now I should say there is nothing wrong with this song in and of itself. It’s a perfectly fine, slightly anonymous rave-up with, as is the way of these things, a nice chorus. But it feels OLD.

It wears its autotune thickly, it gets stuck on certain words in the verses, like Usher’s song does, and it contains the word "ayo". A word which does seem to be enjoying its moment in the sun right now. In years to come, pop archaeologists will probably be able to date songs to 2010 just by blowing the dust off of that word alone.

A few months ago, this would just have been the latest in a fast-becoming-long line of similar tunes. Now it feels like the top of the rollercoaster, looking down into The Void.

I know making any kind of protest about this is not going to halt the tide. I know that in a week I’ll be writing about another club/girl-fixated song as if this never happened, and possibly enduring a few "ha-ha, that did a LOT of good, didn’t it?" comments to boot. But come on, stick the Black Eyed Peas’ recent output next to David Guetta’s next to Usher and Flo Rida and Roll Deep and Tinie Tempah and JLS and everyone else…is there ANYTHING left to say about going to a club and dancing with a sexy lady? Anyone?

OK, so let’s put OTHER STUFF IN OUR SONGS, PLEASE!

Download: Out now
taiocruzmusic.co.uk
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

PS: It’s a rogue’s trick to complain that a song is bad because it is not another song, but to add a certain amount of context to why the overly-smooth, deliberately market-led, straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back ‘Dynamite’ has failed to win friends in my house, here’s a link to a song called ‘Shapeshift’ by Dels. It’s crude and a bit silly, it’s rough around the edges, reliably 8-bit production from Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, but it’s everything Taio’s latest is not. This includes "a song which namechecks the Beano".

Kick The Ear Drum says: "The verses to this song are some of the worst that I have heard. The lyrics are juvenile and have honestly been heard before."

The Hottest Ishh says: "Rumors were floating around that J-Lo put vocals on here."

The Truth About Music says: "The song itself has everything you want in a hit single. It has a catchy chorus backed by great instrumentals.."

View full post on BBC – Chart blog