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

I tell you what gets my goat about the Drums, right; nice tunes and all that, a decent, spirited attempt to re-create the spirit of ’80s indie; and ’80s indie was always half-obsessed with ’60s surf-pop anyway. The turn-ups and sneakers are also painstakingly accurate. They’ve really done their homework.

Buuut, as a group of young men, they so very clearly do not want anyone to make the mistake of believing that they like doing what they do, in case anyone then goes on to extrapolate that this puts them on a showbiz par with, say, Justin Bieber.

(Which is also something of an ’80s indie hangover, sad to say.)

And worse, being serious hipsters, they do come across at times as if they’re above the people who are foolish enough to be carried away by their music. I really, really hope that this is not the case, they do seem to go out of their way to provide evidence for the prosecution at every turn.

Warm and welcoming performers, they are not.

(Here’s the video. STAND UP STRAIGHT BOY! SING PROPERLY!)

Look at that video. Does that look like fun? Could any three young men make the job of being the stars in their own promotional film about their own music look any more like a tiresome chore?

“Dude, what’ve we gotta do NOW? Like, lift this blanket? Oh whatever. I’m totally dropping it”

“Yeah, what’s the deal with this miming the guitar? You can’t MAKE me. I’m all like…NOT playing the guitar, and junk.”

“You want me to what? Dance? Sing? Oh GOD! Can’t someone ELSE do it? Right well I’m not gonna do it PROPERLY, people will think it was my idea.”

And so on, and so on, and so on…

Their collective demeanour is that of a bunch of sulky teens who have been forced into being a lame-ass pop band by their dad, singing stupid trite nonsense about moons and girls, when they would all rather be in a metal band, singing about killing Orcs with a massive sword, and the righteous cleansing fire of rock.

And it’s a real shame, because any fool can make music which is angry or dark or grunty, it’s a LOT harder to make something light and fun and pretty, because you’re always on the knife-edge between that and stupid/insipid/drippy.

Or, to put it like your gran would put it; if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing PROPERLY.

Download: Out now

thedrums.com
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

Stereogum says: “Matthew Dear’s remix is way more Matthew Dear like.”

BlahBlahBlahScience says: “The Clock Opera kids flip this new Drums single, [which] comes to us as one in a series of four new remixes released to accompany the new ‘Me & the Moon’ release.”

View full post on BBC – Chart blog

Hats off to anyone who wants to buck a few trends here and there. Or even give off the appearance of trend-bucking while actually fast-bucking, I’m not fussy.

Y’know, zaggers when we were expecting ziggers; lefties instead of righties. These are the kind of counter-intuitive jumpabouts which are always a good idea. Keeps us on our toes, keeps the flow of ideas from getting too stagnant, and generally shakes things up a bit.

For example: taking a unashamed pop band, who have spent most of their career thus far trying to prove that they can properly rock like the rock bands do, and introducing them to a producer and songwriter who embodies the very sound of what is going on currently in popular music, just to see if they get on. It’s a great idea. Or a great idea on paper, anyway.

(Here’s the video. It’s got girls in it.)

Something isn’t quite firing though. It’s not the Taio Cruz pop sound per se. A better, more attention-grabbing song would’ve suited this noise rather well. It’s more that neither side seems to have brought their best game to the table. There are none of those McFly melodic twists, no maudlin chords. Just one of those four-chord turnarounds and a lot of “eh”.

And it’s yet another recent pop song which can’t seem to decide what tempo it should be. A ballad with a beating dance heart. Too fast and too slow at the same time. Beautifully sung, of course.

And that’s the weird thing about expectations, because we know McFly are capable of writing astonishing tunes, and Taio has his moments too, everything points to this being brilliant, except the song itself.

Another zag successfully zigged there.

Download: Out now

www.mcfly.com
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

#1 Hits From Another Planet says: “It’s easily their best single in years and a real standout of the 2010 pop sound.”

View full post on BBC – Chart blog

“Words come easy, when they’re true”

That, right there, is the reason why this song is reviewproof. To cast any kind of opinion on this thing, which is a very public hug between two men who used to be in a pop band together, but have spent 15 or so years travelling very different paths, would be like complaining about someone’s grammar while they’re in the middle of a marriage proposal.

Yes, you get points for detail, but you lose them all back again, and more, for missing what is actually going on.

(Here’s the video. Bro Back Mountain)

Not that I was going to administer a kicking in any case. This kind of earnest – but still a bit daft and mocking – pop song is what Robbie tends to do best. Bringing Gary in to share his self-admonishment is a great idea, especially now that Robbie is back in Take That. It basically allows him to let the reunion exist as a meeting of mighty pop forces, rather than a retreat from a mild dip in record sales and a shift in public affection. It says there’s a lot to be gained on either side, now that the defenses are coming down.

And this is all about affection. The kind of affection two people share when they know there’s a lot of unpleasant history between them, but it’s all stuff they have long since stopped caring about. The kind of affection that comes when all the nonsense falls away and all you can see is your brilliant mate, grinning and throwing open his arms.

So, stuff it. I’m not gonna interfere in this very public private moment. Except for one thought:

The Beatles had a song called ‘Blackbird’, which is a delicate, finger-plucked acoustic guitar thing Paul McCartney wrote in India. It has the gentle chirruping of actual birds on it, as a pastoral backwash. ‘Shame’ begins with a very similar guitar thing, only instead of birds, there are horses.

I have no idea why this should be the case. Something about being put out to pasture, maybe? Or former rivals in the pop race now walking calmly side by side? Or two old cowpokes riding the range, like in the video. Maybe Robbie just really likes horses. It’s a nice touch though.

OH, and has anyone else spotted that the chorus is basically the same chords as Take That’s ‘Back For Good’ with that beautiful aching twist at the end? I bet Robbie has.

Download: Out now

www.robbiewilliams.com
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

The Mix Eclectic says: ” On listening to the track for the first time I thought ‘meh’ and then proceeded to listen to it on repeat 6 times in that same sitting.”

Sugar Rushed says: “This may well be one of the most specific songs in pop history.”

My Fizzy Pop says: “An entirely delicious semi-country tinged ballad that pairs a pretty melody with some insightful lyrics that could quite easily be describing the bumpy Gary-Robbie relationship of the late 90s .”

View full post on BBC – Chart blog

There are times when taking the things that clever people say on face value is a dangerous game.

Take this song. We all know that Matt Murphy is a smart man, with an keen eye for the wry, so it’s a toss-up as to whether this is supposed to be a parody of all the songs bands write about the existential horrors of life on the road, or actually one of those songs bands write about the existential horrors of life on the road, only one with a keener-than-usual sense of self-awareness, written by a man with a knack for jamming up happy pop tunes with sad lyrics.

Or it could just be a genuine song about feeling dehumanised by the rigours of life in a touring pop band, and wanting to return to the one great night out that made it all seem worthwhile.

Or all of these things. Or none of these things.

(No video. Adult themes.)

Personally, I’m of the opinion that Matt Murphy finds himself hilarious, and is not above embellishing his own life story for comic effect in much the same way that a blue whale is not above an albatross. So there’ll probably be some pop star tantrum at the heart of all this, one which, once the red mist has abated, he can now laugh about.

And what better way to shrug off a tantrum than make it into some life-affirming pop music? A bit of scooped hi-hat here, some ghostly harmonies there, a snarky lyric and a blindingly distracting chorus. Throw in some distorto-synth and the odd stoppy-starty bit here and there, and everyone will soon forget what triggered this sorry affair in the first place.

Hell, if it’s a big enough success, you’ll be encouraged to have MORE tantrums, just to keep the hits flowing.

Download: Out now

www.thewombats.co.uk
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

Comfort Comes says: “Through ‘Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves)’ they seem to be beginning the retreat from teeny indie pop into a sorrowful, haunting and hanging sound that twists together elements of The Editors, Athlete and Duran Duran.”

A Media Mindset says: “I’m going a little crazy on the song, it’s infectious to say the least.”

View full post on BBC – Chart blog

How much YOWSA! can a single campaign sustain without causing serious injury? First the revelation came that the occasionally slightly doughy, occasionally skinny McFly boys have been spending some SERIOUS time in the gym, to the extent that they’re all now super-buff. They chose to reveal this fact by – how else? – posing nude on the cover of Attitude magazine.

It was, and is, quite an eye-catching image. Grown women have been known to spend a LOT of time examining this picture with a thoughtful look on their eyes. Grown men too. It’s that kind of a picture. And that’s before anyone knew there was a sexy vampire video too.

Then there’s the shock revelation that they’ve incorporated those saturated club synths into their pop-rock sound, courtesy of Dallas Austin, who produced their new album. I say ‘shock’ as if the idea of a pop band using an established pop noise in their pop music was actually a shocking thing, knowing full well it’s really not. But nevertheless, it’s an unexpected sonic innovation, especially as they’re not being used to push the band into Enter Shikari / Pendulum dance-rock territory.

There’s even talk of a Taio Cruz-penned McFly single coming soon. I know!

(Here’s the video. Old McDougie had a vampire, ee-aye ee-aye OW!)

There again, what’s so surprising about McFly being into modern pop music? They’re a modern pop band. It’s not like their speciality was chanelling the spirit of the ’60s, or tipping the wink to original punk rock. If they’re going to develop – and BOY have they developed, right girls? – they’ve got to get with the times, daddio! Why the chorus alone features two melodic things which can be directly traced to other recent pop hits.

There’s the wordless refrain which starts the song and boosts the choruses, which is surely just a trimmed-down version of the one in ‘Bad Romance’, and aren’t those “whu-HOO!” bits a bit, well, Scouting For Girls-y? Yes, yes they are.

Of course, this isn’t some desperate attempt to appear relevant to the kids of today, now the bulk of people who bought ‘Five Colours In Her Hair’ have gone to university. See the look of flinty determination in their eyes? This is a show of strength, a flexing of musical muscles to match the actual muscles.

It’s a snoot-cocking exercise to show the doubters that there’s life in the young dogs yet. They have battled long and hard, and now they are here to claim their kingdom. As one, the band have risen, beating a fist to their breastplates in salute to their fallen comrades, and shouting “WE ARE McFLY, HEAR OUR MIGHTY POP MUSIC AND QUAKE!”

Of course, Lady Gaga could eat them for breakfast, but that’s by the by.

Download: Out now

www.mcflyofficial.com
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

Muzic Junkie says: “While Party Girl is a departure in sound for McFly, it still sounds like a McFly track somehow.”

FizzyPop says: “Let’s face it, McFly are the Girls Aloud of boybands.”

Beehive City says: “I have to admit I thought that the band would bubble under fairly quickly after they parted company with Island Records in 2007.”

View full post on BBC – Chart blog