Perennial Swedish mid-tablers suddenly strike it big in Germany, of all places…

[Video][MySpace]
[6.14]

Martin Skidmore: Those who know me will not expect that a Swedish garage-indie band will appeal to me, but this is rather good. The guitars chime and chop nicely, and it builds up some irresistible funky and driving foot-tapping moments on the choruses. It has its dull moments (the singing is dreary on the verses), but overall it’s one of the best indie-rock numbers I’ve heard in ages.
[8]

Iain Mew: The post-punk verses are derivative to the extreme but nonetheless briefly flirt with the heights of first album Editors. Then comes the hoarse holler of a chorus and they clumsily stomp all over the tension that they’d built. Oops.
[4]

Ian Mathers: First he sounds a little like Chris Martin, and the idea of that Coldplay softie fronting some competent enough garage disco rock is actually a little intriguing. Once he really starts gurning, though, Billy Idol is brought to mind instead. The female backing vocals aren’t doing him any favours, although the energy level is high enough to compensate for a multitude of sins.
[6]

Doug Robertson: Why is there such an urge to sound like The Past right now? Is a slot on the Absolute Radio play list really that coveted? Is that lucrative five star review from Q magazine really worth ignoring that hunger for the new that must surely be gnawing at the soul of bands like this? OK, we get it, you have a tasteful record collection and you want to show it off, and that’s fine, but writing derivative dullness like this won’t help your album join those ranks.
[4]

Martin Kavka: The chorus on this is amazing. The video knows that one of the Cardinal Rules Of Making A Good Video is Show People Dancing Ridiculously And Not Caring. The lyrics are interesting: why is the singer “falling in love with your favorite song,” and not you specifically? The build-up at 2:30 sounds like a kettle that’s been left on too long, but this is good stuff.
[8]

Additional Scores

Hillary Brown: [6]
M. H. Lo: [7]

Yes, this is the one that has Ron Howard in the video…

[Video][MySpace]
[5.13]

John M. Cunningham: In a way, I respect that Jamie Foxx in 2009 is making bawdy club songs with T-Pain rather than the ponderous, serious cat R&B one might expect from a recent Oscar winner. Especially when they’re seemingly a cut above most club songs featuring T-Pain. The ubiquitous AutoTune, for instance, doesn’t seem to be just slathered on for kicks here; its distortion niftily mimics the fuzziness of drunk logic, even as it renders the two vocalists indistinct.
[6]

Martin Skidmore: The use of auto-tune is getting more and more prevalent, and I don’t like it, any more than I liked the vocoder in the past. I don’t mind artists adjusting their vocals to be in tune, but the robotic effect seems particularly poorly suited to emotional songs, and makes performances sound literally phoned in. The stuttering bits here undermine any feeling further. I found this completely tedious and rather unpleasant to listen to.
[2]

Martin Kavka: The production on this isn’t bad, but the lyrics are a date-rapist’s anthem. “She say she don’t, but I know she’s frontin’.” How? Could we have some evidence for this, please? “Just one more round and you’re down, I know it.” Great! “Baby I’m about to show you what you’ve been missin’ in your life when I get inside.” OK. But how is she going to remember the glory of your twelve-inch cock the next morning when you’ve gotten her so drunk tonight? Did you think about that, Jamie? Idiotic asshole.
[0]

Al Shipley: At first blush, it didn’t seem even seem like a particularly exceptional T-Pain feature, much less the jam of the year, but that’s what it’s shaping up to be. Chistopher “Deep” Henderson’s beat should single-handedly launch him into super-producer status: the sliding, swelling synths, and the relaxed swing of a rhythm that patiently builds to the song’s money shot, the stuttered hook over snare drum triplets. The inspired inanity of Foxx’s “feeling on your butt – what!” and T-Pain’s “she looked me dead in the eye, and my pants got bigger” only helps to make casual brilliance of the track more fun.
[9]

Dave Moore: Anyone decrying overuse of Autotune in hip-hop has not listened to enough Jamie Foxx songs without Autotune on them. The production is like a sliced-and-diced “Flashing Lights” and the monotone chorus occasionally flirts with a daring second note, but it’s kind of perfect.
[8]

Additional Scores

Hillary Brown: [5]
Ian Mathers: [6]
Doug Robertson: [5]

Will we ever get a more confusing artist billing than this? Probably not…

[Video][MySpace]
[3.86]

Hillary Brown: Not the most fabulous song to begin with and not improved by being squished together with a weak hoochie ballad.
[3]

M. H. Lo: There are many inexplicable things about this totally unnecessary version of the song, but here’s an especially big WTF: even though A. R. Rahman is RIGHT THERE singing alongside the Dolls, Nicole “What? I’m part Filipina! That’s practically Indian!” Scherzinger nevertheless insists on pronouncing the titular phrase as “Jay Ho!” Is she deaf, or stupid? Answers on a postcard, please.
[2]

Ian Mathers: If Nicole Scherzinger would just stay entirely separate from the original vocal track, this would be more tolerable, but as soon as she busts out her own “jai ho”s it stops sounding like a dialogue (however artificial) or a sample and more like a borderline shitty dance-pop act trying to make one of the more stirring soundtrack songs Hollywood has stolen from elsewhere into their own kind of romantic pap. The original is still fantastic, but the English lyrics are just so generic (if they’re translations of the originals, more’s the pity) and the additions to the song fail spectacularly, except for the early parts of the chorus, where Rahman and Scherzinger soar in their own ways.
[5]

Martin Kavka: Somehow I don’t think that “this beat is heavy so heavy” is an accurate translation from the original Hindi. Not even the “Baila! Baila!” chant from the original is kept. The backing track is punched up in interesting ways – everything sounds more synthesized, an electric guitar is added, and the strings are pushed way back in the mix – but the fact that it’s interesting doesn’t quite make it enjoyable.
[4]

Dave Moore: Ah, s’more culture-vulture cash-grabbing from the feel-good motion picture that brought us visible evidence of outsourced filmmaking’s unfair wages to local labor in the guise of Slumdog‘s slumkids, who had a great time on Oscar’s red carpet before being shipped back to Mumbai to sleep under a fucking tarp. The song is…I mean, whatever.
[3]

Additional Scores

Martin Skidmore: [6]
Keane Tzong: [4]

18-year-old gets tagged as this year’s designated UK crossover rapper – Calvin Harris collaboration ahoy!…

[Video][MySpace]
[5.67]

John M. Cunningham: Excise a few suggestions of vulgarity, and this dumb declaration of self could be a mainstay on some British equivalent of the Disney Channel. There’s an earnest charm to the retrograde rhymes, though (“I’m just tryin’ to do my music” is dorky like “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” not to mention the Monkees theme), and when all’s said and done, I sort of just want to give the kid a noogie.
[6]

Martin Kavka: The most interesting thing about this track is that it doesn’t sound current, and it doesn’t seem interested in trying. I would like to infer from this that the UK rap scene is over its inferiority complex, and has stopped trying to appear more street-butch than US rappers. Nevertheless, I suspect that most people will infer from this that the UK rap scene is just as naff as ever.
[5]

Doug Robertson: Wow, Alvin’s voice hasn’t half broken. Crunchy guitars, bouncy rapping with just enough edge to keep it on the right side of novelty and the sort of hookiness that could probably reel in a whole boatful of prime cod if you so desired. Of course, it’s destined to be blasted out of too many bass heavy car stereos to retain its charms for long, but right now, and it’s only the now that matters, it’s kinda ace.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: It’s a one man, British Blog 27, in that it’s somewhat drony, minimal and almost banging. It’s vaguely endearing. It’s hugely embarrassing. A winner as a novelty single but as a career-starter it possibly suggests horrible things to come. I think I like it.
[8]

Hillary Brown: Both unusual and somehow madly uninteresting at the same time.
[5]

Additional Scores

M. H. Lo: [5]
Dan MacRae: [2]
Dave Moore: [8]
Martin Skidmore: [5]

Puerto Rican duo go storming into the lead…

[Video][MySpace]
[7.60]

Ian Mathers: The back track makes me feel like I’m playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, I’m pretty sure one of the foreign guys just said John Travolta for no good reason (and I’m sure he just said “electromagnetos”) and that female chorus vocal is just ravishing. I’ve underrated Calle 13 before, but this is living up to everything I’d heard about them: funny, bracingly off-kilter and still killer pop.
[8]

Hazel Robinson: Err, is this reggaeton going 80s electro? I think it is. And more robots: “Hold me, touch me, break the circuitry” begs the chorus and alright, go on then. It sounds like an interesting remix more than an original, but I’m pretty much a sucker for anything that can fit the word “circuitry” into an inept rap in the middle eight.
[7]

Andrew Casillas: Another stunner from Latin music’s greatest rap act. Notice that I said “rap”, not reggaetón. Calle 13 long ago surpassed that derisive label, and one listen to their new music shows why. Riding an electro-throwback beat, lyricist Residente details an absurd dream (or is it?) of time-traveling back to the 1980s, where they run into a leisure suit-wearing John Travolta while he’s “spinning his dance moves” and dozens of people “dancing” the robot (or are they?). However, whatever the lyrics really mean is irrelevant, because you don’t have to be fluent in Spanish to really “get” this. Calle 13 are much more interested in moving your butt than making you think. This is rap music of the highest sort — exhilarating, adventurous, beyond profane, and knee-slapping hilarious.
[9]

Hillary Brown: If the song could only be half as good as the video, which is sort of like Almodovar meets “Shiny Happy People,” this would be phenomenal stuff. As-is, it’s not like you have to mute it, but it’s not great.
[4]

Martin Kavka: Somewhere, it is still 1983, people aren’t retro when they do the robot, and Jellybean Benitez is the arbiter of cultural taste. That place is “Electro Movimento,” and while parts of it are grating – does Residente really compare himself both to guacamole and arroz con frijoles? Can’t he just pick one dish? — when Afrobeta’s Cuci Amador sings the chorus, I float away in heaven, and miss Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam a little less. Note to cultural conservatives: Residente’s dancefloor is open to practitioners of bestiality and pedophilia. Call your congresspersons!
[10]

Additional Scores

Iain Mew: [9]
Dan MacRae: [9]
Dave Moore: [5]
Doug Robertson: [8]
Martin Skidmore: [7]

Residual Obama Goodwill Piss-Away ’09 begins in earnest…

[Video][MySpace]
[2.18]

Dan MacRae: I’m certain the legal difficulty of (unsuccessfully) getting Rivers Cuomo to clear the sample to “Say It Ain’t So” is much more interesting than this cluster of shit. And why wouldn’t Rivers want to distance himself from the surefire date-rape anthem of 2009?
[1]

Martin Kavka: Asher Roth is soooo not good for the Jews. Fortunately for Roth, the staffers for the Jewish Daily Forward are so worried about Bernie Madoff that they won’t notice.
[1]

Jonathan Bradley: Lyrically, Roth is lazy and lacking in focus, like a paper written the night before by a student not brilliant enough to get away with it. Vocally, he’s adenoidal and ungainly. It’s not that I have any particular problem with white frat boy rap; there are countless archetypes of good for nothing Caucasian youth ripe for nuanced, or at least irrationally exuberant, hip-hop exploration. But Asher Roth is no Animal House, and he’s not even up to the standard of the first American Pie. This is American Pie 6: The One Where Stifler’s Mom’s Cousin’s Horny Boorish Son Goes to Band Camp and makes a Rap Song.
[2]

Iain Mew: As a plodding celebration of doing nothing worthwhile with your life that’s content to coast on recognition alone, rather than any actual humour or joy, this is really rather depressing. That’s even before the terrible widdly electric guitar cuts in, too.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: The Eminem comparisons are not just because he’s a white rapper: he’s learnt some flow from Eminem too, though he doesn’t have the nimbleness nor the brilliance with rhyming. It’s all more laid back, dope-charged as suits the material – it sounds like a modern equivalent of the end-of-party acoustic guitar singalongs. I suspect it might be very big, in which case I will probably grow to loathe it.
[5]

Rodney J. Greene: I’d bet money that John Mayer could out-rap this dude.
[2]

Additional Scores

Hillary Brown: [3]
Ian Mathers: [1]
Edward Okulicz: [2]
Doug Robertson: [4]
Al Shipley: [1]

Transatlantic number one (until yesterday) heralds our return for the ’09…

[Video][Website]
[5.60]

Erick Bieritz: In principle I’ve been as keen as anyone on recent mainstream rap’s engagements with dance music, whether it comes from Daft Punk, Moldova, or the 1980s… but a part of me still hasn’t gotten over incidents like that day a decade ago when Sean Combs dragged Gordon Sumner out of the retirement home with a gun to his head. That said, Flo Rida wisely continues to not really have much of a personality that could interfere with the proceedings, and the blippy metronome pace is engaging enough.
[5]

Hazel Robinson: “And I’m wearin’ a crown, poppin’ these bottles, touchin’ these models, watchin’ they asses go round’n’round” – no lie, it’s hard to hate this kind of ‘dog with its head out of a car window’ enthusiasm. Flo Rida sounds like he’s been kidnapped by Amazons and knows he vaguely ought to be panicking and wondering if his mum’s looking for him but hell, just take a look at that. Awesome.
[8]

M. H. Lo: He tweaks the lyric so that it’s no longer his entire body that is being spun round – because God forbid Florence should be seen to twirl. Conveniently, mentioning “head” means that we can’t miss the meaning of the song (“when you go down”), and I guess any blowjob that Linda Blairs your noggin is by definition a good one.
[5]

Dan MacRae: For a song about pole dancing, “Right Round” comes across as positively quaint. Shouldn’t the Dead or Alive sample have been an alley-oop to something better and filthier? Instead the entire track sputters about (with additional bleeps and bloops for flavor) and does little more than just exist. Maybe Flo Rida sounds better being played by a phone or something. Damn kids and their technology.
[3]

Keane Tzong: There is a certain brutal frugality to this: Can’t get a writer to write a decent hook? Nick one off a proven hit record. Can’t get Katy Perry to sing said hook? Find a blonder, trashier version at half the price. What’s frightening is that this frugality might well be a sign of rock-solid business acumen. You can’t argue with money, after all. And, in classic “winning formula” fashion, his next single features Wynter Gordon and the hook from Eiffel 65’s “Blue”. Personally, I’m waiting for a Flo Rida track with Mutya and “Sandstorm”. Instantaneous global #1. I’m sure of it.
[5]

Additional scores

Martin Skidmore: [5]
Dave Moore: [6]
Jessica Popper: [8]
Martin Kavka: [4]
Hillary Brown: [7]

Last week, kept off #1 in the UK by Flo Rida. This week, kept off #2 in the UK by Flo Rida…

[Video][MySpace]
[5.60]

Dave Moore: Charity single seems to think that it’s doing some kind of commentary on the idea of a plastic-fantastic girl group covering Depeche Mode, but the Saturdays learn the hard way that you can’t really “satirize” boring.
[4]

Jessica Popper: When I heard that they were going to cover this, for some reason I imagined it would be in a sultry electro-girl style. Instead, they’ve transformed the iconic track into a bouncy, cheery pop song perfect for Comic Relief. Kids who don’t know the original will especially love it. It’s a very enjoyable cover (best bit is when it sounds like “Rhythm of My Life” by Gina G at 2:28), but I still have to take issue with the video. Is it really necessary for these pretty young girls to dress and act so slutty in it?
[9]

Martin Kavka: Whereas Depeche Mode found the heart in stereotypically icy synthesizers, The Saturdays find ice in these romantic lyrics by pairing them with a video in which they play ‘50s housewives, having fun doing laundry, lying on cars, playing ukeleles, and throwing off clothes to make themselves weigh less. If this is comedy, please put it out of its misery. It’s almost impossible to screw this song up, but they come damn close.
[4]

Doug Robertson: Somehow The Satudays manage to take Depeche Mode’s most chart friendly moment, a genuinely euphoric surge of loved up synthy genius, and suck most of its poppy charms out of it like some sort of thrill hoover. It’s not that it’s a bad cover as such, more that, rather than the spike-heeled, sassy take on the song you might expect from a girl band, this is more of a rubber wellied trudge through the source material with an underwhelming air of “Will this do?” hanging over the whole affair.
[6]

M. H. Lo: Having decided to cover one of synthpop’s most famous riffs — and faced with options like recreating it with strings (the Balanescu Quartet), or as faux-batucada (Nouvelle Vague) — the Saturdays opt to… do nothing. Well, maybe not nothing: in the third section of the song, at the 2:13 mark, the music drops out for a second, the better to give us that “boom!” moment when the beat kicks back in. But even if we pretend that this is the Saturdays’ doing, it’s still not very confidence-inspiring to find that the best thing about the latest record by Britain’s latest girl group is one second of silence.
[3]

Additional Ratings

Hillary Brown: [5]
Dan MacRae: [6]
Hazel Robinson: [6]
Martin Skidmore: [6]
Keane Tzong: [7]

And so, to close out the first day’s play, what better than the song keeping the previous two entries off the UK number one spot…

[Video][Website][Context]
[2.20]

M. H. Lo: Won’t somebody think of the children?
[1]

Doug Robertson: Who has ever sat down and thought, “You know what? I really like the Dolly and Kenny version of ‘Islands in the Stream’, but you know what would be better? A sub-karaoke version of the track that would be lucky to get even polite applause if the protagonists were doing it down my local pub on a Friday. And the only way that could be improved upon would be if Tom Jones turned up towards the end, bellowing his way through the final chorus like a wounded manatee. That would be perfect.” Well, if you’re that person then this is for you, as is this cyanide pill.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: “Islands In The Stream” is such a great song that anyone who can even vaguely carry a tune should be able to make it listenable, but here, no. I know it’s Comic Relief, but what’s wrong with a little reverence to a song’s quality and faithfulness to its tenor? It’s not a funny song!
[3]

Martin Kavka: Oh, I know, it’s impossible to slag something that benefits charity. But hasn’t anyone commented on how depressing this track is? The whole point of pop music is to sing along with it, often badly. This track, insofar as it sinks to depressing levels of badness before Tom Jones and Robin Gibb save it near the end, teaches you that only Real Pop Stars™ can make a performance good, rule the world and feed the starving children. Don’t try this at home, folks! Leave pop to the professionals! And while you’re sitting there amongst your shattered dreams, give some money to Comic Relief!
[2]

Martin Skidmore: Neither of them can really sing, though they give it their best, and I never liked this song. Tom Jones lifts the standard a bit, but he’s pretty much a comedy turn himself by now. Rubbish, obviously, but good luck with raising some money.
[2]