Spinning Around

Groove Armada - Song 4 Mutya (Out Of Control)
Every now and again something comes along to provide reason for the continued existence of music. This is one of those things. It is, to put it mildly, FUCKING BRILLIANT.

Calvin Harris - The Girls
A not-entirely-choosy Calvin tells us about all the different types of girl he likes. “I’ve got a lot of love to give”, he says, which is presumably why the list is longer than our arm. Either that or he’s desperate. Anyway, the really important thing here is that Calvin is admitting to being a commitmentphobe - are you listening, Kylie?!!

Battles - Atlas
Anyone who likes listening to songs but not knowing what the fuck is going on could do worse than give this a try. It's also recommended if you've got a thing for elf vocals, overbearing drums and prog rock. And it isn't actually shit!

Feist - My Moon My Man
We haven’t got the foggiest who “Feist” is, but this track and the video that accompanies it are both very good. Shame she forgot to press the stop button before legging it from the studio at the end, mind.

Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare (LP)
Hilarious Self Parody, more like. A 4/10 at best.

Rihanna - Umbrella
Shades of Rihanna being a pop-lite version of M.I.A. without the rapping here, on a track whose true quality is only revealed after a few listens (and a hasty ffwd past Jay-Z’s bit). Quite why she keeps refusing to actually sing remains a puzzle, but when the songs are as good as this and S.O.S., she could basically fart down the mic for all we care.

Obscurer with Paul Smith*

Paul Smith has heard a lot of music. He’s listened to more records than you’ve had hot meals, even if you’re obese. We decided to harness his encyclopaedic powers in a new series, where the Maximo Park singer tells us about some of his favourite music.




#3: Sally Shapiro - ‘I’ll Be By Your Side’



“I feel it’s important to point out that Maximo Park is basically an electro band. We may use guitars and real drums and sound like an indie band, but at our heart we are as electronic as a toaster. This is what qualifies me to talk about this record. It is amazing. A piece of gigantic, glacial electropop that to my ear sounds like listening to Kraftwerk while speeding through the arctic tundra on a snowmobile. By that I don’t mean, ‘quite German and full of engine noise’, I’m using metaphor. Again, this is something Maximo Park like to do quite a lot of and why you should always search for hidden meanings in our songs. Metaphor - look it up, kids!”







*not in any way associated with Paul Smith or Maximo Park

Cooking with Ash

TRACK OF THE WEEK
Ash - ‘You Can’t Have It All’

Not a lot of people know this but Ash are well into their cooking. Barely a day goes by without Tim Wheeler going into the kitchen to rustle up a new meal straight from the dark recesses of his imagination (his roast potatoes are known to be especially good).

Let’s take a look at the recipe for his latest culinary treat, shall we?

1) Take one Ash.
2) Remove the Charlotte.
3) Add as much Muse as you want (remember to remove the apocalyptic lyrics from the Muse BEFORE adding it, then replace them with ones people might understand).
4) Let everything bubble until The Beach Boys are almost at the surface, but not showing.
5) Allow time for it to become cool (it might grow somewhat during this step).
6) When it’s set, sprinkle on a couple of ridiculous time changes.

Et voila! One ‘You Can’t Have It All’, ready to serve.

Mmm.

An Important Message

For anyone even remotely interested in matters regarding planet pop.

Please be aware that Mutya (out of the Sugababes) and Groove Armada (out of that car advert with all the arses) have done a song together, called 'Out Of Control'.

:: It is already without question the best pop song of the year.
:: It basically shits all over anything else you will have heard so far in 2007.
:: With any luck it will be out later this summer.
:: It's all the more brilliant for being completely unexpected (Groove Armada?!!)
:: It is so good they gave it two titles: 'Out Of Control (Song For Mutya)'.
:: That's it.

Hurrah!
x

Prayers: answered

This just in from Tahita out of New Young Pony Club:

“There’s a feminisation of music. Nobody has to be a Kasabian or a Razorlight ever again”.

This is basically the best news of the year, unless The Twang announce that they’re splitting up and not releasing their album, that is.

You know she's really good

TRACK OF THE WEEK
Amy Winehouse - Back To Black

Gothic, funereal, sombre - we’ve all heard about Amy Winehouse’s flat on a Sunday morning, but what is her new single, ‘Back To Black’, like?

Well.

If you must know, it’s a downbeat Motown shuffle with a heartbreak chorus that’ll sound mouth-dryingly familiar to anyone who has ever lost love like this.

Musically it sounds like someone told the Supremes to cancel their Christmas party; a sweeping, string-laden, piano-plinking epic of unworn dresses, smudged makeup and empty wine bottles. Quite sad, really.

There is also some percussion.

FYI, singles-wise, it now stands like this:

1) Rehab
2) Back To Black
3) You Know I’m No Good

This is what Amy’s people should do now:

1) Release ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’ at the end of summer.
2) Release a new mix of ‘Me & Mr. Jones’ before Christmas.

And here is what Amy’s people will probably do instead:

1) Release ‘Just Friends’ as a download-only single.
2) Without telling anyone when.

Now that would be sad.

Spinning Around

Amerie - Gotta Work
Horns! Drums! Lyrics about making a bit of an effort! If Beyonce had been similarly keen after ‘Crazy In Love’, we might have had this instead of all the dreadful songs she released instead. Brilliant.

Alanis Morissette - 8 Easy Steps
The fuss over her BEP cover made us revisit one of her previous finest moments. This is amazing proto-Avril pop rock, and features the immortal line ‘I’ve been practising my ass off’.

The Tigerpicks - Crazy Juices
This song sounds a bit like Fischerspooner might if they were forty years younger. It’s a high-NRG hands-in-the-air BANGER and ever so slightly bonkers. There is a ‘piece’ about the band further down the page. Scroll to it if you wish, or if you are lazy click here.

Dragonette - Take It Like A Man
Still.

Vicky Nolan - Look Out Your Window
Gorgeous coffee-table strum which is nowhere near as boring as that description makes it sound.

Timbaland - Shock Value
We’re still listening to Tim’s latest epic (but not all in one go). Amazing songs on this album include: Release, The Way I Are, Time, One And Only, Apologize, Come Around. If he’d used those songs as the backbone to the album and put in some of the less-amazing-but-still-good ones, like Give It To Me, around them, it would have been SILLY GOOD.

Obscurer with Paul Smith*

Paul Smith has heard a lot of music. He’s listened to more records than you’ve had hot meals, even if you’re obese. We decided to harness his encyclopaedic powers in a new series, where the Maximo Park singer tells us about some of his favourite music.

#2 - ‘Hettakorii No Ottokotou’ by eX-Girl

“This is an amazing record by a brilliant female synth-rock sort of band. To mention any kind of genre in relation to eX-Girl is a bit difficult, since there’re more different genres contained in this one song than there are on most record label rosters. The song is like a five-minute mini-opera, I can never tell if there’s a story because most of the lyrics are in Japanese and I always forget to listen to the English bit. The music is just insane, intense experimentalism. Constantly trying new things and moving in different directions. Just like Maximo Park, except we’re not Japanese!”




Thanks, Paul!






*not in any way associated with Paul Smith or Maximo Park

Burn Me Out

Manchester: full of people with ridiculous haircuts playing Stone Roses records to gullible students, right?

WRONG!

Some of the people with ridiculous haircuts are in brilliant electro bands:

Presenting The Tigerpicks, a new band from Manchester who have recently taken several things by storm (including the In The City conference and Deltasonic record label) by playing their own brand of noisy electro sexdisco to assorted impressed gawpers.

They are Frankie Ross, Martyn Anderson and Emma "Reece" Leatherbarrow; shown in some kind of order in the photo above. Assuming that the one in the middle is Martyn, we reckon that the one on the right of the picture looks like an Emma and the one on the left is therefore definitely Frankie. It could equally be the other way around though, we suppose.

Their signature tune (more bands should have them) is ‘Disco Punk Electro Funk’, which sounds like a non-boring indie band having a go at being Girls Aloud and getting away with it better than anyone could have expected. It is, therefore, amazing.

And when they’re not sounding like everyone’s favourite girl band, things get even more bonkers. ‘Crazy Juices’ is a big thumping bastard of an electro record very much of the hands-in-the-air school of these things; ‘Burn Me Out’ is more of the same with added rawk guitars and ridiculous operatic bits all over the place and ’Pow Pow Pow’ has a bit in it where the vocals go all old rave and urge the listener to “oooh trip the light fantastic” and so on, which is brilliant.

Revision Pointers:

: : Manchester
: : Electro
: : Good hair
: : Bits you think you can sing along to but find out you can’t when you actually try.
: : Massive danceability rating
: : Amazing

Spinning Around - Spring 2003 Special!!

Rachel Stevens - Sweet Dreams My L.A. Ex
Dangerously good debut single from former seal clubber Ms. Stevens. Bizarrely, she got even better after this, but less popular. A bit like some kind of mutated supervirus.

Phixx - Hold On Me
Phixx weren’t even good enough to be in One True Voice, yet this was a million times better than the bunch of Jason Donovan b-sides that lot released. A proper big boyband song, with “Yeah”s, “Woah”s and other more vocal but still ridiculous lyrics like “I’m weak to the taste of your seduction”. Amazing.

Kelis - Finest Dreams
Richard X established the template for his sexy electro fashionpop with this slinky little number. It gets a bit lifeless in between the first and second minute mark, but mostly this is quite brilliant.

Lumidee - Never Leave You
Summer barbeque staple where it didn’t matter that exactly the same thing happens, repeatedly, for nearly four solid minutes, as long as you had some warm beer, a nearly-cooked hot dog and the ability to ‘tune out a bit’.

Stacie Orrico - Stuck
Pity poor Stacie, who sings here “I hate you, but I love you”. What a predicament. We feel exactly the same way about Pot Noodles.

Mark Owen - Four Minute Warning
Marky!

Kylie Minogue - Slow
After listening to a load of Fischerspooner albums and still deciding not to work with them, this is officially the point when the brave pop poppet’s fun-to-seriousness ratio went a bit wonky.

See you later

SINGLE OF THE WEEK
Arctic Monkeys - Brianstorm

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Covered In Lumps

Remember that awkward moment watching Dogma when you had to concede to yourself that, actually, Alanis Morissette might have a sense of humour after all? The uncomfortable realisation that safe, boring, what-the-fuck-is-she-whinging-on-about-now Alanis might actually be a bit cool. Well, she’s only gone and bloody done it again, hasn‘t she?


What follows is a link to Alanis doing a parody of the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘My Humps’. We have absolutely no idea why she’s done this; is it an ironic (wahey!) post-feminist critique of a woman’s world blinged senseless by hip thrusts and lady lumps, or a nice cheeky way of getting Alanis back onto the Internet and into people’s heads and thoughts? Whatever, we’re very glad she made the effort.

As unexpected covers go it’s quite a one, turning the guffawing idiocy of the original into a plaintive ballad that, as well as exposing the full dismal extent of the lyrics, finds time to address some of life‘s great questions, like “what you gonna do with all that breast, all that breast inside that shirt?” in a beautiful and sensitive way. It’s really quite good.

Sadly there is no reprise of the bit where the guy raps with all the flow of an eight-year-old at a school party (“I met a girl down at the disco / she said hey / hey / hey / yeah / let‘s go“), but you can’t have everything can you?

See the Morissette here.

Amazing News Story Of The Week

"Dane Bowers has woken up to the health risks of kebabs - after being smashed over the head with a cricket bat in a row over a donner".

From Victoria Newton's ridiculously on-the-pulse Bizarre column, which, when it isn't just copying and pasting stories from the NME website, always has time for the big stories.

A Mammoth Feat.

Have you heard the one about the new Timbaland album? Apparently, it’s 70 minutes long! Haha! That’s ONE HOUR AND TEN MINUTES! Ah, what a wheeze. Who in their right mind would… What? It’s what? It actually is that long? It wasn’t just on repeat and sounded the same? No?

OH.
MY.
GOD.

Take a look at those three words very carefully. By the time you‘ve listened to most of this album, you’ll know them off by heart. They’ll form your favourite phrase, used when the silence after what must SURELY be the last song is replaced by YET ANOTHER INTRO.

About seven times.

Which is a shame, because most of the tracks on offer here are very good indeed. There’s just too many of them. The point’s been made that Timbaland could have flogged a good third of these to other artists, pocketed a billion squillion dollars in the process and still have more than enough goodies left for his album, but the decision’s been made - 19 tracks it is.

NINETEEN! This calls for a Victoria Newton-style EXCLUSIVE track-by-track!

1) We start with ‘Oh Timbaland’, which you won’t be able to listen to without having a silent argument with yourself in two different accents (you‘ll see why). It’s essentially just an extended intro, and as such doesn’t do much.
Skip or Rip? Skip.

2) Things get going properly on track two, ‘Give It To Me’, which sounds pretty good on account of the masses of goodwill inspired by Tim/Nelly/Justin’s exploits together during the last twelve months. It is obviously not as good as ‘SexyBack’ or ‘Maneater’, though.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

3) This is one of those big party songs that people who bounce their heads when they walk are fond of. You could probably “get crunk” to this, or something.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

4) Those acid rave noises from el Timberlake’s My Love make a cameo on this track, which is quite good but seems to go on longer than its three minutes.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

5) This one has a very menacing, brooding way about it. At times it sounds like Justin Timberlake is trying to threaten the listener into having a threesome. Despite that it’s very good and Missy Elliot (she’s not dead!!!) turns up to do a rap, which helps.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

6) The album’s first terrible song. It’s got 50 Cent on it. Oh dear.
Skip or Rip? Leave it playing while you go and get a brew, but don’t listen to it.

7) Features dialogue from the first Resident Evil film. They should have used a clip from the first computer game; the acting in that was AMAZING: “Blood… hope this isn’t… Chris’… blood.“ At least that would have livened things up.
Skip or Rip? Skip.

8) PCD-ish groove featuring Magoo. Short and sweet.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

9) Sugary R&B which could be a good minute shorter without losing anything. Sounds like it might become amazing at any point, but sadly it never does. Very good though.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

10) Too long and too pointless, ‘Scream’ will nevertheless gain masses of exposure because it’s got Nicole Sherwingzingeringer out of the Pussycat Dolls on it.
Skip or Rip? Skip.

11) More aimless pointlessness. This is EXACTLY the sort of song that should have been left on the cutting room floor (i.e. sold to a useless pop star). Clearly we are experiencing the album’s “saggy middle”.
Skip or Rip? Skip.

12) As you can no doubt tell from the title, ‘Bombay’ features music inspired by the sounds of America’s deep south. Woolworths are selling cut-price Vintage Bollywood CDs that sound fresher than this. Three pointless songs in a row, things better pick up soon…
Skip or Rip? Skip.

13) Hooray! A Tune! Things happening! The Hives bring the party back with a nagging guitar riff as we enter the album’s rocky phase.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

14) This is basically your typical Timbaland epic, with added guitar elements and singing in the chorus by She Wants Revenge. Actually it’s a bit too urgent to be a true Timbo epic, but it does sound very big. Comes with bonus “Guess The Rocker’s Accent” game.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

15) Here we go. Newly-good Emo band Fall Out Boy wade in with the best of the rockier tracks. Loud, stupid and packed full of handclaps, ‘One And Only’ also features a weird sound effect running through the chorus that is more addictive than Coco Pops.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

16) Hilariously, this one starts off sounding like Embrace’s cover of D12’s ‘How Come’, but it doesn’t carry on like that. A big, heartfelt slowie that Omarion would be proud of. Nice.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

17) Elton John is on this one, tinkling on Joanna. He doesn’t sing though, which is disappointing and relieving at the same time. The beats are in check and the piano line is very nice. Some strings pop in too, although it kind of loses its way a bit near the end.
Skip or Rip? Rip.

18) Hello! It’s a “bonus” track (what, 17 wasn’t enough for you?) featuring the same woman who sings on half the album and a rapper who sounds like a member of Outkast, but a fairly rubbish member of Outkast. It’s not a member of Outkast. There is basically no need to listen to this one.
Skip or Rip? Skip.

19) Finally, FINALLY, we’re at the end of the album. Another bonus track, featuring M.I.A. of being brilliant fame. We’re excited by her return, and this does nothing to quell that. Really, this song should have been pushed right up into the album proper, in favour of all that mystifying bollocks in the middle.
Skip or Rip? Rip.


Listening to an album this long can be quite difficult, but with a skip button and a knowledge of your favourite tracks you should be okay. Don’t even try to absorb it in one sitting, unless you’re a sadist/Timbaland obsessive. Alternatively, if you stick it on while you’re doing the housework, you can hoover over the boring bits. Hooray!

‘Shock Value’ by Timbaland is out now.

Spinning Around

Robyn - Robyn
Finally! Review soon.

Darke Horse - Text Me Back
Ace new old metal (metal!!) from Sheffield. Includes a diss-tastic McFly reference. We’ll be writing about this band at some point, they’re very good.

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
- Boom! Shake The Room
Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records, and nor does he to get on our playlist. Actually features some priceless lines, this: “I see the one I wanna sic come here cutie/I flip 'em around and then I work that booty” - that’s what Justin really means when he talks about rocking your body.

Dragonette - Take It Like A Man
At the age of 15, hip young gunslinger wrote a letter to the NME about wanting to hug the chorus of ‘Hard To Explain’ by The Strokes. This makes us want to do the same. The hugging, not the writing letters to NME.

Manic Street Preachers - Your Love Alone Is Not Enough
Marginally better than that ‘Underdogs’ tripe, mainly due to the involvement of Nina from the Cardigans and her lovely voice.

*NSYNC - Pop
The second blast from our slightly-less-distant past. This is BRILLIANT, and will one day be seen as a very important pop song.

Ghosts - Stay The Night
The fashion police will lock us up and throw away the key, but this Feeling-meets-Guillemots stomp never fails to incite toe tapping with its bouncy melodiousness. What better way to usher in spring than with lightweight guitar pop?

Dressing up time with Robyn

Last week, Robyn’s ‘Konichiwa Bitches’ was Single Of The Week. This week, the promo for it is Video Of The Week. We don’t even have a Video Of The Week award, but we’re giving it to this one. Before we go on to the analysis, lets take a look at some of the video’s special features:

: : Puppets.
: : Karaoke subtitles.
: : Giant boxing gloves.

It’s brilliant; something which didn’t really come across when they showed it in fast forward on Popworld. Here are the best bits:

00:01 - BOING! Loony Tunes sound effect. Makes us think the video will be quite cartoonish.
00:08 - Conversation between Robyn and a small monkey about what beat she would like on the track. This video is quite cartoonish.
00:25 - The conversation takes place on a GIANT RED PHONE, by the way.
00:31 - It’s the opening titles! These are good opening titles, not like the rubbish ones you get in Justin Timberlake videos when they’re trying to pretend it’s a film.
00:44 - The giant boxing gloves and karaoke subtitles we mentioned earlier appear.
00:45 - Verse bit where Robyn appears in various guises appropriate to the lyrics:
00:46 - Boxer
00:50 - Astronaut
00:53 - Eskimo, or whatever they are called nowadays.
00:57 - Bee
01:04 - Nurse
01:07 - Nurse again, even though the lyric is “saw you in half, like I’m a magician”. (No wonder the NHS is in crisis if this is how nurses behave these days, etc.)
01:12 - GIANT BULLDOZER
01:14 - A frankly-unconvincing “mathematician” with a big hand.
01:18 - A burglar!
01:24 - Now Robyn changes back into her slightly ill-advised eighties outfit.
01:30 - And gives us a lesson on how she arranges her breasts of a morning.
01:43 - Three geishas appear, with Robyn as the one in the middle. She says “Konichiwa Bitches”. If these three formed some sort of arch fighting trio, and called themselves The Konichiwa Bitches, we think they could quite comfortably “take” the Harijuku Girls.
01:56 - Robyn’s dressed as a giant sweet. This is getting silly now.
02:04 - Now she’s a postman. Or postwoman. That’s quite normal we suppose.
02:07 - Now she’s a mailbomb! Who commissioned this?
02:26 - A confused tramp wanders into the studio and sings a bit of the song with Robyn.
02:37 - Robyn gets dressed up as a giant microphone and does the call-and-response bit with a pair of giant lips. Just how many oversized objects are in this video, anyway? Someone should get on to the props department about how they scale things.
02:51 - A 1 TON pile of shit lands on the floor (really). Why? Because “when shit is getting heavy, like it weighs a ton”, Robyn will “run you down like a Marathon“ and, er, put you in the boot of a car. Quite how that’s supposed to help is anyone’s guess.
03:03 - Loony Tunes-style ending. Well, it was coming wasn’t it?

Phew! You can watch the video here.

Alone with Chelsea

SINGLE OF THE WEEK ONE
Stefy - Chelsea



Have you seen the advert for this single? Basically, someone who sounds like a cut-price Lauren Laverne bollocks on about the song’s story, but with added “THIS IS STEFY, HER BOYFRIEND IS A TWAT”, girlpowerness. It is both embarrassing and ridiculous.

Fortunately, the song itself features no such terribleness. It starts off sounding a bit like ‘Sweet Dreams’ by The Eurhythmics (ask your ancestors) and by the end proves itself a more-than-worthy successor to the long line of sharp, shiny and sexy electropop records that have gone before it.

Really, there is no understating this song’s quality. It's simply brilliant. The lyrics are amazing (“She called me while you were kissing / So I could hear what I was missing”), the video is amazing (why wasn‘t The Verdict more like this), the music is amazing, and together they combine to form one of the best pop songs of the year even if, technically, it is a bit old.

BUY IT!

You’ve heard this one before, it’s a Smiths song

SINGLE OF THE WEEK TWO
Mark Ronson - Stop Me

Amazingly, there are people out there who think that covering a song by The Smiths would be an act of massive sacrilege, roughly akin to throwing a burning sheep through a church window.

If it was up to them, records by so-called ‘important’ artists would be locked in a glass vault on the day of release and hidden in a very safe place, so no wrongdoing young ‘uns could get their messy mitts on them.

These people are idiots, obviously.

One person who is definitely not an idiot is Mark Ronson, who’s taken the rain-soaked melancholy of The Smiths’ ’Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’ and replaced it with nu-soul strings, beats and an ADD-friendly title, and given it the kind of Pimp My Misery treatment that makes you think less about abject heartbreak and more about which shoes you’re going to go out dancing in.

That’s not to say there’s no feeling, there’s plenty of that, provided in the main by Daniel Merriweather’s aching vocal, which slides into your ears like melted chocolate, but without any of the sticky unpleasantness that would entail.

All of which bodes well for Mark’s upcoming album, ‘Version’. But what will the purists say when he gets his hands on Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘Oh My God’?! Only time will tell.

Some good things about Matt Willis

1) He used to be in Busted.
2) He is basically what Lil’ Chris is going to be like in ten years, after all the beer, girls and rehab stints have had their say.
3) He’s got an excellent logo:

4) Our female friends inform us he is “fit as fuck”.
5) His new single Crash is quite good.
6) HE USED TO BE IN BUSTED FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.
7) You’d think that last one would garner him a few sympathy sales, wouldn’t you?

Pot, Kettle, Mediocre

Apparently Mika has said that the Scissor Sisters are “so mediocre I can’t believe it”.

Now, we’re no experts on irony, but isn’t that a bit rich coming from a man whose best song sounds very much like a mediocre Scissor Sisters album track? And one off their second album at that?

There was a time when Mika seemed like quite a good pop star. Not as good as some people were trying to make out, but competent nonetheless. Recently though he’s been on a slide towards rubbishness that's culminated in a ridiculous, six-year-old-kid-on-acid performance at the South by Southwest music festival and the release of his new single ‘Love Today’.

Everything you need to know about Love Today:

1) It is probably one of the worst songs ever.
2) That’s it.

Mika: Shhhhh!