I BELIEVE IN A THING CALLED LOVE

The Darkness

At first listen, this sounds like any old heavy metal horror from the eighties you’d care to mention, albeit with a singer who sounds like he’s taken singing lessons from both the Bee Gees and Mariah Carey, then decided to ignore virtually all their advice and do his own thing anyway (complete with unfeasibly high singing voice). However, that’s not the full story. If you’ve seen the video (which basically parodies nearly every rock cliché going), you’ll probably be aware that they’re having a grand old time doing music that they enjoy and that they don’t really give a stuff what music reviewers like me think and, do you know what, the Top 40 needs people like this lot around to bring some fun back into the wide, wide world of music. I’ve never really liked this sort of music and I personally wouldn’t rush out and buy this song, but fair play to them, it makes a change from some of the usual, mass-marketed tat that comes out. Be honest, if it was between the Darkness and Gareth Gates for the very last position in the chart, who would you rather have?

SWEET DREAMS MY L.A. EX

Rachel Stevens

They can’t release it like this, it just sounds like a rough demo of a song Kylie Minogue rejected. I think I’ll wait until they’ve finished it before I give it a full review.

GOING UNDER

Evanescence

I won a few quid last week on the lottery. Unfortunately, the winnings only came to four figures and that was if you included the numbers after the decimal point, which means that I’ll have to review stuff like this for a while yet. I blame Camelot myself. While the Darkness single practically flew along with a big smile on its face, this one plodded along for a few minutes with a deadly serious look on its morose little mug. It is better than Bring Me To Life, but in my opinion Agadoo is better as well, so that doesn’t count for much. This just isn’t very enjoyable to listen to.

HAVE IT ALL

Foo Fighters

This is exactly what I’ve been talking about. Evanescence are doing a serious rock song and so are the Foo Fighters. The Foo Fighters single, however, is interesting. The tone’s a little lighter and there’s more creativity at work here. It’s a funny old world, I never really thought a lot of the Foo Fighters until the current album came out and suddenly they’ve released four decent singles in a row. This isn’t quite in the same league as Low or One By One, but it’ll do for me.

SAY CHEESE (SMILE PLEASE)

Fast Food Rockers

Did you see that? They’re called the Fast Food Rockers and the song title has the word cheese in it! That’s genius at work, that is. Wow, I’m impressed. And there’s more good news too. Mobile Disco owners, here’s another single you can play at primary school discos. You might as well, it’s got naff all relevance to anyone over 10. Pure 24 carat kiddiepop this may be, but just in case you think it’s going to vanish without trace, I offer a warning. Bob the Builder turned over Westlife once and if you can turn your mind back ten years, Mr Blobby gave Take That a right pasting. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again, let’s just pray it’s not this one that does it.

12:51

The Strokes

It could be me, but it sounds like whoever recorded the vocals forgot to turn the volume up because poor old Julian Casablancas almost sounds lost amongst what the other band members are doing. Doesn’t really matter though, as soon as this starts you can tell it’s unmistakeably a Strokes song. Mind you, it’s not quite a “Wow, they’re back and they mean business” song, more a case of simply carrying on where they left off, which is a little bit disappointing. That’s not to say this isn’t very good, it’s just a little bit underwhelming. Hopefully, there’ll be better stuff on the album.