MATINEE

Franz Ferdinand

A few weeks ago, I gave Franz Ferdinand's self-titled album a going-over and amongst the tracks on it, there was a song called The Dark Of The Matinee. I thought it was rather good myself. Actually, I said it was a work of art. So what've they done? They've hacked away most of the song's title and put it out as a single, that's what. Nothing to do with me guv'nor, I just review 'em. It's just one of those songs where everything fits together in a such a way that you think, "Well, I can't see what else they could do to make this one any better". It jigs along at a decent pace, it's unlike anything else in the Top 40 right now, it namechecks Terry Wogan and most important of all, it doesn't sound like Take Me Out II or even Darts Of Pleasure II. Fantastic stuff.

5 COLOURS IN HER HAIR

McFly

According to the Evening Standard amongst others, McFly are the future of pop music. Well, if being the future of pop music means songs that sound like Beach Boys meets Busted meets Electric Six's Gay Bar with a very early Beatles style ending, then McFly have it sewn up, in the bag and posted First Class to Top Of The Pops. While there's no denying this single is Fun with a capital F (and possibly a U and N too), it does get a bit annoying after a few listens and that's a shame, because as long as this single is lodged in the Top 10, this is going to be all over the radio like a dropped blancmange. Of course, it could just be that this song simply doesn't appeal to me in any way. Yeah, that's probably it. I think I'll let the rest of Britain get excited about it and move on to other things.

I DON'T WANT YOU BACK (not quite the full title, for reasons that will become very obvious very soon)

Eamon

The Daily Mail is going to absolutely love this one. All those people who kicked in their tellies when Bill Grundy went up against the Sex Pistols and lost are going to love this too. Not. What we have here is a nice, smooth soulful R&B track, you know, the sort of thing you hear at weddings and holiday camp discos, that sort of thing. The sort of thing the DJ puts on in order to clear the dancefloor of the rugrats that are still demanding The Cheeky Song after he's already had to play it three times. So the mums and dads are dancing and the kids have nipped off to see if they can play on the fruit machines without getting caught and Eamon starts singing. "Wow, what an emotional voice he has" thinks the assembled throng (does anybody know what a throng is exactly?), along with "He seems a little bitter towards his ex-girlfriend, I thought this was going to be a love song". Still, they carry on dancing and then the first chorus comes along. The adults stop dancing and look at each other thinking "Did he just say what I think he did?" and the kids come running back in because, well, they can hear rude words being sung and that has to be a good thing. What could previously be described as bitterness suddenly descends into all-out all guns blazing vitriol. The song's still schmoozing along as if nothing's happened and Eamon, bless his heart, is still singing with all the emotion he can muster, but in reality the song has become a musical scorched earth policy, complete with a barrage of swear words. Are they justified? On this ocassion, I think yes, they are. This is a reached-the-end-of-his-tether song and if you're going to sing about the complete and irreversible destruction of a relationship brought on by betrayal, this is one time where using these words makes sense. The problem is that the tune isn't actually very engaging. It's a nice idea, having a nice soothing tune coupled with these lyrics, but once you get over the ooh-look-rude-words factor, you're left with a tune that really needed as much thought put into it as the words obviously had. That said though, I'd like to hear a radio edit, unless there's some very clever editing the chorus is going to be purely instrumental.