ONLY THIS MOMENT

Royksopp

Well, this year’s just been full of surprises so far. Decent albums from Lemon Jelly and Garbage, half-decent singles from the likes of Moby – and now this. I didn’t like Royksopp’s last album, but I suspect I was one of very few people that didn’t. Fair enough, it was meant to be mellow and relaxing, but there was very little there to interest me. The thinking person’s elevator music, in other words. Now this, on the other hand, has a lot more going for it. It goes “bleep” and “blip” a lot and it’s got a really strange beat to it – I can imagine DJs playing it wondering just how the hell their clientele are going to dance to this. In fact, do you know what, I’ve just worked out what this song reminds me of – Sweet Harmony by the Beloved, especially when the bloke starts singing. It’s not a rip-off by any means, but the two songs could’ve been separated at birth. Good thing too, Sweet Harmony’s a great song, and although this doesn’t quite scale those giddy heights it’s still well worth the place in the Top 10 that it deserves but probably won’t get. Not that that means anything though, my previously fragile confidence in the singles chart has been shot to pieces. Letting Crazy Frog get to Number One was a colossal mistake, keeping him there is downright criminal.

TECHNOLOGIC

Daft Punk

As my huge and loyal army of readers will both be well aware, I have a bit of an issue when it comes to Daft Punk. Their reputation seems to far exceed their ability, to put it bluntly. They’re capable of very good music, but they’re also capable of some spectacularly lazy stuff when they can’t be bothered – particularly their remix of Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out, which consisted of the original song, a few squelchy noises and precious little else. So what are the chances of this not being rubbish? Actually, pretty good for a change. The song starts with a speeded up voice basically describing in the briefest of terms what you can do with computers these days. “Write it, cut it, paste it, save it, load it, check it, quick – rewrite it” – there’s about twenty other lines like that and this is how it goes all the way through, and it could just be me being old enough to remember obscure stuff like this, but it’s said so quickly and there’s so much of it that I wanted the very last line to be “…ever givin’, cool fizzin’ Pepsi”. If it had been, I’d have recommended this song just for the sheer cheek of it, but it’s actually a good tune – a hell of a lot more effort went into making this than Robot Rock by the sound of things. One slight drawback, it goes on about a minute too long, but considering Robot Rock lasted five minutes when there was only enough material to realistically sustain one, by Daft Punk’s standards, this song has been fully defragmented and optimised. See, I can write about computers too.

SO GOOD

Rachel Stevens

She’s singing the first verse and I’m thinking “This reminds me of something”, and then she sings “it’s you, you, you” and suddenly I’m tempted to sing the “doo-doo-doo doo-doo-doo” bit from Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf – luckily for anyone in earshot I didn’t, but you try it, it fits perfectly. This song along with Some Girls is enough to make me forgive Rachel Stevens for the desperate Sweet Dreams My L.A. Ex. I really hated that song, which just shows how good this one is and make no mistake, this is a finely crafted little pop gem. Pop music for grown-ups, that’s what this is, it’s not manic, it doesn’t play up to the cameras, it just gets on with its job (namely to produce a good song) and then starts the car and drives off home. If only all pop music was as good… but then, the law of averages does say that for every Rachel Stevens there must be a Geri Halliwell. Rather puts the mockers on that idea, then.