COOL

Gwen Stefani

No, no, no, this song is anything but cool. Gwen Stefani is better than this tat, in fact she’s wasted on songs like this. Give her songs like Hollaback Girl and What You Waiting For and she’ll do all sorts of vocal acrobatics to the point where sometimes it sounds like two totally different singers are appearing on the same track. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing you can end up with when a singer takes some time off from his / her band and goes solo for the first time. Some of them know exactly what they want to do and others need a bit of time to work out what they’re best at. Here’s an example. When Gary Barlow pushed the self-destruct button on Take That, a nation rejoiced. Then he started putting out middle-of-the-road pop on his own and rapidly disappeared. Robbie Williams, on the other hand… his first single didn’t appear on his Greatest Hits, and do you know why? It’s totally different to everything that followed, and it took him a fair few attempts to get his sound right – if Angels hadn’t done the business things could’ve ended up very different for him. That’s why this song is rubbish – Ms Stefani’s trying everything she can in an effort to find out what works best for her. Trouble is, any old fool could’ve sung this, it’s so flat and boring, nothing like her previous singles that, realistically, only she could’ve done. On this evidence, I’d say that songs capable of evoking memories of shoulder pads, big hair, filofaxes and horrid Tiffany / Starship / Belinda Carlisle type pop ballads are not the way to go. Not just for Gwen Stefani, but for anyone. I lived through all that once, I don’t want to again.

PRECIOUS

Depeche Mode

Anyone who’s familiar with this column knows full well that a new Depeche Mode single was always going to get a review sooner or later. Now, favourite band or not, a positive review was not going to be guaranteed, after all, their last really good album was Songs Of Faith And Devotion and that was twelve years ago. Not only that, their last new single (not counting the Enjoy The Silence remix) was an absolute shocker of a song – thankfully, they made it non-chart eligible so it’ll never appear in the singles chart books (went to the top of the Budget Albums Chart, though, so you could argue that they’ve finally managed to get a single to Number One, well done Mode). The opening isn’t overly encouraging, on the face of it it sounds very poppy, almost like Erasure when they’ve got their serious hats on, but once Dave Gahan starts crooning, something odd happens. It’s almost as if somebody’s shown Martin Gore the lyric booklets from Some Great Reward, Black Celebration and Violator and said “Look at what you wrote back then, there’s some great stuff here”. See, even when he does a love song, if Mr Gore injects a healthy dose of a) realism, b) doom and gloom or c) preferably both into what he writes he’s capable of writing some amazing stuff for Dave to sing. The last two albums didn’t have much of either of those and ended up sounding a bit bland in places, but my goodness he’s back on form here. Here are the first two lines – “Precious and fragile things need special handling - my God, what have we done to you?” That’s the way to start a song. The words are written ambiguously so you can put your own meaning to them which is even better, let the listener work it out for themselves. As for the tune, it may sound a bit poppy, but it’s warm and friendly – basically a little at odds with the lyrics, but don’t knock it because it works. It almost feels like virtually everything released after It’s No Good never happened, and that’s the highest praise I can give this song. Apparently the album’s even darker and grimmer than this. Great. Bring it on.