BIOLOGY

Girls Aloud

It’s different, I’ll give it that. Trouble is, I’ve got no idea what the songwriters were trying to achieve here (well, aside from a Number One). It’s certainly not a song that requires five singers, it’s nowhere near as complex as that. It all starts off in a watered-down blues style, bluesy guitar, bluesy piano, all very interesting and certainly miles away from Sound Of The Underground. Unfortunately, Girl Aloud No.1 starts singing (don’t ask me who, they’re interchangeable aren’t they?) and, by her Lady Sings The Blues attempt, proves what a competent pop singer she is. After that, things get a bit messy. The song turns on a fifty-pence (ie. not quite as smoothly as a sixpence) into a fairly generic pop effort and it’s all a bit “Here we go again” after that. In fact, this is exactly the sort of song Erasure were doing back in the late eighties. Now, Erasure were pretty big back then, so you might think that’s a complement. I haven’t finished – it’s also exactly the sort of song they’d have left gathering dust on the albums. Of course, the bluesy bit gets crowbarred back in around halfway through in case you missed it at the start, but although the end result is indeed slightly different to your average pop song, it sounds like a missed opportunity. They’ve done a lot better than this, but on the other hand they also did I’ll Stand By You and at least this is better than that.

BURN THE WITCH

Queens of the Stone Age

Amazing what you can do with just guitars and drums if you only use a bit of imagination. It’s one of those songs that goes bong rather than bing, and at one point even the guitars are wailing in discontent. I like it. If this had come out for Halloween, it would’ve been huge. It still deserves to be a hit, but who’s got the bottle to play it on daytime radio? Go on Horizon, you know it makes sense.

HOSPITAL FOOD

David Gray

I can imagine this being huge on Radio 2. It’s easy listening but with a full, rich sound to it to keep it just the right side of bland and forgettable. Trouble is, this sort of song is David Gray singing to the converted, I can’t see it winning him any new fans. It didn’t win me over, for a start - mind you, I hated White Ladder and he’s done alright for himself without my help thus far so good luck to him. If it helps, this beats the living daylights out of anything on that album. Unfortunately, so does The Living Daylights by A-ha, so that’s not much of a recommendation.

PROTOTYPE

Rex the Dog

Sometimes it pays to remix other people’s songs. If it wasn’t for the fact that Rex the Dog (who I’d previously never heard of) turned out two storming remixes of some Basildon band’s Photographic last year, chances are I’d probably have skipped over this one, switched off my television set and gone out and reviewed something else instead. But there it is, he’s done a song of his own and encouraged by what he’d done earlier I thought I’d check this out for you. You see, my huge and loyal army of readers (hello to you both), sometimes I spoil you. By the sound of things, Photographic wasn’t a fluke as it’s turned out. From start to finish, there’s always something going on here and it’s usually stark raving bonkers. This isn’t your average thumping-beats-poppy-keyboards-get-some-female-singer-in-who-happens-to-be-passing-by-chuck-it-out-on-the-next-Clubland-compilation type song, no by jingo there’s some thought been put into this. For starters, there’s no singer. Brave move, that, it means no vocal loops. He's mad. It’s all down to whether the tune can cut it on its own, and stone me* if it doesn’t (* I’d prefer it if you didn’t). It’s one of those dance tracks that’s repetitive, but it doesn’t matter because the time flies by. It doesn’t even matter that, for the first thirty seconds, it’s always threatening to turn into Daft Punk because the other five and a half minutes more than make up for that. Smashing, simple as that.