WOMAN IN LOVE

Liz McLarnon

Yes, you may well be thinking, “Who?”. She was one-third of Atomic Kitten. Surely you remember them, they used to do almost half-decent pop tunes before Whole Again got them to Number One and then after that, it was blandness all the way until the band disintegrated, probably out of sheer boredom. So here’s the second ex-Kitten to try and hack it on her own (Jenny Frost crashed and burned last year) and she’s playing it safe. Very safe. You know how Atomic Kitten used to get hold of ancient songs, then gut them, fillet them, cover them in breadcrumbs and serve the remains to their adoring fans who’d probably never heard the originals (thereby having no idea just how shortchanged they were)? Well, if I said this was a cover of the ancient Barbra Streisand track that reached Number One in November 1980, would you be utterly amazed? You wouldn’t? Welcome to my world, it’s not such a bad place. So, where do I start on this? Well, the beginning’s as good a place as any, so here goes. The wailing-ish guitar at the start that manages to somehow lock itself down to playing two notes over and over to try and build up the suspense – nice. On the original version, the guitarist is trying to play a discernible tune – ah, those prehistoric musicians and their quaint Twentieth Century customs, eh? Mind you, that’s peanuts compared to what can only be described as The Most Obvious Drum Loop In The World Ever. It goes from start to finish almost completely uninterrupted and unchanged, apart from a couple of places where… well, let me put it this way, when the changes happen you can imagine the producer thinking “I wonder if it would sound better like this… hmmm, not bad… nah, I prefer the one we had before… let’s go back to that, I’ll delete those other bits later if I get the time”. The guitar and the drum loop are just the bits that stand out. Everything else on the song is purely functional, they serve a purpose, but nothing special happens. The best thing about this song is that this version doesn’t have Barry Gibb singing “I am a woman in love” on it. That always struck me as… wrong, especially as at the time of the original his hairstyle gave him the appearance (at least to me) of a fully-dressed lion with a medallion hanging round its neck. In a nutshell then, this single’s pretty uninspired and dull. In a CD player, it’s even worse.

JUST LIKE THE RAIN

Richard Hawley

This is an odd one, this is. Try imagining a gentle country music number mixed in with some of those jangly guitars the Smiths used to be good at. Now add a bloke singing about crying his eyes out while walking through the snow, thinking about his other half. Got you there, have I? This is one of those songs that’s better off heard than described. It might not be my sort of thing (bit too romantic for me – mind you, I’m about as romantic as a breeze-block), but I can tell when a song’s been done well and this sounds beautiful. In fact, I’m going to recommend you listen to it and make your own decision. Can’t say fairer than that, can I?

FRIEND OR FOE

t.A.T.u.

This is the one that Sting appears on. That last sentence should’ve frightened away the more easily put-off among us, and now I’ll continue. He doesn’t sing a note. No, really. He turns up, plays the bass for a few minutes, gets in the taxi and nips off to Ikea and all this before lunchtime. What a guy. He’ll be having breakfast at Milliway’s next. As for the rest of the song, let’s be honest, it’s standard issue t.A.T.u., which is no bad thing really. Even a standard t.A.T.u. song beats seven different shades out of your average pop song and this is no different. The nice thing is that, even after two singles, there’s still better stuff on the album and if Cosmos or Perfect Enemy isn’t released, I won’t be very happy. Yeah, that’s told ’em.