UP ALL NIGHT

Matt Willis

How To End A Career Almost Before It Begins – announce that the singer of the song you’re about to review is from a boy or girl band. Go on, try it, pick one at random. Emma Bunton, for instance. Sounds fairly credible enough, doesn’t it? Now, you add “Ex-Spice Girl” before her name and the street cred flies into the ground like a dart because that brings up all sorts of things – Spiceworld: The Movie, for one thing. No wonder pop stars like to escape from their past, so here’s Matt Willis, ex of Busted… oops. Still, can’t hold that against him, we all make mistakes. I’m hardly Mr Perfect, when I was younger I once bought Falco’s Vienna Calling because I couldn’t find Rock Me Amadeus. Anyway, the point is, he’s moved on and perhaps we should too. If you can imagine what Busted (damn and blast, done it again) would sound like if they actually sat down trying to write proper songs instead of stuff for school discos, this is probably as close as it gets. It’s still pop-rock, but more grown-up than you’d expect and also a lot more… I don’t know, it just sounds older than it is. That’s it, it sounds like the sort of song Grandstand would play a few years back if they wanted to show a montage of motor racing clips, you know, breathtaking overtaking manoeuvres and high-speed crashes complete with an on-screen counter telling you how many times the car had cartwheeled before finally flattening a burger van half a mile away from the track. It’s not great, but it’s fun and that in itself has to be seen as a promising start. It’s just a shame that half the time it sounds like a computer’s doing the singing instead of him, but you can’t win them all.

IS IT ANY WONDER

Keane

<hype> This is Keane’s best single ever! I mean it. You put this next to anything on Hopes And Fears and it wipes the floor with every single track. </hype> Tell you what, let’s put this into some proper perspective, eh? If we’re going to compare it to other songs that Keane have done, it does stand out by a country mile. Because it sounds like it has guitars! Woo! Rock and roll (man)! It’s also slightly faster than their older stuff! Big wow. This single still fits into drivetime radio as neatly and as safely as their other material. The problem is, it might be faster and it might be brimming with guitar noises (apparently they're not the real thing), but they’ve forgotten to make this song interesting. Bit of a boo-boo, but one I thought was worth mentioning. However, the fact remains that this is their best song to date, so you never know, there might be better stuff on the album. “Where there’s life, there’s hope” and all that. Ah yes, life… perhaps not the right phrase to use there.

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE

Muse

Oi, Keane, get your lugholes round this. THIS is how you do it. You can almost guarantee that some hack somewhere is going to do an article on Muse and call it I Bet Muse Look Good On The Dancefloor after hearing this – the music press are so predictable. This is totally unlike anything Muse have done before and it’s great. The difference between Keane and Muse is that Muse did some great stuff before this too. On the evidence of this, it sounds like Matt Bellamy and friends got bored with the prog rock anthem approach, put on their dancing trousers and cheered themselves up. Good thing too if this is anything to go by, because this is that rare thing, a Muse single with a smile on its face. Not only that, you can dance to it too… if you want. Of course, just by liking it I’ve put the kiss of death on it and it’ll drop out of the Top 40 like a stone, so if I were you I’d get to the record shops the minute this comes out, seriously, it’s as good as that.