FADE

Solu Music

I suppose, now it’s getting warm, that the time of year is fast approaching when the record companies start bigging up their latest releases by putting dirty great big stickers on them screaming “European Top Hit”, “As Heard In Ibiza / Ayia Napa / Ampthill” or “Contains Awesome Remix By Scooter”. Yup, there’s no denying it, summer’s here and that’s my hay-fever sorted for the next few months then. Hooray. Still, on the bright side, if you’re going to have a summer anthem, you could do a lot worse than this. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday, for one thing. Anyway, the point is this – if you want a song that represents the arrival of summer as well as a news report about drought orders and newspaper front pages that scream the temperature at you in Fahrenheit because it’s a bigger number, you need something bright and breezy that you can dance to. The sort of thing you can play in the background at a barbecue to keep the kids happy while the chicken’s defrosting, in other words. Nothing too mental, something like Born Slippy would be right out because there’s no tune, and you don’t want to get fooled by the title alone otherwise you’ll be playing Feel Good Hit Of The Summer and that’s not really suitable for the under-fives. No, what you need is a jolly little track with some pianos chucked in (the legacy of Italo House, eh? Black Box, so much to answer for) and somebody to sing something… something… oh, who cares what’s she’s singing? Since when did songs like this sell because of their incisive and hard-hitting lyrics? It’s just another element of the song. Mind you, it was nice of them to invite a church organist along to play in the background, even if he doesn’t really contribute a great deal to the proceedings. To be honest, I quite like this one and I’m not going to apologise for it. It’s a simple, happy song and ought to do OK. Tsk, look what I’ve done, I’ve gone and jinxed it now by saying it’s good. I’ll never learn.

SO UNDER PRESSURE

Dannii Minogue

If you ask me and I’m sure you didn’t, Dannii Minogue generally makes more interesting music than Kylie Minogue. That’s not to say it’s always better, but she’s a bit more unpredictable. Let’s face it, she put out the godawful Put The Needle On It and then immediately followed it up with the really rather good I Begin To Wonder, so at least she’s a bit more interesting than Westlife, who of course always put out amazing singles one after the other and never release a duffer – and there I was thinking the heatwave hadn’t affected me. As far as this one goes, it’s not bad, it’s better than your average pop single, sounds a bit eighties, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not likely to be remembered as one of her finest singles. Ah well, never mind, could be worse.

ENJOY THE SILENCE

Lacuna Coil

Obviously, one or both of my regular readers will know that in my opinion, this is the greatest song ever written, so when somebody covers it they’d better do it right or there’ll be trouble. It starts pretty well, all very dark and gothic and gloomy (that’s a result so far) and then in come the guitars and… and… the quality doesn’t dip. This is a good sign, and the singers put plenty of oomph into their jobs and actually the end result is better than I was expecting. I’m a bit hesitant to describe this as emo, I don’t really know the band and I haven’t seen the video, but from what I can gather, if any of the band members have hairstyles resembling Phil Oakey circa 1981 then that’ll do for me. It’s as good as the version Mike Shinoda came up with, but the original is still the benchmark. Mind you, that is one hell of a benchmark.