ALWAYS RIGHT BEHIND YOU

Zutons

The phrase "Best Zutons single ever" surely must rank up there with "most convenient limb to lose in the event of an accident", at least it does in my book. I'll be honest with you, I'm not a fan of theirs, and my dislike of their music has only been intensified recently. Not only did Mark Ronson churn out a cover of Valerie (which is nowhere near their best song), but the Great British public then went out and bought the damned thing in their thousands. It's things like that that make this song all the more frustrating. You see, it's actually rather good and not only that, it really is the best single they've ever released, but now that phrase actually means something. It's three and a bit minutes of knockabout glam rock-influenced fun and games, and if this had been around in 1972 it would've kicked Slade and T. Rex all over the park. However, that's where the problem lies. It's not Valerie. It doesn't even sound like Valerie. It doesn't even sound like the band that recorded Valerie. Even worse, Amy Winehouse doesn't sing on it. They don't stand a chance. However, despite all that I don't care what happens to it in the charts. I like this song, and considering the Zutons' previous form, that's no mean feat.

S.O.S.

Jonas Brothers

So, this is what mechanically recovered pop music sounds like. You know, when all the good ideas have already been filleted and all that's left is the giblets. If I was still at school, and therefore well within the Jonas Brothers' target audience, two thoughts would immediately spring to mind. Firstly, I'd be wondering why I was still at school when I was supposed to finish in 1990, and secondly I'd actually feel insulted that a song as bland as this was being directed towards my age group. This is entry-level pop music, nothing more, with zero in the way of long-term appeal and certainly not the sort of song I can imagine you'd be telling your friends you'd just downloaded. That's not to say this is a bad song as such, but it's such a non-event you have to wonder where the market is for this sort of thing. Having said all that, I'll probably be proven wrong and it'll be a huge hit and the Soundtrack To The Summer TM - and now I've predicted it'll be a hit that should just about guarantee that it won't be. Therefore, my work here is done.

THE RIP

Portishead

Ah, now here we've got a proper song. Portishead's new album is a rather bleak affair in places, but when the songs are as good as this who cares? Personally, I'm rather hoping they release Silence and / or We Carry On as singles too, but this will do very nicely thank you. For two minutes, it's very quiet and sedate - you've got a singer going on about white horses taking her away and a couple of guitars strumming away gently in the background, which sounds boring, doesn't it? Well, you'd be perfectly entitled to think that even though you'd be wrong, but once we get past the opening couple of minutes, all sorts of things happen. The song stays exactly the same, but it's played very differently. The guitars are chucked into the bin and to make up for it the tune's driven instead by a handful of keyboard stroke synthesizer things that sound as though they're older than the people playing them, and even though this is the point where the beat kicks in, it's not used as an excuse to speed things up and go wild. Like I said, the tune doesn't change one bit, it's purely down to the instruments that are playing it. If there are courses in how to put together a tune properly, this really ought to be required listening, it's that well done. Of course, it also helps that it's a decent song in its own right too.