ALCOHOLICS UNANIMOUS

Art Brut

It’s not easy singing along to a song if even the song’s singer isn’t singing along. Yeah, try saying that after a night in the Theatre District. Actually, it’s not so much a song, more a bloke saying what he thinks while an indie band plays behind him, and when I say "saying," that’s what Eddie Argos does. He doesn’t sing, he doesn’t even rap, he just talks. The fact that it rhymes and is spoken in time to the music almost feels like a happy accident, and do you know what, it works. It might be a gimmick, and his vocal skills wouldn’t get him past the first round of auditions for The X-Factor, but it’s different. Of course, it also helps if the song itself is alright, and this one is. There’s even a Making Of movie for the accompanying video, which normally I’d disapprove of in the strongest possible terms. I mean, seriously, that Diet Coke advert with Duffy is bad enough (and what the hell is she wearing? She only needs a bag marked SWAG and you’ve got Burglar Smurfette), but the Making Of is a real finger-down-the-throat Happy-Eater-logo experience. For this Making Of however, the niceties are out the window and hurrah for that. Watch the video, watch the Making Of, then buy the song, that’s my advice.

SHOW ME LOVE

Steve Angello and Laidback Luke featuring Robin S

Well, this isn’t very good, but it could’ve been. The original’s something of a classic, so you’d have thought they’d be onto a winner. Yes... you’d have thought it, wouldn’t you? The tune’s been updated, all the vocals are still intact, but whoever was playing around with the drum loops needs a very stern ticking off. It’s as though the person responsible couldn’t decide what the beat should be, so they tried everything, and ended up with this rather sorry mess. Infinity shows how updating can work, this shows how it can fail.

UNTOUCHABLE

Girls Aloud

Hold on a second... what’s going on here? A seven-minute Girls Aloud song? And it’s not a remix, but a proper song? Pop bands just aren’t supposed to do this, you know. I mean, I can remember A-ha’s The Sun Always Shines On TV running for well over five minutes, and Radiohead’s Paranoid Android soared past six... mind you, one of those songs was definitely poppier than the other... I think. Pop bands generally don’t do epic songs, do they? Press play, song starts, la la la, chorus, la la la, chorus, instrumental break, chorus, finish, start the car, done. Three to four minutes, tops. That’s it. This, however, is not an epic song. Not by any stretch of the imagination is this an epic song, it’s just a pop song that happens to run for six minutes and forty-one seconds and that’s how they get away with it. There’s no overly lengthy pauses or unnecessary instrumental breaks or anything like that, it just so happens that this particular song has a little more to say and a bit more time to say it in, but they’ve got a heck of a nerve fading the song out at the end. Apparently 6:41 isn’t enough time to fit in a proper ending, but never mind that, at the end of the day (which is what it feels like once the song’s finally finished) this is comfortably the best single off the album... and that probably means that now I’ve said that it’ll be their first proper single to miss the Top 10. Now you’ll know who to blame.