January 2010 – Do It Again

There’s a lot to be said for music videos that feature the band members standing in awkward poses next to cars that are parked so badly in the middle of a deserted street they may as well have crashed there, but none of it would be complimentary. Thankfully, Ego has a better song than video, but it probably had to. Next, Florence and the Machine turf out an underwhelming and unnecessary cover of Candi Staton’s You Got The Love… mind you, Florence has finally corrected the grammar in the title, so marks awarded for effort there. Riverside is a noisy, bleepy pile of rubbish. Data Records used to be so much better than this, you know. That just leaves Replay for this week, and despite not having a huge amount of competition it’s still comfortably the best song of the week.

Broken Heels is an enjoyable enough tune, but the video is, not to put too fine a point on it, preposterous. And why is Alexandra Burke nearly playing American Football in her video when her home country plays a version of football that’s arguably more widely played around the world? Anyway, moving on… Plan B sings Stay Too Long like a man who’s not entirely sure whether he’s got a decent singing voice or not and is finding out as the song progresses. Tell you what though, it’s a great song; his vocals actually help propel the song along and when he goes into the rap at the end the whole thing builds up into a remarkably angry finish. All that fury, that passion, that invention… looks like Plan B used up this week’s quota because Don’t Stop Believin’ (yes, the Journey song from last month) is just… well, there. If nothing else, it shows what a good job Journey did when they recorded it. Fireflies… nah. I listened to it, that’s my job done.

One Shot – aptly titled. Give me a shotgun, throw the CD in the air and one shot would be all I’d need. It briefly threatens to go uptempo, but decides midtempo’s a much safer place to be – it sounds to me like almost as much effort went into the dance routine in the video as it did into making the song.