November 2012 – Revelry

Oh, Wonder’s good. It’s very, very good. In fact, it’s just as good as Hottest Girl In The World isn’t – that sounds like JLS impersonating Justin Timberlake, and not even coming close. After three club stompers, it’s something of a shock to hear Labrinth doing an out-and-out ballad, but hell’s bells, he does a good job here.

Can You Hear Me is as mad as a box of frogs, but again, I like this one. Come to think of it, 2012’s turning out to be a surprisingly good year for pop music, at least from my perspective. This is an entirely unexpected development; I really thought all the properly decent stuff would be struggling to get anywhere near the Top Ten thanks to the radio stations’ policy of playing the same bloody songs every half hour. Anyway, Candy – in which Robbie Williams does a straightforward pop song for the first time in ages and gets a deserved Number One for his efforts.

Rita Ora’s single – meh. Misha B’s single – better. As for the Wanted, it’s another good song with a decidedly “nothing is quite as it appears” video.

Love Is Easy is an unashamedly happy song with an unashamedly happy video; could’ve done with losing the guitar solo, mind you. About twenty seconds into Ho Hey I became heartily sick of the “ho hey” chant that permeates the song, but unfortunately there was another two minutes twenty seconds to go after that. Oh well, at least there’s The Power Of Love… oh, it’s not the Huey Lewis song, it’s the Frankie Goes To Hollywood one. I can’t win at the moment, can I? Still, it’s a good rendition and that’s what matters. Now then, Little Mix’s song starts with a music box juxtaposed with a heart monitor – honestly, how many times have we heard that before? That’s the best part of the song, which is a shame, but you can’t have everything. Bruno Mars’s latest has a “Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be the Police circa 1979” feel to it. Not bad, but heard it all before. Do you know what, if one person sang Little Things it would be a brilliant song. No, seriously – the lyrics are heartfelt, realistic and down-to-earth and the tune is nothing but a single guitar. The problem is that there are five people in One Direction and they all have to have a turn at the microphone. Five people all singing the same love song? That’s just wrong. They sing it well enough, but the video shows them in the recording studio, smiling and grinning as if it was just another track on the album, which I suppose it was. No, it should’ve been sung by one person who believed every word he or she was singing and then we’d have had something very special here.