February 2013 – The Circus

Oh, I like Clown. The tune’s a bit slow, but the lyrics are where it’s at. Animal’s good as well – Conor Maynard’s keeping up his 100% strike rate of decent tunes; impressive going there. Get Up is an OK song, but the video is amazing. It’s like a duck version of Death Wish, in which a group of mallards take it upon themselves to remove the criminal element from a housing estate. I don’t know who came up with the idea, but it’s clearly the work of a genius.

Rewind’s not bad, even if the chorus does threaten to segue into Heart’s Alone at times. I don’t think much of the tune for Thrift Shop, but I like the story behind the lyrics, which is “other rappers boast about how much they spend on stuff, so I’m going to do a song about how little I spend on clothes.”

Oh. Oh dear. What the hell is Dizzee Rascal playing at? Bassline Junkie is terrible, and it also seems to be loaded with naughty words purely for the hell of it. Now then, it’s been a while since I last heard from Fall Out Boy, and I’m not entirely convinced this song was worth the wait. White Noise though, now there’s a decent song. More like this, please.

Oh for goodness sake, even Bruno Mars has gone down the “one singer, one musical instrument and that’s it” route now. What is this, the latest craze or something? I note he also ends his video the same way John Legend concluded proceedings for Ordinary People; by picking up his drink and walking away from the piano. There’s a car in Gabrielle Aplin’s video but it’s definitely not down to product placement. For one thing, it’s a Volvo that’s probably older than she is and for another, it breaks down. It’s a nice, folky song and it’s roughly seven and a half thousand times better than Harlem Shake, which is basically just three minutes of random noise. I Could Be The One, meanwhile, is another example of a reasonable song given a fantastic video.