October 19, 2009
Posted Fri 23 Oct 2009 1:23PM BST by Reviews Editor in Recommenders
Welcome to Yahoo! Music's whistle-stop guide to what's happening in music this week. Every seven days in Recommenders we check-out the latest tracks, downloads, leaks, links and video clips from the corners of every genre and let you know whether they're worth getting out of bed for. Today, JAIME GILL puts the microscope up to JLS, ATLAS SOUND, ALPHABEAT, MIIKE SNOW, KASABIAN and CHERYL COLE.It's "X-Factor" season, so this week's Recommenders is dominated by good old-fashioned pop. Well, old-fashioned pop, anyway. First up are last year's show runners-up, JLS (pictured), with "EVERYBODY IN LOVE", a pleasant but predictable hands-in-the-air anthem which could easily have been a 5ive album track eleven years ago. You'd probably find the video more pleasurable - certainly, more work seems to have gone into the boys' biceps than the song - but we've been blocked from embedding it here. How encouraging that even in these difficult economic times, the record industry is in such rude health that it needn't promote its artists.
One video we can show you is this one for ATLAS SOUND's twinklingly lovely new single, "WALKABOUT", which has nothing to do with any record label and everything to do with Animal Collective's Noah Lennox and Deerhunter chief Bradford Cox. One of the many revolutionary waves unleashed by the internet has been creative, allowing anyone with a laptop and an imagination to create their own music, short films or videos. True, much is amateurish rubbish, but every once in a while you find a gem like this, lovingly assembled by a 16-year-old Canadian from readily available archive footage which perfectly matches the song's chiming, nostalgia-glazed glow. Utterly, utterly charming.
Of course, charm is a treacherous thing, and can quickly turn queasy on you. Just one year ago, ALPHABEAT's relentlessly sunny retro-pop sounded adorable and kittenish, but now it's soured into kitschy, irksome affectation. The tinny, fizzy production of "THE SPELL" is borrowed wholesale from Stock, Aitken & Waterman, but lacks the killer tune that much-maligned trio could once churn out in their sleep. It's like being harangued at a children's birthday party by a seven year old who has been persuaded by indulgent parents that they are cute, when in fact they're profoundly irritating.
Tracks like "The Spell" make it easy to take the pop song for granted, to forget what a ceaselessly miraculous thing it is. But then along comes something as simple but perfectly realised as the new MIIKE SNOW single and you recognise the joys of verse/chorus/middle eight are still vivid 60 years after their invention. Just listen to the way that the plaintive, Coldplay-tinged verse of "BLACK AND BLUE" gives way to the silvery Prince-like sleekness of the chorus, then back again, and gloriously back again, and be thrilled and grateful.
One invention which hasn't proved so enduring is KASABIAN. When they first emerged with their Us Vs The World gang mentality, and fusion of big beat dance and bullish rock, they seemed more interesting than your average indie band, and more likely to develop in interesting ways. Sadly, five years later they've barely developed at all: despite a brilliant descending guitar line from Serge Pizzorno, "UNDERDOG" is all swagger and no soul, the sound of a band coasting.
Back to "X-Factor", and all the fuss about CHERYL COLE's "Did she? Didn't' she?" miming on the show has distracted from the more pressing question of why the vastly famous nation's sweetheart hasn't been able to persuade anyone to give her a better song than "FIGHT FOR THIS LOVE" to launch her solo career? It's not bad, just a little dated and nondescript, with a desperately uninspiring vocal from Cole at its heart, so gossamer thin you feel like it will blow away if you breathe too hard nearby. Given her profile it will probably be a huge hit, but so forgettable that Cheryl may struggle to even mime it in one year's time.
