A day late due to “unavoidable technical difficulties” at their end, this week’s column sees me spouting forth on new releases from Oasis (a dissenting view), Turin Brakes (twiddle-dee-dee), Jennifer Lopez ft Fat Joe (a great sample overrides all other concerns), Black Eyed Peas (don’t phuck with my funk), Rob Thomas (it’s happy hour at Hooters!), Hot Hot Heat (are skinny ties the “bonce-boppers” of 2005?), Our Javine (formerly Poor Javine), New Order ft Ana Matronic (they have DOWNLOADED MY BRAIN!), Mylo (a little “prose-poetry” moment, for those of you who miss that sort of stuff round here), Stevie Wonder feat. En Vogue & Prince (oh, it’s a PUN – I missed that), Trick Daddy ft Ludacris (more dubious sex/confectionary metaphors) and Antony & The Johnsons (wrong choice of single, but swoonsome all the same).
Instant quiz! See if you can spot the two I wrote when I was a bit drunk, after the third consecutive “oh, just a quick one then” early evening session in the village pub with the usual suspects.
With seventeen – SEVENTEEN! – singles to review last week, I managed to knock out fourteen, before expiring from the effort of having to find fresh ways of saying “quite nice but nothing special”. As two of the singles were then dropped from the column altogether, I have no qualms in making their reviews available here.
As usual, I’ve also added all of this week’s reviews to my rolling archive (for those “show me a sample of your work” moments).
So Many Times – Gadjo (5)
Summery, uplifting vocal house for the smart-casual set, with Latin-influenced piano and percussion, that will probably find its way onto one of those Hed Kandi compilations before too long. Pleasant enough, but nothing that Masters At Work weren’t doing ten times better ten years ago.
Owner Of A Lonely Heart – Max Graham vs Yes (6)
Mmph, I’m calming down about this a bit now. Not quite the sacrilege which it first seemed to be, this is a reasonably sympathetic grafting of a rhythm track onto Yes’s Trevor Horn-produced 1983 hit, which you sense has been done by someone with some modicum of respect for the original. (Indeed, Graham has been quoted as saying that “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” is his favourite track of all time, hence this “tribute”.) There’s not much more to it other than some looping of the main guitar riff, which fits right into the Deep Dish/Bodyrockers idiom of the day, and a couple of extended bridge/breakdown sections. Actually, it’s the first of these two breakdowns which I take exception to: building the tension up and up and up, leading you to think that something really exciting is going to happen, and then… oh, it’s the second verse. Bit of a waste, really.
Coming up in a few days’ time: another collaborative panel-based capsule review project thingy, whose identity I am not yet at liberty to divulge. However, I can exclusively reveal that it involves Belgians.
troubled diva 