Tim: I’ll be honest with you, Tom – not long after I pressed play on this I got bored and picked up my phone, and didn’t realise until the end of it that I’d missed a pretty good track. Don’t do that.
Tom: I tried. I genuinely tried. And then halfway through the final chorus, I absent-mindedly opened a new tab and looked up something that had crossed my mind.
Tim: Agh, this is so frustrating. See, I’m sure this is a good track, with individual parts that all work fine: the chorus has a lovely melody to it, verses flow along well enough, it doesn’t really do anything wrong, and every moment I’m listening I’m thinking “yeah, I like this”.
Tom: There’s some really good vocal work, too, like that falsetto in the last line of the chorus. (How much of that is live performance, and how much is digital trickery? These days, I guess it doesn’t matter.)
Tim: Sure, maybe it could do with something bigger when it comes back after the middle eight, because the lyrics really deserve it, but overall it’s fine. Except, I seem fundamentally unable to pay attention to it. I press play, I listen for a bit, and then I go back to Twitter. I stop myself, go back to the music, think “yes, this is definitely good”, and thirty seconds later I’ve opened up a new tab and am browsing some other website.
Tom: It’s not just you. For once, we’re in complete agreement: it’s a good song. It just doesn’t hold the attention, which to me is inexplicable.
Tim: And that really, really annoys me – because I like this! I really do! But I just can’t get myself to actually pay attention to it.