Tom: Right, a word of advice before this one: just watch it. Sit back, put it on full screen, and watch it. Don’t read the rest of this. Go. Do it now. I’ll wait.
Tom: It’s not really a notable song – it’s a nice twangly bit of guitar and some well-meaning lyrics – but like, say, all of OK Go’s music, it’s completely redeemed by the video. I simply couldn’t help breaking into an enormous grin along with him.
Tim: You’re right about the smile – it just sort of happened with me. Awww.
Tom: Our Doctor Who correspondent, Gary, adds: “That’s just CCTV footage of Eccleston waking up, speeded up 50x. His alarm goes off at 7 but he’s not even vertical till twenty past Jeremy Kyle.”
Tim: I’d love it if I woke up like that every day, although probably not slowed down to 1/50 of the speed.
Tom: And that seems to be real-time footage of Christopher Eccleston: he’s not in slow motion, he’s just that good an actor. Anyway, the song’s re-released on download only today.
The lead singer’s wearing a lab coat in the video?
Tim: Swedish band, had a vague hit in the dance area over here a few years back with ‘Temple of Love‘.
Tom: So the lead singer’s wearing a lab coat in the video, and the album’s called “Big Science”? That sounds promising.
Tim: Yes, and for the most part it’s bloody awesome. And regarding the lead singer: he’s off of Sweden’s Popstars.
Tom:I’m actually finding very little wrong with this. Bit of a clichéd “talky bit in the middle before the bridge”, but it’s made up for by BEARDED BACKING SINGER.
Tim: Doesn’t he look absolutely terrifying? It’s amazing.
Tom: It’s even got a dum-dee-dee-da at the end! Hear this, Robyn? THIS is how “Dancing On My Own” should have been. It’s a textbook Swedish pop song, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not going to be stuck in my head or anything, but I’d be happy with this popping up on shuffle.
Tim: As an aside, that whole album‘s pretty good if you want to check it out at some point.
Tim: Just played them chorus after chorus, and yes, I concede a similarity. Not so much that it’s the same song, though, but yes there is quite a resemblance. The one thing that does really annoy me about the album, though, is the massive similarity between Singing in my Car and Kings of Tomorrow.
“Shoddily produced, cynically designed rubbish.” – Tom / “Fantastic.” – Tim
Tim: The X Factor started up again last week. Question: when you think ‘X Factor’, what are the next two words that pop into your head?
Tom: “Not again”?
Tim: That’s right: ‘Voiceover Man’. Because the show would be NOTHING without his ‘IT’S TIME. TO FACE. THE MUSIC.’ and various other shouty bits. But did you know that voiceover work isn’t all he does? Oh, no.
Tom: Oh no. No, no, no. No, I’m not watching that.
Tim: Now first off it should be pointed out that this is very definitely not a bringing-all-the-boys-to-the-yard milkshake – it’s a nice tasty innocent frothy milkshake, with fruit or chocolate or some other yummy stuff in it. But, well, we’ve got to shake it. And shake it we will.
Tom: I can’t even get past one second of this. Why? Because it’s wrong on several levels. And I don’t mean that in a laughing, ‘ha ha this is wrong’ way, I mean in a ‘this is contributing to the decline of civilisation’ way. It’s a jingle, a commercial radio jingle, three soul-destroying minutes long. Every second of this is an advert, and you’re willingly listening to it.
Tim: The thing (that shouldn’t really need saying) about this is that it’s not really a music track that they’ve come up with a dance for. It’s a collection of dance moves with music added later. That’s definitely not a bad thing – YMCA, the Cha-Cha Slide and the Macarena were all very enjoyable, and we all look forward to the wedding DJ putting on the Timewarp. So: what’s the dance like?
Tom: I don’t care. Every viewer we send their way is contributing to some despicable advertising executive going ‘ha ha, look at all the people who’ve watched this, we should do this again.’ It’s shoddily produced, cynically designed rubbish.
Tim: It’s fantastic. Lengthy, but that’s not a problem – part of the fun of knowing the Saturday Night routine is smirking quietly at the people that don’t, but decide to have a go anyway and then desperately try to work out why the hell they seem to be a beat out of time with everyone else. Especially since, in this song, he tells you what to do for most of it, so you’ll be able to get together with others in the know and laugh at how everyone else must be real morons.
Tom: “Hello, this is Peter Dickson. I’m not in at the moment, but whatever it is I’ll do it.”
Tim: Best of all: it also teaches you how to make a milkshake! So we have smugness and cookery tips all in one – what else do you need?
Tom: A Molotov cocktail and the address of whichever PR company put this abomination together.
Tim: IT’S TIME. TO DANCE. AND I WILL BE…
Tom: Laughing merrily as Advertising, fifth horsemen of the apocalypse, rides over the blood-soaked hillside with his Scythe-o-Matic 6000 glistening in the red, swollen sunlight of the end times?
Tim: …DANCING. You know, you’ve really developed a snarky side recently.
Tom has just discovered how to be a complete dick at karaoke.
Tom: Taylor Swift’s new single leaked online the other week, and was swiftly released properly in response. It’s just hit the US Billboard charts, and no doubt it’ll be over on these shores sooner or later; the official video just came out, too.
In related news, I have just discovered how to be a complete dick at karaoke. Here is the karaoke backing track for Love Story by Taylor Swift: your challenge is to sing You Belong With Me over the top of it. Provided you nail the key change at the end, and can deal with the harmony singer on the backing track throwing you off, they fit perfectly.
Tim: Oh, you and your… you-ness. Good work. You been doing karaoke?
Tom: If by “karaoke” you mean “singing along too loud while wearing headphones” then yes. The two songs have the same structure and same chords.
The new one’s got roughly the same structure, but then so does every schlager song in existence. At least it sounds a bit different, even if it’s the same “oh look, we’re in love, and despite some setbacks we’re still in love at the end” that describes most of her songs.
Tom: Not surprising – they’re by the same producer.
Tim: Do we need to bother reviewing Mine? It’s absolutely nothing special at all: if people liked Love Story and You Belong With Me they’ll like this as well, and if they didn’t they won’t. I think we should leave the summing up for YouTube commenter MoonfulBlue, who seems to live in her own little world of fluffy bunnies and pink clouds, but has an appropriate take on Taylor Swift’s music:
‘I love how Taylor’s songs always talk about things in life that could actually happen and they don’t talk about drugs/sex/violence and instead, love is in place.’
Tim: You have almost certainly not heard Ik Ben Verliefd (Sha-la-lie) by Sienke, the rather jolly and pleasant Dutch entry to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest that entirely failed to qualify for the final. This is not important; what is important is that you now hear the cover of it by Swedish dansband Drifters, which is even more jolly and even more pleasant, to the extent of being utterly delightful.
Tom: Oh, that deserves to be played at every wedding disco in Sweden. Does Sweden have wedding discos?
Tim: I think if any country can do a good wedding disco, that country is Sweden.
Tom: It’s proper 80s-Eurovision, that is. It’s even got the plinky-plonky piano improvisation going on in the background. But it was rightly rejected – the contest isn’t about that any more. (Are you listening, BBC?)
Tim: That deserves repeating. DEAR BBC: EUROVISION IS ABOUT DECENT MUSIC. NOT PETE SHITTING WATERMAN.
“It’s stuck in my head, and I think it sounds like a CBBC theme tune.”
Tom: Here’s an odd one for you. This is a 2008 cover of U96’s 1991 hit Das Boot – which was itself a reworking of the theme from the 1981 German submarine movie. I bring this to you for two reasons: one, because it’s stuck in my head, and two, because I think it sounds startlingly like the theme tune from CBBC’s Incredible Games and I want to know that I’m not crazy.
Tim: Oooookay…
Tim: Don’t worry, you’re not crazy – they do sound quite similar. Dance remixes of movie themes are tricky things, and I sometimes get a bit nervous before listening to them. When they’re done right, and convey the same tone as the original piece, they can be brilliant (see Tiësto’s Pirates, DJ Sakin’s Braveheart, Airbase’s The Rock).
Tom: You’re right about all those except Tiesto’s Pirates, where all he’s done is create an entirely new song and then jam a messed-up version of He’s A Pirate in there somewhere. The great thing about all those tracks, though, is that if you don’t like one particular mix – the vocals in Sakin’s Braveheart really annoy me, for example – there’ll be another one along in a minute.
Tim: On the other hand (which is, unfortunately, a much larger hand), they can be absolutely horrendous. One example is DJ Stef’s version of Titanic, where the guy shouting ‘Freeze’ as a vocal really doesn’t help.
Tom: You know, it used to be that aspiring dance producers (or, in other words, “teenage kids on their parents’ computer with a pirated copy of FruityLoops”) had to go out of their house with a CD, attract the attention of a DJ, prove they were half-decent, and steadily work their way up the ranks. Now all they have to do is pick a vaguely popular song, remix it badly, quickly jam a video together, lob it up onto YouTube where it’ll be played in low-bitrate mono to most users, and presto: half a million listeners.
Damn kids. Get off my lawn.
Tim: Das Boot 2008, I think, belongs nicely in the first group, although I don’t get the counting to ten bit. U96’s had ‘one, two, three, techno’, which made a vague sort of sense (I’d have preferred ‘eins, zwei, drei’ but that’s just me), whereas this just counts to ten and then… nothing. Come to think of it, it’s a bloody odd cover – aside from the same source material, they’re quite different. The U96 version is much darker, even though that’s a weird way to describe a dance tune, what with all the clanking noises*, and it has far more vocal. If Guenta K. hadn’t used the small amount of vocal that he did, it would just be another redoing of the theme music, focusing almost exclusively on just the bit of the theme that people know with just enough background variation to keep it interesting, and it would probably be better for it.
* I am well aware that this is an appalling word to use to describe it, but I honestly can’t really think of a better one, and I think it describes it well enough for you to know what I mean.
The good thing about this blog is that we can be all judgmental.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T9JXLBI_KQ
Tim: Following your Vengaboys comeback song, you may be tempted to listen to the single that marks Ace of Base’s return. If so, here it is.
Tom: That is a textbook Ace of Base song, isn’t it? I was expecting a ‘Don’t Turn Around’ somewhere in there.
I think the problem I had with the Vengaboys comeback is the same as the one I have now with this Ace of Base comeback. And the Aqua one, now I think of it. They’re all album tracks. If they’ve been away for this long, they’ve had years and years to come up with something absolutely brilliant. Instead, it just sounds like they’ve taken something from the rejects bin of their last album.
Tim: Now you mention it, that seems to be the same with most comebacks. Aside from Take That (who I think were the first of recent times, and whose success is probably largely to blame for the recent spate), I don’t think I can think of an artist/group that has actually done well.
A lot of them probably think that all their old fans are out there, and that once news gets around they’re coming back the fans will lap up everything they can throw at them. They can therefore put out a vaguely good single with a promise that an album will forthcoming and assume it’ll be fine. The problem is, of course, that it isn’t, and if a vaguely good single doesn’t sell because the fans feel cheated there’s no way an album will.
You might get a few gigs out of it, or a full tour if you’re lucky, but no more.
Tom: Let’s not forget: Take That’s second comeback, this time with a certain Mr. Williams, is on the cards. Admittedly “Greatest Day” was pretty damn good – if they can pull it off twice that it basically means that Gary Barlow is the greatest songwriter of modern times, which is not really something I’m comfortable with saying.
Tim: This Ace of Base one is like so many – no real effort. It’s not particularly bad – catchy enough, with a decent hook – but there’s just nothing to get excited about. The chorus always feels like a not very good post-bridge chorus, and isn’t enough to make me want more. To have a better chance of success, artists should write a whole album (or even just an EP) and then choose the good songs off it to release, because they’d then have a good idea of what the overall quality of the work would be, and we’d have a proper idea of what we could expect.
That’s not particularly realistic, of course, given the much increased time and effort it would involve, but it might help. I don’t know – the good thing about a blog like this is that we can be all judgmental without having to pretend we know anything about the music business at all.
Tim: Here’s a lovely summery bit of dance music for you from a Romanian. More than a little reminiscent of ATB, but in a good way.
Tom: You’re right, that’s a perfectly competent bit dance track. Nothing wrong with that. It’s also a fine example of the theory that if you want to film a cheap video very quickly and your vocal talent is female and attractive, put her in a bikini on a beach and you’re sorted.
Tim: Don’t forget the nicely ripped guys for the singer to, um, interact with. Or, in the case of Sunblock, a car they can get all soapy with.
But why does everyone who’s against the sky in the video – the guys with the ice cream at 1:52, the people embracing at 2:19 – have white halos around their heads? Maybe it’s because I’ve just finished reading Scott Pilgrim, but I think there’s something sinister going on there.
Tim: Hmm. I’m going to say that the halos are there because it’s actually a musical version of Sixth Sense, and the big twist, to be revealed in her next video, is that the guy who saved her life and gave her mouth to mouth is also dead. Anyway, as is traditional with such dance songs, the lyrics mean absolutely nothing whatsoever, although I think the line ‘It’s just the meaning of being alone’ does give extra credence to my theory, especially since her singing it coincides with the first appearance of the life-saving corpse.
The first mainstream song about female masturbation since “I Touch Myself”.
Tim: So Alexandra Burke’s bringing out her new single in two and a half weeks, and the video’s so ridiculously gay it’s quite likely this song’ll be the new Torchwood theme.
Tim: The music starts off entirely cack, with a trademark Alexandra moment of self-doubt having everybody else’s name shouted out first*, but then the chorus lands and you feel you should be in Hawaii surrounded by coconuts and pineapples, and it’s rather catchy. The rest of the song improves as a whole, and I think it’s a good’un.
But dear lord, the video… It’s just…I really don’t know. I have absolutely no clue what logical thought process could possibly have led to this as an idea for a music video. It’s not bad, yet nor is it good, and it sure as hell isn’t average. On your standard scale of quality, it seems to defy placement.
* This is the one thing that really annoyed me about Bad Boys, which was otherwise a ruddy marvellous effort. That cock Flo Rida had only a few rapping lines and wasn’t the lead artist, yet it started by him yelling ‘FLO RIDA! Alexandra…’ Nob. And I know RedOne’s good and all that (*cough* Darin *cough*), but since when did the producer ever get a shout out?
Tom: Haha. This is terrible. I mean, there’s nothing particularly bad about it musically, but it sounds like someone took the backing of Agadoo, jazzed it up a bit, and then got Ranking Roger to do a bit of Jamaican sort-of-rap at the start like in mostly-forgotten mid-90s Pato Banton hit Bubblin’ Hot.
Also, as soon as you realise the lyrics are one giant sexual metaphor, the whole song makes sense:
“Oh, here I go, drip droppin’ way down low
You’re ’bout to miss
Winding to this
Don’t make me start without you”
Er, anyone under 12 probably shouldn’t read that last paragraph. Not that they’ll understand it anyway. Actually, let me rephrase: don’t let your parents read that last paragraph, it’ll just be awkward.
Tim: I hadn’t actually looked at the lyrics, and I’m a little disturbed. Not by them, but by you and your choice of lyrics to display the metaphor. You could have had
Body like a weapon that’ll make you go boom
Get like a drum I’ll make you go…boom
or, even more so,
You’re the only one and I’m all on my back
The only one I want on my back
— but no. You chose drip droppin’ way down low. Seriously, man, what’s the matter with you?
Tom: Because all the others are generic, all the others sound like the vague comments made in every other song. There’s no other explanation for that particular verse though – I even checked Urban Dictionary, and the only definition it gave was a visit from Aunt Flo, which frankly turns the song down an entirely different route.
Once you start looking, there’s even more evidence: her hand gesture at 1:51, for example. The only conclusion I can draw is this: Alexandra Burke’s “Start Without You” is the first truly mainstream song about female masturbation since “I Touch Myself”.
Tim: Also from the lyrics comes a massive annoyance that I hadn’t previously noticed, although it’s not just in this song because I’ve had it for quite some time: when the sod did ‘I’m going to’ become ‘Imma’? It’s the most ridiculous contraction since, well, ever. In fact, it’s not even a contraction when you compare it to ‘I’ll’. Utter crap. I blame Kanye West.
Tom: I’m sorry, are you from the past? First, the Black Eyed Peas released a single called ‘Imma Be‘ in May last year – although the cover of that was a picture of a bee, so well done there. Imma is now so common that even I use it on occasion, and (like everyone else on the internet) I’m a middle-class white guy. I tend to use ‘immana’ more, but it’s steadily creeping in.
Tim: I know it’s been around for a while, but it’s one thing that really really gets me, because I just don’t see how it makes sense. Although I did feel incredibly old when writing it, so I’ll accept you have a point.
Tom: One final comment: is Laza Morgan the guy off Mysterious Girl? Because the opening sounds remarkably similar now I think about it.
Tim: Wikipedia tells me the Mysterious Girl guy was called Bubbler Ranx, so no, although we still have the sublime Ant & Seb to link Alexandra and that song.
Tim: Here’s a nice Swedish dance tune for you, by a new bloke called Tim Berg. Well, mostly. He did the backing music, which – as an instrumental track called Bromance – has been all over Scandinavian clubs and dance radio the past few months. It is rather good indeed on its own.
It’s also been up on YouTube for people to play around with. One such person is Axwell (off Swedish House Mafia and Axwell & Bob Sinclar’s What a Wonderful World), who took it and bunged the vocals of the otherwise largely unremarkable Love U Seek on top of it. That bootleg got very popular, and so, with a bit of rights fiddling and re-recording, has been chosen as the proper UK release, now called Seek Bromance (clever, isn’t it?).
Tom: Bromance is a lovely track, but I can’t help but feel it’s rather close to plagiarising the lead melody from the absolutely gorgeous Still Alive, from Mirror’s Edge – the second best piece of video game music ever (after the coincidentally-named Still Alive from Portal). Hell, even the synth patch used in Bromance sounds similar.
It’s still a great bit of music though. I think it’s better without the vocals, but I understand that you pretty much need them for a commercial UK release. I can see myself listening to the original of Bromance quite a lot.
Tim: Do you know, I agree with absolutely everything you just wrote, and I enjoyed the slight campness of the music descriptions. I hadn’t heard Still Alive, so thank you for introducing me to it. I’ve a feeling most people will think the same about the vocal (especially DJs), so what’ll likely happen is that Seek Bromance will only really be heard on the radio and before old-school CD-buying people skip to track 2, while the original will keep being played in the clubs. A good thing, I believe.
