Tim: We last saw her being kicked out of Melodifestivalen after singing Elektrisk, and now she’s turned up with a cover of of September album track.
Tom: That’s not the most promising introduction you’ve ever written.
Tim: This is somewhat different from the September version, and weirdly sounds more like September than that one did.
Tom: Add a few more people singing harmony, and I reckon this could sound a bit like Steps.
Tim: Whoever it sounds like, I think it’s alright – it does still sound a bit album trackish, though.
Tom: Especially the unexpected in-bridge swearing. It did wake me up, though.
Tim: Fairly vibrant, building slightly throughout, but never really enough to get properly going. Not something I’d turn off, but equally not something I’d go wild for in a club.
Tim: A new two-piece from Iceland. Based on this, I’m hoping they’ll hang around.
Tim: Ground-breaking and original? Not particularly, although the flute and violin they play during the bridge do take it somewhere unexpected, and nice.
Tom: When they finally kicked in, I was thinking “it’s about bloody time”. Does it change at all during the first two and a half minutes? I’m not sure it does.
Tim: Not really, and it’s not particularly catchy either, or memorable, but what it is is happy, and cheerful, and it’s very much put-down-your-drinks-and-make-your-way-to-the-dancefloor. It’s somewhat reminiscent of a couple of recent Eurovision dance tracks – more stylistically than melodically, but it still puts me in mind of This Is My Life, and definitely not in a bad way.
Tim: In the past twelve months Romania has already provided us with Stereo Love and Inna, and now at Europlop’s doors from Radikal Records* arrives this Romanian bloke, whose track Morena was released last September.
* They’re not just radical, they’re Radikal!
Tom: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I agree with a YouTube commenter. Thank you to ‘vgasparis’, who simply says “This porn has nice background music.”
Tim: It is a bit raunchy, isn’t it? And the music is nice – repetitive but decent hook, good tune throughout the rest of it, consistent strong beat and added piano here and there. I like this.
Tom: Repetitive: yes. Decent: no. The verses don’t have a bad tune, I’ll give you that, but the rest really could use… well, anything.
Tim: Hence the lesbian storyline in the video, presumably, which is a surefire way to get most blokes on board, as the dribbling masses displayed in the club demonstrate. It’s all decent enough.
Not one of those tracks that takes a while to get going.
Tim: Basic Element, a Swedish dance group. This, a tune I present to you with one instruction: PUT YOUR HANDS UP.
Not in a bank robber way, mind. Like, in a dancey way. You know.
Tom: Blimey, that kicks off fast and strong, doesn’t it?
Tim: Yes – it really isn’t one of those tracks that takes a while to get going, which partly seems to be out of necessity. We all know I’m not one for a long track, but here, there’s just not enough time for everything to happen without getting crowded. It seems like a TV show where the producers want to make a episode that’s absolutely insane, with the viewers going OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD THAT’S HUGE, but they forget that they’ve only got so much time to do it in and it all comes out all a bit confused and there’s no time for anything to have any impact.*
* Steven Moffat, I’m glaring at you.
Tom: My Eurobeat-loving roots mean that I should be absolutely OK with a dodgy Euro-rap bit in the middle of the track, but it just seems out of place here. You’re right about the track insanity, though: it’s not really genre-shifting at all, it’s just rather quick. That’s perhaps for the best – if they’d made it longer, I think it’d have gotten dull rather fast.
Tim: Here, obviously there shouldn’t be any time constraints, but it seems like a similar problem – they’ve tried to squeeze a five-minute track into 170 seconds, and it’s really just a mess.
Tom: I rather liked the intro, but I’ll agree with you that the verse is terrible.
Tim: Chorus: good when it starts, heading for GREAT from the ‘why should I care what they say’ bit. But that’s all the positiveness I can really give this – it’s just nothing special. Unfortunately we seem to have left Manboy far behind, and that’s a big shame.
Tom: It’s just not got that sense of excitement about it – a lovely chorus like that shouldn’t sound like it’s being sung by rote.
Tim: Actually, scratch what I said about it not being special, because there’s the bridge. This s special, because it lures you in like an evil temptress, with a reworked second (a.k.a. best) half of the chorus, and then right as you’re gearing up for a great key change at 2:39 that will make this song alright, perhaps even downright good, it comes back. With a bloody awful rap bit. I had never heard of him before today, but right now I hate this J-Son bloke, for ruining our Eric.
Although I also hate him because it took me a good twenty minutes to realise his name is a play on Jason. Or at least I think it is, but then Jason isn’t actually his name – basically, it seems he chose a name that may or may not be a bad rewriting of something that isn’t his name but that took me too long to figure out even if it wasn’t there to figure out in the first place. I am entirely confused now, and hatred is all I have left.
Tom: Hey, it took me years to work out that “Flo Rida” was a pun on “Florida”.
Tim: Browsing through my iTunes library the other day, I discovered I have Ms Ernman’s La Voix du Nord album; contained within it is this, released as the follow-up to her 2009 Eurovision hit.
Tom: Ah, that explains why I haven’t heard it.
Tim: I like it a lot. It’s obviously not our traditional pop stuff, but it’s nice to have a change. It has a graceful intro, livened up by the drumbeat after a while. The first key change comes as an ‘ooh, that was pleasant’ surprise, and while the second is more predicatable it’s no less satisfying.
Tom: I’ll support pretty much any song with two key changes.
Tim: The title translates to ‘My Place on Earth’, and the lyrics seem to be all about finding peace and happiness and all that malarkey.
Tom: I found myself tuning out at first, and then starting to sit up straighter in my chair, and breathe a little deeper: it sounds almost like a patriotic song or a national anthem. I felt like saluting at that second key change.
Tim: Overall, this seems to have been a good second mainstream release – bridging the gap somewhat between her Eurovision act and her more usual style for anyone who wants to get to know her better.
Tim: LOVE IT. But back to the item in hand, once we’ve dissed all the crap music, the pop kicks in, and it’s fantastic. There’s an accordion (an ACCORDION!), and of course a cracking key change.
Tom: It’s a textbook key change, isn’t it? I’m trying to keep myself concentrating on the music, rather than the attractive women in the video – even accounting for that bias, I reckon it’s a pretty solid track.
Tim: This reminds me of S Club 7 music – not entirely sure why them in particular, other than that I’ve had S Club Party in my head all day – in the pure pop sense. Most of it, I think, is the lead-in to the chorus, working as a ‘right, we’re done with the dull bits, let’s have us a PARTY’, even though the dull bits aren’t particularly dull.
Tom: As Michael Bolton says: “now back to the good part!”
Tim: I’d love to know what the lines in the verses beginning at 0:40 and 0:50 remind me of, though. Female vocalist, might be Billie Piper. (If I try to sing it, it just morphs into In The Shadows, which it sort of is but isn’t what I’m thinking it is.)
Tom: Am I being too cynical, Tim? Because when an anonymous reader sends us a track that I’ve never heard of, and says it’s a “decent comeback” by the “Pina Colada Boy team”, I tend to be a bit suspicious and think that it might actually have been sent in by the “Pina Colada Boy Team” themselves.
Tim: Well, I don’t mind – if it’s anything like the actually-brilliant-but-for-all-the-wrong-reasons Piña Colada Boy, with its hook lifted directly from Eiffel 65’s (excellent) remix of The Bad Touch, and initial line strangely reminiscent of Matt Cardle’s When We Collide (not to mention the fact that it’s a song dedicated to the third best cocktail ever), I’m just glad that Tim, Andreas & Sandra have got new stuff at all.
Tom: Well, since the song is really quite staggeringly bad, the suspicions I have don’t really bother me.
Tim: Oh.
Tom: Let’s do that thing where we list off things we don’t like about the song. I’ll start: the appalling rapping.
Tim: By a white bloke who really really wants to be black.
Tom: Well, really really wants to be will.i.am, anyway. Moving on: the massive amount of autotune.
Tim: The way it gets your hopes up about it finishing at about 2:12 before coming right back in.
Tom: The overuse of the “lost power” vocal effect to end a line. In fact, all the overuse of vocal effects.
Tim: The way it gets your hopes up about it finishing for a second time about three minutes in before returning for a whole other forty seconds, and then you hate yourself for believing it.
Tom: The Peter Andre Mysterious Girl drums.
Tim: The fact that, due to some of their previous stuff being firmly in Guilty Pleasure territory, I really really want to like this, but the rapping’s just far far too irritating.
Tom: Now, there is one saving grace: the first part of the chorus, that “please just do what I say” before the INJU5TICE Syndome kicks in? It’s amazing. It’s brilliant.
Tim: It is excellent.
Tom: It constantly set me up with that lovely bit, only to knock me down with the Teletubby impression. Which is a shame, really: if it was all like that good part, I think I could really get into this track.
Tim: San Francisco…that’s in California, right? Bearing that in mind, let’s have a listen to this.
Tim: Remind you of anything?
Tom: That’s… well, it’s fair to say it’s very much “in the style of” Katy Perry. It’s also about 12 months late.
Tim: Now let’s be honest, Cascada’s glory days are well and truly behind them. Which is a shame, because Everytime We Touch was a great album, and Perfect Day wasn’t bad either. This…well, this is pretty much textbook ripping off, and it’s disappointing.
Tom: It’s worth taking a moment to notice that this is another case of the YouTube Video Editing Phenomenon: where the official video of the song will have a break of a few measures in the middle that isn’t in the actual track, in order to get the people who use YouTube as a jukebox to actually pay for the track.
Tim: New album’s out soon, by the way – according to the description of this video, it’s called Original Me. Really, it is.
Tom: As opposed to all those copies of her that are running about.
Tom: An anonymous reader wrote in to suggest this track, which hit Number One in Finland back in February 2010. The title, translated, means “I Don’t Wanna Die Tonight”, and the singer is a former winner of the Finnish version of Popstars.
Tom: It’s certainly a belter, which makes it all the more odd that I don’t like it. Despite all the energy, the promise of the build in those first few seconds, the full-on vocals, all the instrumentation and production… somehow the word that drops into my head is “plodding”.
Tim: Hmm…not sure about plodding. I think there’s a solid amount of life there, and I don’t dislike this at all.
Tom: It doesn’t necessarily need a key change, it just needs… damn it, I don’t know. Perhaps it needs to break out of the one octave she’s singing in? A chord progression that seems to come from a completely different song, like the Killers do so often*?
*”Will your system be all right / if you dream of home tonight” in ‘Human’, and “–if you don’t shine” in ‘Read My Mind’.
Tim: Afraid I can’t really help you there, as I don’t actually think it needs anything. Certainly not a key change, although if I did have to change anything I’d trim the bridge a bit, and perhaps the intro as well – compared with the strong beat of the rest, the quieter parts don’t seem to fit so well.
Tom: To use a dodgy metaphor: it feels like a soaring eagle that’s been clamped down by ten-kilo weights. It needs to soar, and all it can do is limp along.
Tim: Really? I seriously think this is good – the return after the bridge, for example, may not be hugely triumphant like a great song can be, but it’s still full of energy, and gets me at least nodding my head along to it, and perhaps even swaying my shoulders as well.
