Europop – Page 139

Gravitonas – Religious

With a decent remix or two, this song could be really good.

Tim: This video, released a few days ago but only just up on YouTube, is of the second single by the band Gravitonas, and if you think it sounds familiar you’d be entirely correct – half of the band comes direct from BWO, who took a break about six months ago, and each of them is currently doing their own thing. One’s of them’s done proper heavy rock, another has moved in the opposite direction, whilst Alexander Bard (the terrifyingly beardy one) has pretty much stayed exactly where he was, whilst picking up a friend or two.

Anyway, yes it’s familiar. The instruments and the vocal style are all the same, and the pre-chorus melody is lifted straight from Kings of Tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad – like most of BWO’s stuff, it’s enjoyable, pleasant and entirely inoffensive. The only criticism I have is that while it’s got a fairly decent beat that grows throughout, for a song that’s about an enlightenment brought on by dance music (just go with it – it’s best not to think about it too much), that beat’s not nearly big enough. With a decent remix or two, though, this song could be really good.

Tom: The beat’s not big enough?! The beat’s bloody massive. I nearly had to turn down the bass on my headphones. It’s just it never quite kicks in properly. For me, there’s no big hands-in-the-air everybody-sing moment, which for a song about religious enlightenment (in whatever form) is a bit of a letdown. Yes, they’re trying for one when the final chorus kicks in, but the song’s melody is such that it’s hardly going to get everyone belting out the lyrics on the dance floor.

Also, “entirely inoffensive”?

I believe in the magic
Feel the heat of your skin
You can call me fanatic
I’m your soldier of sin

– is not exactly something I’d play to a priest.

Tim: You really think the beat’s huge? I just don’t think it builds up quite enough.

Tom: I’m not sure we have the same definition of ‘massive’. You’re absolutely right about the Kings of Tomorrow rip though.

Tim: The video starts off fairly weird, but soon progresses to disturbingly weird, and by the end of it I’m almost thinking KKK on acid, so probably the less said about that the better.

Annikafiore – Forbidden Love

She’s ruined that wedding dress.

Tim: An interesting take on two blokes fighting for a lady’s attention, and a rather nice tune on the back of it. While it’s true that the end bit doesn’t add anything that wasn’t there previously, it doesn’t matter, because it sets the perfect contrast between most of the song and the Florence-and-the-Machine-esque bridge. (The first part of that, incidentally, reminds me slightly of Red Carpet Extend-O-Matic from the World of Goo soundtrack.)

Tom: Two main thoughts from that video: “she’s ruined that wedding dress” and “ooh, nice dynamic type in the credits”. Those don’t really reflect well on the song.

I know it’s meant to be sung like that, but she sounded out-of-tune, almost like she’s not putting the effort in to hit the notes. The official song of Copenhagen Pride? It’s no Friðrik Ómar track, that’s for sure.

Tim: No, it isn’t Friðrik Ómar, because it’s a completely different type of track – his was party party party, sod any form of meaningful lyrics, whereas hers is all about, well, Forbidden Love, we’re gay, get over it: ‘we’ll love how we want, our time has just begun‘ … ‘don’t taste like forbidden, just tastes like love‘. Two pride stereotypes – partying vs political – and each will appeal to a different group. Personally, I prefer this one – there’s enough danciness in it for some decent remixes to hit the clubs, and there are sure as hell no Lazytown lyrics in there.

Tom: She has completely ruined that wedding dress though.

Saturday Flashback: BWO – Right Here Right Now

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.

Time passes…

Tom: What the hell? With the exception of the main vocal line, Love Came Crashing Down is Beggin’. Either the Madcon version or the Frankie Valli version.

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.

Peter Dickson and The Shakettes – Shake It

“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: Well, he’s done a comedy bit: IT’S TIME. TO TASTE. THE MUESLI. I mean, he’s got one shtick, but he does it well.

Tim: He also makes milkshakes in his spare time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUKs9KjdRe8

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.

Drifters – Sha La Lie

Utterly delightful.

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.

Tom: Yes, that is his middle name.

Album Review: Darin – Lovekiller

Tom’s unleashed Tim to tell you everything about it, vaguely quickly.

Tim:Tom’s let me loose on this fine Sunday to tell you all about this album, because we love Darin here. His only condition was that it be vaguely quick, so here’s a crap gimmick to show how modern we are here: every track review is less than one tweet long. Let’s see how it goes.

1 – Microphone: Excellent and vibrant start. Could work as a good career launching track, which vaguely makes sense given the change of direction he’s made. 9/10
2 – You’re Out of My Life: Less extravagant but very enjoyable. Comes with a key change that, if sung on the X Factor, would trigger spark fountains. 8/10
3 – Lovekiller: In case enough hasn’t been said already, this is sodding awesome, and is what all future pop songs should be judged against. 12/10
4 – Only You Can Save Me: Continuing the energetic theme, with an unsettlingly sudden bridge. Part of me is now hoping the album will calm down at some point. 8/10
5 – Drowning: Well, it’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s beginning to sound a bit formulaic. Good formulaic, but still a bit tiring. 7/10
6 – Viva la Vida: The first thing that’s stood out as different. Very dancable with a great chorus, although it goes on quite a bit longer than it needs to. 7/10
7 – Endless Summer: Ooh, this is proper different; a bit like Westlife’s musical evolution compressed into three minutes. Still plenty of Darin, though. 6/10.
8 – OK (Dangerous Game): Is to the first few tracks what new Mcfly is to old McFly. Odd use of stereo; ‘Ooh, this is fun’ quickly becomes ‘Oh God please stop it’. 8/10
9 – Can’t Stop Love: Written for a recent Swedish royal wedding, but quickly leaves ballad territory and becomes, well, pretty much like the first five tracks. 7/10
10 – I’ll Be Alright: If each track’s a runner in a race for best tune, here’s the quadriplegic the producer took pity on and allowed to enter. AWFUL FINAL TRACK. 2/10
11 – Lovekiller (Acoustic, iTunes bonus): They chucked out the backing singers, but forgot that after the bridge they’re the only singers, so he’s howling all alone. Doesn’t work. 3/10

tl;dr: Largely formulaic, but in a very good way. 8/10 – would have been a 9 if they’d lost the last two songs.

If this has tempted you, you can get it on iTunes if you’ve got a Swedish bank account or 7digital if you live in Sweden (or can find a Swedish proxy).

Saturday Flashback: Guenta K. – Das Boot 2008

“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.

Ace of Base – All For You

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.

Inna – Amazing

A lovely summery bit of dance music.

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.

Saturday Flashback: Eric Saade – Manboy

You know what else no-one’s doing? Raccoons.

Tim: This really, really, really should have been Sweden’s entry to Eurovision 2010.

Tom: It’s Womanizer by Britney Spears, isn’t it? When he started his vocals, I muttered “Superstar, where you from, how’s it going”. Decent choreography though, although he seems to forget where the audience is half way through.

Tim: Perhaps, but this is Melodifestivalen, Sweden’s (vastly superior) version of Your Country Needs You, so he just needs to remember where the camera is. Also, you need to wait ’til after the key change before you can properly judge the dancing.

Tom: Ah, he’s been to the George Sampson school of stage performance then. (Not Daz Sampson, thankfully.)

Tim: Apparently, ‘everybody does fire’ and it’s quite boring.

Tom: He’s got a point there. You know what else no-one’s doing? Raccoons. No-one ever unleashes a hundred ravenous raccoons to attack the singer on the key change.

Tim: True, although raccoons would probably poo everywhere. Just not practical.

Tom: Neither’s rigging up a power shower above the stage, but they manage that.

Tim: Ah, but he practically had to beg them to. (Really, he did.) He probably wouldn’t have been so enthusiastic about unleashing rabid animals to munch on him.

Tom: Not sure about these lyrics either. “You can call me manboy” sounds like an odd way of saying “I have learning difficulties”. Can I do that joke?

Tim: Yeah, why not.

Tom: Hmm.

Manboy, manboy,
You can call me manboy,
I don’t care, I’ll show you how to love.

I’m not an expert, but I’d guess most women would prefer ‘man’ over ‘boy’. There’s not a whole lot of ‘showing how to love’ when your entire experience of love is the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Or, if you weren’t born in an 80s sitcom, the internet.

Tim: Well I think that’s it. He pretty much is only a boy (19), so he wants the man to shine though. And, after all, what better way is there to prove manliness than stand in the pouring rain?

Tom:Raccoons. Fighting raccoons.