Tim: You have, Tom, on multiple occasions, taken the opportunity to reword lyrics to songs in an attempt to ruin them for me.
Tom: I have, and most of them are too rude to repeat here.
Tim: Indeed – particularly your variant of ‘Cut To The Feeling’. But allow me, please, to actually improve this fairly good song even further. You see, there’s a pause in the fourth quarter of the chorus, press play and you’ll hear it.
Tom: George Ezra doesn’t look like a pop star in this video, does he? He looks like a student who’s doing a lip-sync video for the first year of his Media Studies degree. You’re right about the song, though, that’s a catchy track.
Tim: Certainly is. Now you’ve heard that gap, play it again. And edit that to ‘…underneath the HOT SUN, feeling like a SOME-ONE, [BEAT] with YOUR MU-UM.”
“He’s the one with the weirdly deep and resonant voice that sets me on edge a little.”
Tim: Today, in “interchangeable middle class British white solo males”: George Ezra!
Tom: Oh, yeah, he was the one who… no, that was… wait, didn’t he… yeah, no, they’re all interchangeable, carry on.
Tom: I remember! He’s the one with the weirdly deep and resonant voice that sets me on edge a little. Seriously, I had to check whether the unofficial upload you’ve linked to there had been pitched downwards to avoid copyright detection.
Tim: Nope, that’s just his voice.
Tom: Also, I thought there were two singers for a bit. There aren’t, he just changes register really quickly. Anyway. Yes. The song.
Tim: Decent launch track for a second album, I’d say – it’s up and off right from the get go, a shout and call back to get the audience involved, and most importantly of all, a chorus I’m still humming well after the track’s finished.
Tom: I despise that chorus. I’ll agree with all the points that you have above, but I still despise that chorus just for the line “your bloody veins”. First: ew. Second: what do you even mean by that, that’s an accurate adjective but it’s got horrendous subtext. Come to think of it, a lot of the lyrics here seem a bit… off, but it’s “bloody veins” that really grates on me.
Tim: Yeah, that lyric does put me off quite a bit, most because ‘bloody’ is comparatively rarely used to mean ‘full of blood’, so it just sounds confusing if nothing else. Everything else, though, I’ve no issue with (and I don’t mind his voice). So sure, the resurgence of guitar pop may have been and gone a couple of years back, but when it’s a rocking and basically just plain BANGING as this, I can always find room for it.
Tom: Sadly it turns out that, for me at least, they aren’t all interchangeable. If they were, I’d probably be OK with this too.
