Tag: Nicola Roberts

Nicola Roberts – Yo-Yo

Standard pop, and done fairly well.

Tom: Full marks to the backing dancers in this video: there aren’t many of them, and they’re in the middle of some stark environments, but they’re still giving it their best shot.

Tim: Though they never quite match up to her own dancing at about 2:57.

Tom: Occasional bits of the verses remind me of The Feeling and various Disney songs – but all mashed up with a high, falsetto voice and an instrumental that seems to go all over the place.

Tim: Ah, see I think occasional bits of the verses remind me of pop music in general, and I like that a lot. This is standard pop, I feel, and done fairly well.

Tom: A ridiculously long middle-eight with a long euphoric build at the end. It promises great things, but it doesn’t quite deliver.

Tim: There, I absolutely agree with you. It’s far, far too long. Really, faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too long. (Do you see what I did there?)

Tom: I see it. I wish I didn’t have to.

This isn’t bad – and I’m always appreciative of gratuitous lingerie shots in music videos, of course – but it won’t be reaching my regular playlist any time soon.

Nicola Roberts – Beat Of My Drum

It’s like Billie Piper got a Casio keyboard.

Tom: Released last week, this has been sent in by our Radio Insider, Matt. If you don’t recognise the name “Nicola Roberts”, feel free to substitute “the ginger one from Girls Aloud”.

Tim: Indeed. Gaga has her Monsters, Justin has Beliebers, and Ms Roberts has Team Ginge.

Tim: No.

Tom: It’s like Billie Piper got a Casio keyboard.

Tim: Yeah, but Billie Piper had good music. Mind you, so did Nicola before Girls Aloud broke up. SORRY, ‘went on hiatus’.

Tom: This really irritated me on first listen, but I realised towards the end that I’d started to enjoy it in a Ting Tings kind of way. So I hit ‘play’ again and, now that my brain had gotten used to it.

Tim: One of the problems I have with this is the chorus. Not that it’s a bad chorus (though it is, but that’s not relevant right now), but that it’s the sort of chorus, what with the letters and everything, that is crying out for a dance. You know, like YMCA or Macarena or Saturday Night, that everyone can get excited about and do at a school disco or cheesy nightclub or suchlike. And there isn’t one. There are three, at least, which is stupid. ESPECIALLY since in the first chorus when she’s moving her arms up bit by bit, they’re horizontal on the V and V-shaped on the E. Idiotic, I tell you.

Some people say I go on unnecessarily lengthy rants about tiny unimportant things. I’ve just realised they’re actually sort of right, aren’t they?

Tom: Yes. They are.

Anyway, don’t get me wrong – the versus and the first part of the chorus are still terrible, but the cheerleader chants and one-note-drone bits of the chorus have a certain Toni Basil something about them. I think.

Tim: Who?

Tom: Hey, Mickey!

Tim: OLD.