Single Reviews 06/11/06

Sorry readers, but there’s been a slight error in the awarding of previous Single of the Week winners – each should in fact have gone to talented, humble, maturely-behaving, respectful, all-round good sport Kanye West. Let the record also show that Kanye should have been the rightful recipient of no less than six Nobel Peace Prizes, over 20 ribbons at Crufts, every Oscar ever awarded, and is the actual Son of God, rather than Jesus who was only recorded as such due to a voting error.

Kasabian get the proverbial rolling this week with the bloke-chic terrace rawk of Shoot The Runner. Perhaps not quite up to the standard of previous single Empire but certainly proves the album of the same name is a capable collection of anthems, and incidentally provides us with one of the best videos of 2006.

Paving the way for their Greatest Hits album, the Sugababes unveil their first fully Amelle’d single. Sadly, it seems Mutya was the sole vessel of edge within the band, for Easy is a sub B-side snoozer with severely forlorn undertones. By no means a bad song, but is left shivering in the shadow of previous efforts. We’re crossing everything that this is a one-off.

Christina Aguilera hits the shelves this week with the drab Hurt, another self-indulgent vibrato marathon. Thankfully it’s not another excuse for the yelp-happy harpy to inform us how it’s “a throwback to the 20s, 30s and 40s” for the millionth fucking time. Hard to believe this is the same woman that brought us Beautiful.

Innovation specialists and near-overkill purveyors Gnarls Barkley wallop us from two directions with a double A-side treat. Who Cares is an itchy lounge trill, while the electro-noodle of Gone Daddy Gone is an invitation to the dancefloor that only a limbless corpse could refuse.

Finally, we begrudge herald the return of All Saints, a band who we hated with fizzing bile back in their glory days (it was mandatory for any true Spicephile). However, we’ve had a chance to develop an objective approach in the past five years, while the Saints have evidently learned how to make songs without autocue intros or twiddly fieldmouse noises. Rocksteady is the single Sugababes should be pre-empting their Best Of with, but is instead our Single of the Week.

(...which, of course, in actuality, belongs to Kanye “King of Fucking Everything” West.)