Friday, September 23, 2011

Single Reviews 25/09/11

For about a tenth of a second, we considered addressing the split of REM in this weekly blurb o’ nothing prior to the Single Reviews. But we’ll leave that to the inevitable commemorative issue of Q, though how you’d tell a special REM issue apart from any other issue of Q is anyone’s guess. But we digress. Read on for a selection of British rock, some interchangeable girlband Autons, and a Seb Coe-approved musical endorsement of what’s essentially a fancy gas lighter.

You Me At Six
herald their new album Sinners Never Sleep with the marching riffs and snarling vocals of Loverboy. It’s an interesting angle, and an effective one at that, letting the plodding, mesmerising hook do most of the work before the huge rock ideals are unveiled with force when the chorus comes along. And with even the most mainstream of rock acts finding it a struggle to promote in this fickle world of Rihanna, Rihanna and more Rihanna, it’s a nice quirk that’ll get them noticed without even coming close to diluting themselves.

We’ve already addressed the peculiar moniker of Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds on these pages. And with a pretentious name comes an equally pretentious single title in the form of AKA...What A Life! It’s a level of extraneous punctuation not seen since Britney Spears’ early work, but thankfully the song more than excuses such anti-Truss behaviour. An inventive, poised and charismatic number, and surprisingly contemporary for a man usually shackled to 1996, it’s precisely the step forwards from Oasis he needs, and an easily-awarded Single of the Week.

With the Olympics less than a year away, the cash-ins and spin-offs are already well underway, once such example the Official Olympic Torch Song from Dionne Bromfield and Tinchy Stryder. A song for the TORCH. At this rate, should we expect an Aquatics Centre Anthem? A dubstep track from Wenlock and Mandeville? Still, at least Spinnin’ For 2012 has its merits – a bouncy, poppy offering much more suited to Bromfield than the considerably more mature soul she’s been peddling up until now.

And finally, we were planning on really laying into Freedom, the BIG! COMEBACK! single from the dregs of the Sugababes. But clearly, they’ve realised themselves what an unimaginative, uninspiring, unequivocal pile of horse-shit Freedom is, cancelling its release and giving it away for free instead. For a song that’s supposed to be a noisy, heartening call-to-arms, it’s more likely to induce diarrhoea than any kind of empowerment. Look girls, the Sugababes brand has been sullied enough, and we know it’s beyond repair. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want you to quit. Take the hint.

No comments:

 
Creative Commons Licence
The Sloppy Dog by www.thesloppydog.co.uk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.