Singles of the week – the battle of the divas

Kylie Minogue

It’s here. The battle of two of the biggest pop-divas in the world. The seasoned Australian princess versus the outrageous, never-far-from-nude upstart. Kylie and Lady GaGa release CD singles on the same day today, and what a battle we have on our hands. Except we don’t, because of bloody downloads ruining all the fun – they’re both already in the top ten, with the GaGa song entering its tenth week.

It seems that the days of hyped up chart battles are over, but worry not – the two singles will be pitted against each other in this very column in a competition as intense as, if far, far less lucrative than, any chart battle. There will also be reviews of other new singles, including The Futureheads and Revere, although these won’t involve any element of competition.

Kylie Minogue – All The Lovers

Kylie Minogue is a lot like The Futureheads. I shouldn’t have to explain that since it’s so obvious what I mean, but I will anyway. After a brief hiatus from the record business, they both came back and began producing music that reflected exactly what they believed the fans wanted from them. I’ll explain how this applies to The Futureheads later, but with Kylie, her albums Fever and Body Language seemed to go beyond what was expected of her, producing interesting, minimalist arrangements. More recently however, she’s been producing songs like ‘All The Lovers’, route one dance songs which don’t go anywhere you wouldn’t expect them to. It’s a song that could be by anyone and seems to have involved about a tenth of the effort it took to create its overly-sexualised video. Speaking of which…

Lady GaGa – Alejandro

What an enigma Lady GaGa is, managing to be both intriguingly left-field in her stylistic choices at the same time as occasionally making music that sounds as cheap and brainless as anything you’ll hear on Capital FM. This is so much the case in her new single that she must be having a laugh – a dark and raunchy video, which goes on for double the length of the song, tries to distract from the music which Ace of Base would have knocked back for sounding “too much like our usual stuff”. Certainly not her finest moment, although perhaps GaGa sees a song as simply something to set a video to. The video is just nine minutes of her being felt up by half-naked men with bowler hair cuts, though, so she shouldn’t have bothered.

Winner: It’s a tough one. Both offer up bad songs with sexy videos for our delectation, but it’s got to go to Kylie, with a slightly less irritating song and a slightly more erotic video sealing the win for her. Hurray!

The Futureheads – I Can Do That

The Futureheads are a great band that, unfortunately, seem to have been stung by the harshness of the music business. Whilst those more marketable such as Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party have been indulged, The Futureheads were dropped from their record label despite releasing the superior second album. They have fought their way back thankfully, but have had to rein themselves in  in the process. ‘I Can Do That’ is an example of this. A decent song with a good chorus, it nevertheless lacks the identity of their earlier efforts, echoing instead more recent songs like ‘Radio Heart’ with its simple, hard-rocking style. It has more limited aims, and succeeds in them well enough, but since it doesn’t risk anything too new, it can’t hit the heights of songs like ‘Decent Days and Nights’. Hopefully songs like this prove to be consolidating their strengths so in the future they can start to play around a bit more and try new things.

Revere – We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow

Arcade Fire might have started it, but many more British indie bands have picked up on the anthemic, secular-hymn style than our friends over the Atlantic. Perhaps in the belief that having their Glastonbury moment is much more appealing, and easy, than releasing music with any substance, bands such as Mumford & Sons, The Maccabees, and now Revere, have all jumped on the bluster-bandwagon. ‘We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow’, Revere’s new single, is as transparent in its intentions as they come. ‘Find new words to sing/there’s no more time for sorrow’, the singer demands, and you wish he’d took the first bit of advice himself, instead of giving us the usual simplistic nothingness that this type of band gravitates towards. The music writes itself, with epic drums and epic trumpets leading to an epic chorus of epic proportions – it’s so impatient to get any non-anthemic part of the song out of the way that the verses seems to last about five seconds. No doubt they’ll be stirring festival crowds all over the shop this summer, but this is barrel-scraping stuff, even when considering that it’s a pretty barrel-scraping style of music.

Skepta – Rescue Me

On its way to a chart near you on the strength of its obnoxious chorus, this song comes into its own when Skepta finally makes an appearance. The beat is impressively deep and dirty sounding, given how this is clearly his shot at the mainstream, and his hungry rapping gives it the edge it deserves. It’s certainly no classic but the whole thing is kept from being as annoying as it really should be, given the subtle-as-an-autuned-brick chorus, by the attempts to try something new. UK rap merging with other electronic genres often creates more misses than hits, there is clearly attempts at invention and keeping things fresh, something that I fear isn’t a concern in mainstream indie music in this country anymore. Rescue Me’s acoustic intro and vocoder wailing grates, but there’s enough going on here to make you think that there’s a chance the experimentation might, just might, work out in the future.

No related posts.