Author: Tim

Saturday Flashback: Grégoire – Soleil

Inoffensive, chirpy and largely relaxing.

Tim: Brought to Europlop’s attention by a French radio station as I was visiting my sister, this came out in January of this year.

Tom: Today’s “applying logic to a music video” moment – how is he touching those incandescent light bulbs without hurting his hand?

Tim: Oh, stop being finicky. And is he touching them? Looked more like cupping to me, and just long enough for it to almost but not quite hurt. The lyrics, meanwhile, go on about how despite how we all have different flags and countries and parents and tastes and all that, we all live under the same sun so we should all be nice to each other. Sounds like a load of hippy crap to me, but the French people apparently liked it so I guess that sort of proves his point.

Tom: At least it’s not a generic love song. I was about to complain about it being musically generic, but it seems happy and friendly enough that I don’t really mind.

Tim: Yeah – I quite enjoy the music, or at least I’m fairly sure I do – it’s inoffensive, chirpy and largely relaxing.

Tom: It’s absolutely designed to hit all the typical emotional happy-pop notes.

Tim: And indeed it does. Good.

Galaxies – I Don’t Want This Love

Ground-breaking and original? Not really.

Tim: A new two-piece from Iceland. Based on this, I’m hoping they’ll hang around.

Tim: Ground-breaking and original? Not particularly, although the flute and violin they play during the bridge do take it somewhere unexpected, and nice.

Tom: When they finally kicked in, I was thinking “it’s about bloody time”. Does it change at all during the first two and a half minutes? I’m not sure it does.

Tim: Not really, and it’s not particularly catchy either, or memorable, but what it is is happy, and cheerful, and it’s very much put-down-your-drinks-and-make-your-way-to-the-dancefloor. It’s somewhat reminiscent of a couple of recent Eurovision dance tracks – more stylistically than melodically, but it still puts me in mind of This Is My Life, and definitely not in a bad way.

Basic Element – Turn Me On

Not one of those tracks that takes a while to get going.

Tim: Basic Element, a Swedish dance group. This, a tune I present to you with one instruction: PUT YOUR HANDS UP.

Not in a bank robber way, mind. Like, in a dancey way. You know.

Tom: Blimey, that kicks off fast and strong, doesn’t it?

Tim: Yes – it really isn’t one of those tracks that takes a while to get going, which partly seems to be out of necessity. We all know I’m not one for a long track, but here, there’s just not enough time for everything to happen without getting crowded. It seems like a TV show where the producers want to make a episode that’s absolutely insane, with the viewers going OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD THAT’S HUGE, but they forget that they’ve only got so much time to do it in and it all comes out all a bit confused and there’s no time for anything to have any impact.*

* Steven Moffat, I’m glaring at you.

Tom: My Eurobeat-loving roots mean that I should be absolutely OK with a dodgy Euro-rap bit in the middle of the track, but it just seems out of place here. You’re right about the track insanity, though: it’s not really genre-shifting at all, it’s just rather quick. That’s perhaps for the best – if they’d made it longer, I think it’d have gotten dull rather fast.

Tim: Here, obviously there shouldn’t be any time constraints, but it seems like a similar problem – they’ve tried to squeeze a five-minute track into 170 seconds, and it’s really just a mess.

Tom: An energetic mess, though.

Eric Saade feat. J-Son – Hearts in the Air

We seem to have left Manboy far behind.

Tim: Don’t give up on this too soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJDxvuOh2fk

Tim: Intro: dire. Verse: somewhat crap.

Tom: I rather liked the intro, but I’ll agree with you that the verse is terrible.

Tim: Chorus: good when it starts, heading for GREAT from the ‘why should I care what they say’ bit. But that’s all the positiveness I can really give this – it’s just nothing special. Unfortunately we seem to have left Manboy far behind, and that’s a big shame.

Tom: It’s just not got that sense of excitement about it – a lovely chorus like that shouldn’t sound like it’s being sung by rote.

Tim: Actually, scratch what I said about it not being special, because there’s the bridge. This s special, because it lures you in like an evil temptress, with a reworked second (a.k.a. best) half of the chorus, and then right as you’re gearing up for a great key change at 2:39 that will make this song alright, perhaps even downright good, it comes back. With a bloody awful rap bit. I had never heard of him before today, but right now I hate this J-Son bloke, for ruining our Eric.

Although I also hate him because it took me a good twenty minutes to realise his name is a play on Jason. Or at least I think it is, but then Jason isn’t actually his name – basically, it seems he chose a name that may or may not be a bad rewriting of something that isn’t his name but that took me too long to figure out even if it wasn’t there to figure out in the first place. I am entirely confused now, and hatred is all I have left.

Tom: Hey, it took me years to work out that “Flo Rida” was a pun on “Florida”.

Tim: True. Still can’t believe that.

Saturday Flashback: Malena Ernman – Min plats på jorden

The follow-up to her 2009 Eurovision hit.

Tim: Browsing through my iTunes library the other day, I discovered I have Ms Ernman’s La Voix du Nord album; contained within it is this, released as the follow-up to her 2009 Eurovision hit.

Tom: Ah, that explains why I haven’t heard it.

Tim: I like it a lot. It’s obviously not our traditional pop stuff, but it’s nice to have a change. It has a graceful intro, livened up by the drumbeat after a while. The first key change comes as an ‘ooh, that was pleasant’ surprise, and while the second is more predicatable it’s no less satisfying.

Tom: I’ll support pretty much any song with two key changes.

Tim: The title translates to ‘My Place on Earth’, and the lyrics seem to be all about finding peace and happiness and all that malarkey.

Tom: I found myself tuning out at first, and then starting to sit up straighter in my chair, and breathe a little deeper: it sounds almost like a patriotic song or a national anthem. I felt like saluting at that second key change.

Tim: Overall, this seems to have been a good second mainstream release – bridging the gap somewhat between her Eurovision act and her more usual style for anyone who wants to get to know her better.

Tom: I’ll add here that the version of ‘La Voix’ that she did with rock supergroup Casablanca in the 2010 Melodifestivalen interval may just be the best thing she’s done since Eurovision itself.*

*Although that may just be because of the redhead drummer.

Baby Alice – Heaven is a Dancefloor

Really quite staggeringly bad.

Tom: Am I being too cynical, Tim? Because when an anonymous reader sends us a track that I’ve never heard of, and says it’s a “decent comeback” by the “Pina Colada Boy team”, I tend to be a bit suspicious and think that it might actually have been sent in by the “Pina Colada Boy Team” themselves.

Tim: Well, I don’t mind – if it’s anything like the actually-brilliant-but-for-all-the-wrong-reasons Piña Colada Boy, with its hook lifted directly from Eiffel 65’s (excellent) remix of The Bad Touch, and initial line strangely reminiscent of Matt Cardle’s When We Collide (not to mention the fact that it’s a song dedicated to the third best cocktail ever), I’m just glad that Tim, Andreas & Sandra have got new stuff at all.

Tom: Well, since the song is really quite staggeringly bad, the suspicions I have don’t really bother me.

Tim: Oh.

Tom: Let’s do that thing where we list off things we don’t like about the song. I’ll start: the appalling rapping.

Tim: By a white bloke who really really wants to be black.

Tom: Well, really really wants to be will.i.am, anyway. Moving on: the massive amount of autotune.

Tim: The way it gets your hopes up about it finishing at about 2:12 before coming right back in.

Tom: The overuse of the “lost power” vocal effect to end a line. In fact, all the overuse of vocal effects.

Tim: The way it gets your hopes up about it finishing for a second time about three minutes in before returning for a whole other forty seconds, and then you hate yourself for believing it.

Tom: The Peter Andre Mysterious Girl drums.

Tim: The fact that, due to some of their previous stuff being firmly in Guilty Pleasure territory, I really really want to like this, but the rapping’s just far far too irritating.

Tom: Now, there is one saving grace: the first part of the chorus, that “please just do what I say” before the INJU5TICE Syndome kicks in? It’s amazing. It’s brilliant.

Tim: It is excellent.

Tom: It constantly set me up with that lovely bit, only to knock me down with the Teletubby impression. Which is a shame, really: if it was all like that good part, I think I could really get into this track.

Tim: REMIX.

Cascada – San Francisco

Remind you of anything?

Tim: San Francisco…that’s in California, right? Bearing that in mind, let’s have a listen to this.

Tim: Remind you of anything?

Tom: That’s… well, it’s fair to say it’s very much “in the style of” Katy Perry. It’s also about 12 months late.

Tim: Now let’s be honest, Cascada’s glory days are well and truly behind them. Which is a shame, because Everytime We Touch was a great album, and Perfect Day wasn’t bad either. This…well, this is pretty much textbook ripping off, and it’s disappointing.

Tom: It’s worth taking a moment to notice that this is another case of the YouTube Video Editing Phenomenon: where the official video of the song will have a break of a few measures in the middle that isn’t in the actual track, in order to get the people who use YouTube as a jukebox to actually pay for the track.

Tim: New album’s out soon, by the way – according to the description of this video, it’s called Original Me. Really, it is.

Tom: As opposed to all those copies of her that are running about.

Saturday Flashback: Carola – Invincible

The greatest Eurovision performance of recent times.

Tim: So, tonight’s the night – the biggest night of the year as far as we’re concerned, in fact, and so it’s only right that now we should take a look back at what is, in my view, the greatest Eurovision performance of recent times, five years ago.

Tim: Even if we were ignoring the song, this is good. The dress, oh, the dress. The wind – the ENDLESS WIND. The constant look of joy on her face.

Tom: Let’s not forget just how hard it is to keep your eyes open in the face of a wind machine, let alone to keep singing and to keep a look of joy on your face.

Tim: But of course we can’t ignore the song, because it’s just so fantastic. The energy throughout, the key change and the effort therein, it’s just brilliant.

Tom: This is, frankly, the perfect example of a schlager track. It’s absolutely textbook. And so’s the singer – she’s been competing in Melodifestivalens for, ooh, how long now?

Tim: Well, trivia: she’s performed solo three times – 1983, 1991 and 2006 – and has won every time (although she duetted with Andreas Johnson in 2008 less successfully), and during Melodifestivalen this year, this song was actually performed as the original Swedish version; I do not know why they changed it.

Tom: I can’t really believe it was five years ago, but it was: 2006 was a bonanza year for Eurovision. Not only did we have Carola, but Lordi won it for Finland with monster masks and their own pyrotechnicians (thanks to one of the first major Facebook campaigns). And let’s not forget Lithuania getting booed for their frankly genius entry that simply declared themselves the winners.

Let’s hope we get some more of that tonight.

Tim: Not forgetting, of course, the performance by the UK’s number four MC.

Tom: Who could ever forget him?

Le Kid – America

A bit mellower than other tracks of theirs we’ve reviewed.

Tim: We were prodded to review this by regular reader Roger; let’s do so.

Tom: Ooh, new Le Kid. This should be good.

Tim: A bit mellower than other tracks of theirs we’ve reviewed.

Tom: It is, isn’t it? Good luck to them with the video for this.

Tim: I can’t really imagine soapy sailors or giant liquorice allsorts going too well with this, but it’s but no means a bad, or even mediocre, track. Nice, gentle, poppy, mainstream – it’s not hands-down fantastic, though, and I can’t get excited about it like I did the rest, unfortunately.

Tom: It’s let down by that chorus hook; “in America, America”? It’s not singable like their other tracks.

I think it’s also because, after so much bubblegum, even something as bouncy as this still seems a bit downbeat.

Tim: Well, if you’re missing some of the over-exuberance of previous tracks, have a more dancey remix of Oh My God: here.

Danish Week: Christopher Brandt – Emma

Definitely one to play your grandparents

Tim: Here’s one that for some reason doesn’t have a performance on YouTube, and it’s definitely one to play your grandparents, making sure they pay attention at the seventeen second mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljJ3jb0OH7k

Tom: Wait, is he actually swearing in English there, or is it just a Danish word that sounds amusingly similar?

Tim: Well, while most of the song is in Danish, that bit actually isn’t – he broke into English just so he could be a bit offensive. As for the other lyrics, I’m not really sure what they mean – the only lyrics I could find for it were on YouTube, and Google didn’t like them. From what I can tell it’s basically ‘I’m a shit boyfriend but I do love you, honest’, with the chorus going about about forgetting to cooking her brunch on Sunday.

Tom: Top work by the lyricist there. It’s nice to know that even in other languages, sometimes our old Anglo-Saxon profanities are still necessary.

Tim: Musically there’s not really a lot going on (as with the performance, which just had him standing on stage in a suit if my memory serves me correctly) – the instrumentation’s fairly low key throughout, although there’s a slight beat that comes in for the choruses. I don’t mind that, though – the guy’s voice seems strong enough to hold it on its own, and I think this was a very worthy contender.