Europop – Page 94

Meja – Blame It On The Shadows

“Nice, calm, folky pop.”

Tom: Remember Meja?

Tim: Erm…

Tom: No, I didn’t think you would. I’ll bet you remember “All ‘Bout The Money”, though.

Tim: YES. “I don’t need your money, money money, not about the money, money—” wait, that’s Jessie J. Erm, still no. But let’s pretend I do.

Tom: Well, fifteen years — and a lot of albums and singles that haven’t troubled the British charts — later, this the new single.

Tom: And I think we can safely say that she’ll, sadly, be remaining a one-hit wonder over in these parts for a while. There’s nothing wrong with the track: it’s nice, calm, folky pop, but it’s going to stay in the background.

Tim: Yes – if I were to compare to someone ‘big’, I’d say Emmelie de Forest, except that Meja doesn’t have a Eurovision victory to bounce off. Nothing wrong, but it’s not the most fashionable stuff anywhere right now, so probably not destined for hugeness.

Tom: But my word, she can definitely sing live: that rise into the last chorus is wonderful. Her fans will no doubt love it, and if acoustics-and-vocals is your kind of thing then this will go down very well indeed.

Tim: Oh, absolutely. Lovely final chorus, but nothing that’ll get airplay. Of course, one could argue (or rather hope) that we’re now in a time where radio stations don’t dictate what’s successful, but, well, for the time being hope is all we can go for.

Midnight Boy – When You’re Strange

“Warning: full-frontal nudity ahead.”

Tim: Warning: full-frontal nudity on the streets of Stockholm ahead, of a very distracting nature. So have a listen, but if you’re in a public place, or of a slightly nervous disposition, you’ll want to be switching to another tab by 2:55.

Tom: It’s not a cover of the Doors, is it? I’m going to be properly disappointed if it’s not.

Tom: Oh. Well, I guess I was going to be disappointed either way.

Tim: So, yeah, that’s that. And despite the ridiculous video, which I’m buggered if I can understand the point of, aside from showing that Swedes are really very good at ignoring things they don’t want to see, it’s a very good number.

Tom: It is, but what a — forgive my phrasing — half-arsed video. Apparently shot on the wobbliest, dodigest camera available and fixed badly in post; and he’s not even bothering to sing the song. As for the music…

Tim: Sort of electro-rock, really, and performed to exactly the standard we like to hear. Melodic, vibrant, an appropriate vocal sound and a fair ‘throw everything in and see what doesn’t bounce out again’ production method. I like this a lot. As long as I don’t have to watch the video, anyway.

Eric Saade – Boomerang

“Two-step is meant to be a bit unpredictable.”

Tim: As noted the last time we checked in on him, genre-wise he’s still up in the air a bit, and back then he gave us a tedious Justin Timberlake sound-a-like. This time, though? Two-step pop. Yep, that’s right.

Tim: And actually that’s pretty good.

Tom: It is, but two-step is meant to be a bit unpredictable, and this just isn’t. Even that repetitive drum fill seems to have been lifted straight from Tinie Tempah’s “Pass Out”.

Tim: Indeed. It’s not fantastic – there’s little variation throughout, he seems to have missed the memo that that auto-tune-style ‘eh-eh’ went out of fashion three years ago, and I really don’t want to overthink the lyric “Bite in your lips, just right in your Victoria’s Secrets”.

Tom: “You’re like a drug, with a smile on your face.” Hmm. Perhaps more time has been spent on the production than any of the lyrics.

Tim: There’s that – at least it’s not tedious like previously. It was written with the same J-Son who featured in the sonically similar Hearts in the Air a couple of years back, and all in, it’s fairly good pop.

Le Kid – Physical

Tim: About eighteen months ago Le Kid brought out a track called Human Behaviour – I’ve no idea why we didn’t cover it, but anyway. Since then, they’ve been pushing themselves onto the German market, and this is a played around with and jumped up version of that song. Have a listen, why don’t you.

Tim: So, it’s The Offspring’s message wrapped up in lovely pop for the rest of us.

Tom: “It all just happens again, way down the line”?

Tim: You see this is why we tend to stick to Europop – I did of course mean the Bloodhound Gang, as also mentioned on Saturday. ANYWAY, what an interesting video – I can certainly understand why they went for humans dressed as animals rather than actual horses and reindeer and pigs and stuff, but it doesn’t half make for a slightly unsettling watch.

As ever, though, the music from these guys is really rather great.

Tom: Yep, although I do still expect something a bit more bubblegum from them — not that this isn’t sugary as it is.

Tim: For some reason, the song it puts me most in mind of is Little Mix’s DNA, and while it’s not quite as good as that, that song was bloody brilliant so I think that’s praise enough for this song.

Tom: Huh, really? I hear DNA as being a lot darker than this.

Tim: Oh, it absolutely is – this just seems to be what you’d get if you turned the happiness and sweetness up a little bit on that. It’s very enjoyable indeed, and right now I’m hoping that once they’re done with Germany they’ll have a go here. Because I would BUY EVERYTHING.

Tom: You know that we have the internet these days, right?

Tim: The…the what now?

Saturday Flashback: Baby Alice – Piña Colada Boy

“It’s a bloody earworm.”

Tim: I asked you what we should feature today, you said this had been on your mind recently; care to explain yourself?

Tom: Because it’s a bloody earworm. Even worse than that Kelly Clarkson Christmas track. It just gets in there and doesn’t leave.

Tim: This is three and a half years old now, so I’m sure the point has been mentioned before, but blimey there’s a lot of Bad Touch in there.

Tom: There is — probably not close enough to get sued over, but it’s certainly very familiar.

Tim: Aside from that (or perhaps given that), what a fun tune. I can understand why it’s in your head.

Tom: It’s worth noting some of those particularly ridiculous lyrics: “my patience shorter than my skirt”, for instance. Bonus points for having a video that somehow manages to objectify pretty much everyone.

Tim: Yes – possibly the best kind of video. And since you mention “that Kelly Clarkson Christmas track”, by which I’m sure you you mean “that glorious new tune Underneath the Tree”, I noticed this week that we didn’t have a new Christmas track, upsettingly; according to Wikipedia, though, these guys have done a version of Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree, and if anybody has a copy of that anywhere I’d love to hear it.

The Fooo – Freestyler

“How on earth does a boyband cover a track like this?”

Tim: The Fooo, who you may remember recently wanted to build themselves a girlfriend, have sensibly backed away from that idea and now have this, a cover of, yes, that Freestyler.

Tom: I had to listen to the original to remind myself. And I’m at a loss: how on earth does a boyband cover a track like this?

Tom: Oh. By making it almost exactly the same.

Tim: I was all ready to pass this up and say, yep, that’s a cover and it’s pretty much identical, fine, but then there’s a bit of extra melody on the chorus line which is pretty good, and there’s also a little of bit extra stuff they’ve thrown in after the chorus that makes it sound a little bit more up to date than the 1999 original.

Tom: It’s basically an ill-advised X Factor covers week attempt, isn’t it?

Tim: Oh, come on – every X Factor week is ill-advised covers week.

I don’t know if this was a song that really needed a cover version, but they’ve done a very good job of it nonetheless – I wasn’t really ready for it to end when it did, and to be honest I wouldn’t have minded another chorus there, which must mean I like it.

Tom: Speak for yourself: I’ll stick with the original.

Pandora – I Feel Alive

“This is a lovely track.”

Tim: Pandora, a Swedish songstress who did all her big stuff in the nineties, but has been going strong and is now celebrating twenty years in the business. She’s also made a video to go with it of some highlights, so that’s nice. (Though try not to look at the lyrics.)

Tom: I can actually believe she’s done that video herself, which is either lovely or a terrible damning of someone else’s editing skills.

Tim: Well, yes, the lyrics bit of that video is awful, with a nice copy-and-pasted-three-times typo, but that’s not so bad because there’s a proper video on the way, apparently, and hopefully that also won’t have the audience at the end.

Tom: “Those of you who do not want to participate in this video, please contact us,” says the video description. I don’t even know how that’d work.

Tim: No. No, I’m not quite sure. But anyway, those minor things aside, this is a lovely track.

Tom: Agreed: it’s a pretty damn good bit of pop music.

Tim: It’s very happy, it’s celebratory like it should be, a euphoric dance track that we can all get excited to, and, as this video actually shows quite nicely, one that we can all have a wonderful time singing along to. There have been twenty years that we can all be very grateful for, and this is great way of celebrating them.

Amy Diamond – Your Love

“Would be better if the chorus was a bit more varied”

Tom: Our reader, Roger, sends in this new single. Now, we’ve covered Amy Diamond, her of the Greatest Hits album at 18 years old, a few times before — and each time we’ve found ourselves generally unimpressed.

Advance warning: this is an unofficial YouTube copy, so the compression on it’s a bit dodgy.

Tom: Well, I’m more impressed than I have been than some of her previous tracks, which I’ve outright dismissed, in one case as “sugar piled on top of sugar”. This still doesn’t seem to work properly for me, though.

Tim: Hmm. It’s still quite sugary, but I think it does work for me. Would be better if the chorus was a bit more varied, though.

Tom: Roger does say it’s a bit repetitive — but then, that can still make a catchy track, as Daft Punk found out this year. But this ain’t Daft Punk; it’s just a track with an unmemorable melody that keeps repeating “your love, your love, your love”.

Tim: Yes. My problem with Daft Punk wasn’t the repetitiveness of it so much as the reasoning – I got the feeling that it had been put there not because they was nothing else but just in order to deliberately be repetitive and get stuck in peoples’, almost cynically so. This feels the other way – that they couldn’t think (or couldn’t be bothered to think) of anything more. Not sure if that’s better or worse, really.

Tom: It’s worth pointing out that Amy wrote most of this herself, for the first time; the backing vocalists are her sisters, and she’s even got a credit for the cover design. And while that’s admirable… it still feels a bit like stock music in the background of a TV show: there to be talked on top of. And that’s a shame, because there’s a gem of genius in here somewhere — it’s just spread very thin.

Nanne – Ingen Dansar Dåligt (Lika Bra Som Jag)

“Like an advertising jingle for Butlins.”

Tim: Nanne, who in case you haven’t heard of is a Swede who’s been in music for the past two and a half decades and was last heard of in 2011 with her, erm, interesting, ‘My Rock Favourites’ album. But she’s back!

The track isn’t embeddable, but you can listen to it here.

Tom: Crikey, that starts off sounding like an advertising jingle for Butlins. Actually, most of it sounds like that.

Tim: Google’s not happy on the translation of the SoundCloud description, which reminds me that I really must get onto the Duolingo people about Sweden, but it’s something to do with dancing badly (or not) and mostly just hearing it and dancing. And let’s be honest, that’s very easy to do. Because it’s pop. It’s danceable. It’s very pop, and it’s very danceable.

Tom: I found myself adding double-handclaps myself at one point, like it’s the 1970s or something. It’s pap, but it’s very well produced pap.

Tim: A lot of the lyrics are just ‘do-coo’, which suits me fine because now I don’t have to spend time learning foreign when I could just be dancing. And that’s what I really want to do. So I will. DANSA!

Tom: Dancing?

Tim: You know, I knew exactly where that link was going. And I clicked on it anyway.

Robin Stjernberg – Pieces

“Yes, it’s a builder”

Tim: This is the title track, about to be released, from his fairly good album, released some time ago. There’s an actual video, but it has one of those annoying ‘don’t you dare rip this’ bits and it’s so annoying it actually dented my enjoyment of the song. So I won’t link to it. Have this.

Tim: This is a weird one. Because yes, it’s a builder, and that’s a common refrain, and possibly used too much. But this almost takes it to the limits and redefines what it should be. Because let’s be honest, the first verse is basically nothing.

Tom: Now, there’s something about that piano melody that grabbed me right at the start — but you’re right, after that, it sort of faded into the background.

Tim: Even the first chorus is basically nothing. It finishes, you might realise we’re getting another verse, and you think ‘oh, was that it?’ Then the second verse, well, there’s still pretty much nothing there. The second chorus, mind, might catch your attention when it arrives, and that’ll be alright a bit, and there are drums underneath every now and again, but you still might get bored, and let’s be honest in the middle eight you may well fall asleep.

Tom: It kept startling me occasionally — the introduction of the drums, the clanging chimes in that middle eight, but yes; after that it sort of became just “nice” again.

Tim: BUT THEN. The final chorus, out of nowhere, he’s screaming enough to wake the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and he’s got the instruments in to help him. And really, that kind of makes it all worth it. Because the next time you hear it, it’s there.

Tom: Well, more or less. I think you might be going a bit over the top.

Tim: Obviously it isn’t, really, because it’s still pretty much nothing, and I still only rated it three and a half stars in iTunes, but at least you know where it’s going.

Tom: I had to look up the Ephesus reference, by the way.

Tim: Well, I’m glad I can help to further your education.