What if you’d never heard “Video Killed The Radio Star”?
Tom: Here’s a question, Tim. What if you’d never heard “Video Killed The Radio Star”?
Tim: Erm, I don’t know, really. Why do you ask?
Tom: Well, it’s a cultural touchstone. The first record ever played on MTV. Number one in eight countries. Recognisable from its opening riff. But if it had never been a hit, and your brain wasn’t so used to it… what would you think of it?
Tim: I don’t know. I do know that it first came to my attention when it was covered, somewhat sub-optimally, by Presidents of the United States of America, so it was a sort of gradual discovery, but…I don’t know.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUzU9sCbyTw
Tom: Well, now you know.
Tim: Huh. I do indeed. And never did I think there’d ever be a song devoted to a recording studio.
“It sounds like it could be from a High School Musical film.”
Tim: Matt Cardle: one of the less impressive X Factor winners. Melanie C: easily the best post-Spice Girls Spice Girl. So let’s combine the two, and see what happens.
Tim: I promise I mean this in a good way: it sounds like it could be from a High School Musical film.
Tom: Crikey. I know you mean that as a positive thing, but it’s a difficult sell.
Tim: Admittedly “I wanna get under your body” probably wouldn’t make it past the Disney execs, but for comparison, I recommend Can I Have This Dance, the peak of the franchise in terms of cheese (so much so that if you stay with it until the two minute mark you’ll hear Gabrielle singing in harmony with herself).
Tom: More than that: Cardle and C have a patchwork of musical… well, shall we say “homages” to other tracks? I’m sure I’ve heard most of this before, just in a different form, and not put together quite as slickly. You’re right: it’s a Disney number.
Tim: It didn’t hit me until the second time I heard it come back from the middle eight, but it’s got all the hallmarks: a vibrant chorus with a decent earworm for a hook, a pause before said chorus to emphasise said vibrancy, instrumentation that’s as standard as it possibly could be, a quiet middle eight coming back into a triumphant closing section, and then the killer feature of two people singing at each other and not really paying attention to what the other is saying.
Tom: Russell T Davies describes dialogue as “just two monologues clashing”. This pretty much sums that up.
Tim: Top that off with a slight laziness when working the harmonies, and you’ve got everything you need. This is a textbook Disney song, and it’s pretty great for it.
Tim: The follow-up to Only Teardrops – let’s see if she can keep coming up with the goods.
Tom: You know, I’m still not sure if she “came up with the goods” during Eurovision. I didn’t actually like Only Teardrops all that much.
Tom: …and this appears to be the same song.
Tim: Well, stylistically it is very similar: the drums and breathiness of the verses evoking images of music from millennia ago, as in fact does the whole hunter/prey metaphor that the song’s carried by.
Tom: Mm. I suspect it’s more evoking images of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films rather than actual music from millennia ago, but I see what you mean.
Tim: That’s then brought way up to date with the guitars and pop melodies in the chorus, and again it works very well and I like it. Certainly show she’s not a one-hit wonder, although I am curious as to how long the ethnic power-ballad thing will be played out for – there are some very different tracks on the album with a great deal of variety, so it’ll be interesting to see if she sticks with what works for the third single, or branches out a bit.
Tom: Branches! Ha.
Tim: Erm, ha?
Tom: Because, you know, her last name is “de Forest”.
Tim: Oh. HA!
Tom: Oh, suit yourself.
Tim: Yes. Speaking of different tracks on the album, the symphonic version of Only Teardrops is worth a listen – remarkably different, and considerably calmer.
“This passes the “dancing in my chair” test so, so well.”
Tom: A bit of introduction here. C2C are not the southeastern rail company, thankfully: they’re a French turntable group. So their shtick is to take old tracks — in this case, Mississippi bluesman Eddie Cusic’s You Don’t Have To Go — and shift them into something… else. And this is one hell of a remix.
Tom: This passes the “dancing in my chair” test so, so well.
Tim: Hmm. Well, I like the thing with the skateboard and the tyre, that was quite good.
Tom: It’s already reached number 1 in France; it probably won’t do quite as well in the UK but, bloody hell, it deserves to. The new album seems just as promising. Really, I’ve got nothing to add to this: I just bloody love it.
Tim: I know reading YouTube comments is often described as the first step to madness, but I do like the bluntness of the guy who just wrote “this is honestly the worst sound ive ever heard”. It’s not that bad – I think I’m just having trouble trying to work out what it’s meant to be.
Tom: You remember Mint Royale’s Singin’ In The Rain remix? It’s a bit like that. Hell, it’s even got a boots-and-cats beat going on in the background if you can’t quite get it.
Tim: The loud bit in the second half is quite listenable, but the rest of it just seems a little uninterpretable. Hmm.
Tom: Speak for yourself. I’ll keep dancing in my chair.
Tim: Unfortunately, Recover got neither the airplay nor the sales it deserved, and charted really rather low. However, Lauren, Iain and Martin are hoping this one will fare somewhat better, and help them live up to their Sound of 2013 shortlisting.
Tom: Thanks for that reminder, Tim. How are the rest of the Sound of 2013 crew doing?
Tim: Ooh, six months on isn’t a bad time to check, I suppose. Not so bad – AlunaGeorge got to number 2 as a featured artist and have been playlisted a few times, Laura Mvula has apparently had a top 10 album (though I’ve not heard of her at all). HAIM have had a couple of top forty tracks and Angel Haze is best known for releasing a couple of ‘diss tracks’ aimed at Azealia Banks.
Tim: This took a while to grow on me – I first heard it and thought ‘oh’.
Tom: Yep, same here. It was more of a “meh”, but the sentiment’s the same. Surprisingly good video, though: taking the 80s aesthetic and using modern tech.
Tim: Not hugely special, not even near the same league as Recover. But I listened a few more times, and it grew on me a bit, and then someone played it at work and I really liked it, although I didn’t know recognise it as this track. Based on that, I reckon it’s a really good song to hear in the background.
Tom: Damning with faint praise there. So it’s, what, elevator music?
Tim: It doesn’t stand up to that much scrutiny, and if you really pay attention to it there’s not a lot to say about it – sure, it’s got the nice twinkly synths and her lovely vocals, but the main problem is that it’s just not what it should be. I know I said last week that we shouldn’t judge tracks based on previous releases, but here it’s unfortunately almost impossible not to. On the other hand, listen to it while you’re concentrating on something else, like I’m doing now writing this, think of it as just another electropop track, and it’s absolutely fine.
Tim: The Sound of Arrows stuck a remix version of their still wonderful debut album on their website about six months back, and this wasn’t on it, because it only appeared online last week.
Tom: Bloody hell. That’s an amazing remix.
Tim: It’s not a proper release, but it is a damn good song almost reinterpreted, more than anything else. The original was good, but not as hands in the air, rave to the massive (yep) as this —
Tom: You know, I was going to argue with you about “rave to the massive”, but I reckon it’s actually the right phrase to use.
Tim: — more of a (very) slow builder that eventually reached this sort of level. I say reinterpretation because, well, the hope that there still is originally wasn’t so prevalent, what with it taking a while to arrive and stuff – yes, there’s hope, but we may well have a long journey ahead of us before things really improve. Here, though it doesn’t waste any time at all – it’s big, it’s bright, and things are getting better right now. As they should.
Though of course, I could be way overanalysing this and it’s actually just a jumped-up bigger version of the original. Either’s good.
Tom: It is indeed — and I hit the “download” button on SoundCloud pretty damn fast. Interestingly, the resulting file is “TISH 3.5.1.mp3” — implying that there are some other versions of this remix sitting on a producer’s hard drive somewhere. I’m glad this is the one that made it out.
Tim: Normally I hate stuff that TV channels put on screen over the programs, whether they’re massive promos for new shows or just irritating hashtags that say “hey! this is the way in which we’d like you not to pay attention to the show”. MTV, though, have a thing in their dramas where a fairly discreet “now playing” bars appears briefly for any incidental music tracks.
Tom: Huh. For their demographic, I suspect that’s a very good idea.
Tim: It’s via that that I found out what this track was, used recently in an episode of Teen Wolf (you’ll probably judge me based based on the title alone; I couldn’t care less).
Tom: I will.
Tim: Firstly, let’s get the obvious out of the way: CHIMING BELLS, and somehow it doesn’t sound like Christmas – that’s quite an achievement.
Tim: True, true. Then there’s the unimportant things, like the lyrics, which are practically non-existent – about six verse lyrics, and then “we’re often ready to go” in there a full twenty four times.
Tom: Isn’t that “we’re up and ready to go”? Like you said, though, it doesn’t matter.
Tim: I thought so as well, but most lyric sites beg to differ.
The singing as well is, well, alright – decent enough, but hardly “you’ve got four yeses”. But all that’s okay, because there’s one thing that really makes this track: the production on it. Because, wow. We thought Hurts was good last week, and it was, but this is fantastic. The drums, the guitars, the bells, the keyboard, whatever else they’ve got in there, all just add together to give a total that is just brilliant.
Tom: Agreed: the ol’ wall-of-sound technique that can often see individual elements lost, but it’s handled rather well here. Yep, that’ll do nicely.
Tim: This is a Swedish band, comprised of Filip, Magnus, Povel and David; this is the first track of theirs that I’ve come across, and I’m glad I did.
Tim: I like the speed of this, because right from the start with the horse racing and the quick keyboard we’re clearly in for a good ride, and happily the song doesn’t fall short on that promise. (Metaphors are all over the place there; you know what I mean.)
Tom: That verses sound a bit like a cross between the synths from Baba O’Reilly and the vocals from Call Me Al – and I’m fairly sure I’ve heard that “on our way way way” chorus somewhere in Eurovision recently.
Tim: You have, and it took me a while to place it too – it’s from Eric Saade’s Popular.
Tom: But if you’re going to echo someone else’s style, those aren’t bad ones to echo.
Tim: The words come thick and fast, as to the lyrics in that video (which I like, in the way that’s it’s almost a struggle to keep up with it).
Tom: Agreed: they’ve got a proper designer or two in to handle putting that video together.
Tim: Also garnering points: the ‘we are young’ vibe, which is out in full force here, from the obvious let’s head to a party as quickly as possible in the chorus, through to the up all night in the middle eight and the rather clever “I miss her bed” – couldn’t care less about who she was, just the bed part of it. Classy. Excellent.
Tom: To be fair, I can understand that. My bed’s not particularly comfortable.
Tim: You may remember Muukalainen, Kristiina’s previous track that we reviewed. If you don’t, go and have another listen, because it’s lovely, and this one’s not going anywhere. Nor, in fact, is it remotely similar to that one, but never mind.
Tom: Blimey, that starts out a lot darker, doesn’t it? What’s it about?
Tim: ‘Rikki’ means broken; as for the other words, I started typing them into Google Translate but soon got incredibly bored, so I can’t really claim to know what’s going on here, though the tone suggests a relationship’s somewhat on the rocks.
Tom: Top quality music journalism right here.
Tim: Alright, fine – you type them in, then, and see how far you get before the continuous pausing to check and annoyance that the results don’t make much sense wear you down. Now, if we could get back to the song, rather than cruel, unnecessary and unfair digs at me, it’s very different in style, at least to start with, which was slightly jarring – previously we’d had mellow guitars building into upbeat almost Eurotrance, and to be presented with rather melancholy bass and drumbeats was less than what I was hoping for.
Tom: I didn’t go in with that hope — not after those first few bars — so it works rather well for me.
Tim: Nonetheless, it does the same good job of towards the ending of building up to something approximating a bit of a raver – there’s a tinge of optimism in the choruses, and by the end it’s really picked up very well. I like this. Not as much as the first one, but if we kept judging songs by previous standards I’d never have had time for any Jedward song since they did Ghostbusters.
Tom: She’s doing “acoustic folk hip-hop”. She’s that one who pulled out of the X-Factor. She’s NORTHERN. And she’s…
Tom: …ooh, quite good. I mean, I suspect it won’t light up the charts given her previous performances, but this is a really nice track.
Tim: Huh. I was all prepared to go “yawn, next please” with this, especially with that introduction (hip-hop? Seriously?), but as it happens it’s not bad.
Tom: But let’s not forget that the X Factor wasn’t her breakthrough: she’s been performing at festivals for a while, and put a first album out herself. She’s not someone with a good voice who’s suddenly shot into the limelight: she’s a competent singer-songwriter who’s been gigging for a while.
Tim: True, but does that make a difference in the long run? She’ll get quite a bit more publicity, I guess, but likely at the cost of “authenticity”. Silly word, that, but there are some people (generally bell-ends) who insist on it.
Tom: I suspect that, if she keeps going like this, she won’t be “that person off the X Factor” – she’ll be “that folk singer who did the X Factor once”.
Tim: I don’t care what she’s known as, I want to know what her fans are calling themselves, because if they’re not going with “Sprag bols” they’ve really missed a trick.
