Dario G – Hola

“IT’S DARIO G AND IT SOUNDS LIKE DARIO G YES I’M GOING TO START BOUNCING AT MY DESK NOW.”

Tim: Yep, Dario G – did Sunmachine, Carnaval de Paris, Dream To Me and maybe a few others way back when we were youngsters.

Tom: Not to mention a really good track on the Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds remix album. Yes, that’s a thing.

Tim: Huh, never knew. Also, now there’s this, somewhat out of the blue, because why not?

Tom: Well, I like that. I like that a lot. Why do I like that so much?

Tim: I mean, potentially because it sounds like it could be straight off an album from the then-trio twenty years ago. Some people might argue, mind, that if you’re coming back after a couple of decades you could maybe update your sound a bit.

Tom: That’s fair. This hits a lot of nostalgic parts of my brain. When I stop to think about it, I’m really not sure about basically the entire middle third of it: that chopping-and-stuttering effect doesn’t work for me. But if I don’t stop to think about it: it’s DARIO G AND IT SOUNDS LIKE DARIO G YES I’M GOING TO START BOUNCING AT MY DESK NOW.

Tim: That absolutely makes sense. After all, Busted updated their sound for the third album and it was garbage, then went back to the normal stuff for the fourth and it was excellent, so what do some people know? This is nice. It is, basically, a tune that could have been released by Dario G twenty years, and we’d all have been very happy with. Good shout, then – why mix with a winning formula?

Stockholm Noir – Glory

“Late ’90s trance synths with a gentle amount of late ’10s tropical hints here and there”

Tim: A Swedish dance act that we haven’t covered anywhere near as much as we should have done, as I think you’ll agree after hearing this.

Tom: I couldn’t tell you what decade that’s from. You’re right, though, it’s a good track.

Tim: Well there it is: we’ve late ’90s trance synths with a gentle amount of late ’10s tropical hints here and there so it doesn’t sound dated. And I for one absolutely love it. A lot of one great genre, a small amount of a fairly good genre, and a lovely vocal on top of it.

Tom: I can’t remember it after listening, but it’s the sort of thing that’d sit happily in the middle of a dance playlist. There’s nothing wrong with it, and by my standards that’s an endorsement.

Tim: I’ve no complaints at all, even at four and a half minutes long. It’s lovely.

Lana Del Rey – Doin’ Time

“I genuinely thought, ha, someone’s doing a really good Lana Del Rey impression and is using it on a completely inappropriate track.”

Tom: Have you ever had a moment, Tim, when you look at the world’s reaction to a track and think that something is terribly wrong?

Tim: Tom, we run a site largely dedicated to Europop, and are frequently fans of songs that end up at the bottom of the Eurovision table. Believe it or not, I have had many such moments.

Tom: Well, anyway. You know the old Gershwin classic “Summertime”? Jazz standard, probably the canonical version’s by Ella Fitzgerald, you know, the one that goes “summertime, and the living is easy”? It’d be a logical choice for Lana Del Rey to cover. It fits her style perfectly.

Tim: Correct. But she hasn’t?

Tom: She hasn’t. She’s covered Sublime’s 1997 highly-modified reggae cover.

Tim: That…is a lot better than I was worried it’d be, given how you sold it.

Tom: The world loves it. I’m driving through the US, it’s on the radio, the DJ’s describing it as the song of the summer. Positive review after positive review is cited in the Wikipedia article for it, and while some of that may be selective quoting due to the label’s PR team, those reviews were still written.

Tim: I wouldn’t disagree with so many of them – I think it’s alright. Doesn’t hugely push my buttons, but it’s a nice tropical vibe, which fits a current day summer style.

Tom: I thought it was a parody. I genuinely thought, ha, someone’s doing a really good Lana Del Rey impression and is using it on a completely inappropriate track. Even now, I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t just someone’s idea of a joke that got out of hand.

Saturday Flashback: I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME – Choke

“The chorus isn’t too bad, I’ll give you that.”

Tom: I know that “Utah-based indie band that sounds like early Britpop, doing a song that personifies Los Angeles and describes how the singer wants to choke the city to death” is well outside our wheelhouse, but given yesterday’s track, it seemed like a good time to talk about someone else who’s insisting on all caps.

Tim: Certainly is a heck of band name.

Tim: Oh. Oh, mate, why?

Tom: Mainly because — despite that introduction that places it outside our wheelhouse — that’s basically a schlager chorus, isn’t it?

Tim: Hmmm…yeah, actually, the chorus isn’t too bad, I’ll give you that.

EMIL HENROHN – BAPPAWEYA

“Emil is apparently a big fan of shouty capital letters.”

Tim: Formerly a member of the short-lived A*Base, Emil is apparently a big fan of shouty capital letters.

Tom: I dislike him immediately.

Tim: Which is peculiar because the rest of the song is really entirely lovely and not shouty at all.

Tom: Oh. You’re right, that’s really nice. It got me from the introduction, which is rare.

Tim: And that’s a nice piece of promo for the Lion King remake that’s out in a couple of weeks, isn’t it?

Tom: Eh?

Tim: It’s a little unfortunate that the underlying opening bits of each verse reminds me of I Just Can’t Wait To Be King, I suppose, but other than that (and perhaps because of that, to an extent), this sounds absolutely lovely for a nice sunny weekend.

Tom: I genuinely can’t hear that, which is weird because normally my brain works in overdrive to find those sorts of connections.

Tim: It’s the second song in three days with a nonsensical title, and this time I can’t find anything already in existence; I’m reliably informed that the lyrics imply it’s just a sort of nice snuggly feeling he gets when he gets up close and personal, how sweet.

Tom: I’m not generally on board with just inventing a nonsense word and writing a song about it, but… well, like you said, the result is entirely lovely.

Medina – Sir Det Ikk

“Curious message, but hey ho, we’ve got a decent song about it.”

Tim: Says Medina, in her native Danish, “Don’t Say It”.

Tom: Video editors haven’t got bored of the VHS filter yet, then. Anyway, sorry, yes. “Don’t Say It”.

Tim: More specifically, the message is ‘don’t tell anyone you think I’m amazing, particularly not your current girlfriend’. Curious message, but hey ho, we’ve got a decent song about it so I’m not complaining.

Tom: Well, we got a decent chorus, at least. The rest… well, it certainly is a song.

Tim: That is, after all, an absolutely lovely chorus, and while it may not have the big energy of a truly amazing pop song, it does have a delightful melody, sounding brilliant coming in after that pre-chorus gap (which I’ve checked, and it isn’t just there for the video). Three and a half minutes of delight, here, only slightly spoiled by thirty seconds of garbage on the front of the video.

Tom: And about five seconds in the middle, just to make sure you’ll play it through Spotify instead.

Tim: Well, obviously. And why wouldn’t you? The music’s fabulous.

Alyssandra – Himbo

“Now she’s sleeping in my bed, God I wish that you were dead.”

Tim: Remember when TLC made that song where they spent some of the time saying that they didn’t want no scrubs, but spent most of the time explaining exactly what a scrub is? Well, Alyssandra, formerly of Dolly Style, never really gets round to the explanation.

Tim: If you can’t guess it from the context, Urban Dictionary reports that it’s basically a male bimbo, which makes sense as a portmanteau, I guess. There are a number of good things about the lyrics, though, not least the line “now she’s sleeping in my bed, God I wish that you were dead”, which takes the prize of being my new favourite of at least the month so far.

Tom: It’s interesting how often you describe the same lyric as “favourite” and I describe it as “cringeworthy”. Which applies to the word ‘himbo’, the line ‘goofy in that Gucci dress’, ‘which bone in your body should I break first’, and ‘the himbo’s got to go’, which all appear within about fifteen seconds of each other. Which is a shame, because the composition and production are pretty good.

Tim: Some of those I will grant you are a little iffy, but it’s not all bad, not by a long way. As you said, musically it’s pretty good as well, and you might expect that given the talent on board: co-writing credit goes to none other than the great and glorious Max Martin, proving once and for all that, yep, Sweden’s still got it.

Kygo & Whitney Houston – Higher Love

“Recognisable, clearly inspired by, but also new. I can live with that, I guess.”

Tim: Slightly interesting history to this track: originally recorded by English singer Steve Winwood in the 1980s; covered by Whitney and made exclusively available as a bonus track on the Japanese edition of her 1990 I’m Your Baby Tonight.

Tom: I know the original well. And I always hear the chorus lyrics as “bring me a pie, oh love”, which means it’s basically ruined for me. And now you too, I guess.

Tim: Oh, thanks for that. Now remixed by Kygo, allegedly at the request of the Houston family, and first performed at New York Pride on Saturday.

Tim: Now, before I heard this I saw a couple of people discussing it on Twitter; one of them complaining that Kygo got rid of the middle eight, and I was immediately primed to dislike it. However, having heard this now without hearing the original, it doesn’t seem to be missing anything: sure, there isn’t one, but there’s more than enough variation present in what we do have for me to find it an enjoyable enough listen.

Tom: It reminds me of his Take On Me remix: recognisable, clearly inspired by, but also new. I can live with that, I guess.

Tim: One thing’s odd, though: although it does have a very different sound from the original, which is pretty much pure brass, it’s not all that Kygo-y, what with there being little in the way of tropical instruments. All in, though, it’s nice: a good song, nicely redone and released to a new audience. I approve.

Tom: And I can still hear “bring me a pie”, so I approve too.

Tim: Excellent.

AJR – 100 Bad Days

“It’s an odd one.”

Tom: I’m driving round the US at the moment, Tim, which means that as I scan through the radio dial I have to play the game of “is this just an uplifting pop track, or have I tuned into a Christian radio station”. Harder game than you might think.

Anyway, I keep hearing this on regular, secular radio stations, and it’s an odd one. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to be doing that bubbling-up thing, where it was released a few months ago, but somehow it’s finding its way to playlists.

Tim: Hmm. There’s a lot to dismantle here, not least that video, which…I mean, I can’t even begin to imagine how the designer came up with that collection of bizarre ideas.

Tom: Leaving the interesting visuals aside, there is a lot to dislike here. I should hate those chorus lyrics and their two-tone playground chant style, and I should particularly hate the weird distorted acapella vocal that leads into the chorus. I don’t like them — but neither do I hate them either, which for something like this is saying something. Even that odd xylophone-and-shout middle eight can’t take away from the fact that this song just works for me.

Tim: You know, I’m the same – there are those occasional bits where I’m thinking “hang on, I don’t like this, I want to turn it off”, but I don’t, and then it soon gets better. I think it’s because the annoying bits are brief, but the good stuff stays around, and flows throughout it, so even with a bad bit you’re still reminded of the previous goodness.

Tom: I like the triumphant sound. Plus, the chorus and post-chorus are incredibly catchy: I was humming this after one listen. And in the end, “we’ll laugh about this one day” is a really, really good message.

Tim: True. Very true indeed.

Saturday Flashback: Hogland & Vinil feat. AVA – We Don’t Care

“Everyone, I’ve good news!”

Tim: Everyone, I’ve good news! Turns out, the rest of Hogland’s output is at a similar level to that of Letting Go, that brilliant track we featured last week! Here’s one from a couple of years back to demonstrate that.

Tim: You see? As previously, great production, great featured vocals, an absolutely fantastic post-chorus breakdown, and even a good middle eight!

Tom: The introduction and first verse remind me of OneRepublic, and I mean that as a compliment. Of course, it very quickly goes in a different direction. I’m really not sure about those steel-drum-like synths that just repeat one phrase over and over again, though.

Tim: My only question, to be honest, is: why haven’t I heard this guy before? I really don’t know, but I’m very very glad I’ve heard him now.