Tomine Harket – Breathing Better

“There’s a lot going on in that villa that is summed up nicely by pop music.”

Tim: A song about self-appreciation; as the pre-chorus puts it, “I’ve nothing left to prove, I’m way too good for you.” The chorus takes it somewhere else, though the overall gist is still there.

Tom: If that surname sounds familiar, it’s because this is the daughter of A-Ha’s Morten Harket.

Tim: It is, and to be honest I’m wondering if he’d approve of the raunchiness on display here. I’m not sure we’ve heard this particular variant of the lyrical genre previously, but I guess there are many, many couplings out there where it could apply.

Tom: “I know I touch myself better than you.” Harsh, but ultimately a valid complaint.

Tim: Hell, Laura and Wes on Love Island could pretty much have had this as their theme tune during last night’s relationship bloodbath. (Three out of seven couples broke up. THREE out of SEVEN!)

Tom: I… I’m going to have to watch this at some point, aren’t I? It’s a running joke now.

Tim: What can I say, there’s a lot going on in that villa that is summed up nicely by to pop music. Musically it’s perfectly serviceable as a piece of modern pop music: all the right sounds, vocal noise and synthy stuff in the background, laid out nicely in pretty much the right order.

Tom: Yep, I was expecting to dislike this for some reason — just a bit slow in the voices — but damn if that return from the middle eight didn’t sell me on the whole track.

Tim: Hell of an annoying music video, though. Just, show us what’s happening, please.

George Ezra – Shotgun

Tim: You have, Tom, on multiple occasions, taken the opportunity to reword lyrics to songs in an attempt to ruin them for me.

Tom: I have, and most of them are too rude to repeat here.

Tim: Indeed – particularly your variant of ‘Cut To The Feeling’. But allow me, please, to actually improve this fairly good song even further. You see, there’s a pause in the fourth quarter of the chorus, press play and you’ll hear it.

Tom: George Ezra doesn’t look like a pop star in this video, does he? He looks like a student who’s doing a lip-sync video for the first year of his Media Studies degree. You’re right about the song, though, that’s a catchy track.

Tim: Certainly is. Now you’ve heard that gap, play it again. And edit that to ‘…underneath the HOT SUN, feeling like a SOME-ONE, [BEAT] with YOUR MU-UM.”

Tom: Hahahahaha yes, that’s staying in my head.

Tim: You’re very welcome.

Aqua – Rookie

“You probably have several questions about Aqua releasing a new track.”

Tim: You probably have several questions about Aqua releasing a new track. The answer to every single one of those is, “YES, so listen to it.”

Tim: Most people think of Aqua, they think of the Aquarium album – Cartton Heores, Barbie Girl, Doctor Jones, that era. They don’t think of the early 2010s Megalomania era, and while it’s a shame, it’s unsurprising – Aqua were never fashionable as a standard pop group, only as purveyors of somewhat novelty singles, so no-one wanted to hear standard pop. Nonetheless, those standard songs were good, very much like this is.

Tom: It’s good, isn’t it? Better than it has any right to be.

Tim: We’ve a decent la-la-la-la-la hook, a nice combination of René’s and Lene’s vocals, which sound much better together than they really ought to, and a bit of rudeness thrown in for the grown-ups.

Tom: I’m not convinced by that la-la-la-la-la: opening a chorus with that always makes me think they’ve run out of ideas. And I’ll admit that first grunt from René surprised me: both vocalists have voices that it takes a while to get used to. But by the end of the track, yep, I was on board with this.

Tim: All in all, this is a great track, and a lot better a one than many groups come back with after a five-year break. No idea if there’s a new album coming out, but here’s hoping.

Saturday Flashback: Tom Walker – Leave A Light On

“As heard on the Sony Bravia OLED TV advert”

Tim: Now, thanks to one particular romantic TV show, I’ve started watching proper TV recently, with adverts and everything.

Tom: Event television is still popular, and when all your friends are talking about it online and in real-time, sometimes it’s necessary.

Tim: And there’s one single that’s getting advertised a lot, slightly weirdly. Because BACK IN MY DAY, tracks were advertised as “the number one hit” or “platinum-selling”. Not really, like this one is, as “as heard on the Sony Bravia OLED TV advert”.

Tom: How quickly we forget.

Tim: Good LORD, I’m fairly sure that’s by far and away the most obscure reference ever made on this side. Good work.

Tim: Good song, though. And, now I’ve looked it up, not a bad advert. I’m thinking I need a new TV, Tom. Do I need a new TV?

Tom: No.

Tim: I need a new TV.

Peg Parnevik – Loafers

“This is not a healthy relationship.”

Tim: So there’s a guy on Love Island this year called Adam, who’s a complete slag, leaving one girl as soon as another hot one comes in; he’s three girls in after just two weeks, but the girls keep going with it because he’s fit af.

Tom: That is a very ‘you’ sentence, Tim.

Tim: Thank you – I like to keep things on brand round here. But anyway, Peg’s basically written a song about being one of those girls.

Tim: I mean, where to start? “Never cleans a single dish, at least the guy is well-equipped” kind of sums it up, and, you know, I can sympathise with that, both the reasoning and the overall picture. After all, if you’re happy where you are, it’s hard to move on, however unsustainable you know it will end up being in the long run.

Tom: “He’s not cool, but it’s easy.” This is not a healthy relationship, but I suspect it’s relatable to a lot of people.

Tim: And when that’s all wrapped up in such fantastic music – the chorus is just wonderful, with that melody underneath it, and you’ve got the voice bringing a lovely Dua Lipa vibe to it and the instrumentation bringing a…well, also quite a Dua Lipa vibe.

Tom: Yeah, I was going to say.

Tim: In fact this is basically a Dua Lipa track, and a really really good one at that. Love it. Almost as much as I love Adam.

Tom: Mate.

Em Appelgren feat. Valence – Wicked

“A strange selection of instruments in here, aren’t there?”

Tim: Em Appelgren, a Swedish singer; Valence, an Australian producer; one question: are you up for it?

Tim: So for the first eight or nine seconds I was all “pineapples out, then”, but then that guitar twang hit, and I wondered if it was about to go a bit country on us. It wasn’t of course, but it did get me wondering what tropical country pop might sound like. Probably fairly awful, really, so let’s move on.

Tom: There are a strange selection of instruments in here, aren’t there? Synth pads, that country twang sample, and what sounds like the ‘whistle’ MIDI instrument off a cheap early 90s keyboard. It does sort-of work together, I suppose.

Tim: I quite like this track, largely because of the lyrics and how the unabashedly disgraceful lines like “join me if you’re open-minded” contrast slightly with the first verse’s projection of her as really quite a nice responsible person.

Tom: Bold choices in the middle eight: both the talking part and going acapella for a while. If you’re doing dance-pop that’s a long time to not have anything to dance to.

Tim: True, I suppose, though once that’s worn off it’s turned into very much a standard dance pop banger of a track, particularly around the end of the track when everything’s just chucked in together and stirred all over the place; I guess there’s nothing wrong with that, though. I’ll take it.

Elina – Wild Enough

“A piano ballad, about which I have multiple thoughts.”

Tim: Debut single from someone who’s previously stayed behind the scenes doing the writing; it’s a piano ballad, about which I have multiple thoughts.

Tom: That… is indeed a piano ballad. We don’t normally talk about those, because my reaction is likely to be even more ambivalent than usual. Which it is.

Tim: So, as a piano ballad, it’s good. The melody’s good, the vocal’s flawless, and I really do like the “wild enough, wild enough, wild enough” refrain, because it gets the message across without sounding irritatingly repetitive. HOWEVER: this just isn’t, well, wild enough. I get the point of the lyrics – that she is decidedly not a wild person, which is why they can’t be together, and yes the song really really fits it. But you know what’d fit it more? A string section.

Tom: Oh. Yes, you’re absolutely right. Yes, that’s what this is missing.

Tim: A beautiful, rolling understated string section, coming in after the first chorus, adding a little bit more emotion and bringing a lot more to the song. It got me in mind of Mika’s Happy Ending, and how outstanding a song that is, and how it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much without the violins underneath. This track is good, but it could be so much more.

Ivy Rei – Say It To My Face

“Well, that could be a lot worse.”

Tim: 300,000 followers on Instagram, so what else is there to do but start a pop career?

Tom: I mean, literally anything else, but sure, let’s go for this.

Tom: Well, that could be a lot worse.

Tim: Couldn’t it just? It is, pleasingly, a lot better than our previous Insta-celeb’s debut, despite Ivy only having a tenth the size of his follower count. In fact, I’d say its good enough that we can ignore the Instagram background and go straight for standard singer, albeit with a nice quick fanbase advantage.

Tom: Yes: both in terms of the production and the vocals. Given the chequered history of influencers-turned-pop-stars, this has turned out pretty well.

Tim: Strong guitar work, strong vocal work, strong electronic fiddly bits in the post-chorus. I have very few criticisms of this – really just one: more from the middle eight, please, or if you’re going to keep that dip then you’d be better returning with something bigger than what you had previously. Other than, though: top notch.

Dotter – Heatwave

‘Every part of it is just, “yes, this is what I want to hear in a song”.’

Tim: Follow-up to the Melodifestivalen entry Cry, with no small number of similarities.

Tim: So I really like this song – pretty much every part of it. Thing is, I don’t really have much to say about why I like it, though not in the sense that it’s generic, because it isn’t at all. It’s simply that every part of it is just, “yes, this is what I want to hear in a song”.

Tom: That’s because your brain wants to listen to You’ve Got The Love.

Tim: Hmmm…maybe…ish…

Tom: Okay, that’s a little harsh, the melody line is at least somewhat different, but this sounds like someone’s just applied the KLF’s Manual to Florence and the Machine and got this out of it.

Tim: The vocal is good, the instrumentation behind it is very good, and all in all it’s just…good. Really good.

Tom: You’re not wrong there, though. It’s not a bad track.

Tim: I feel I should be saying more, but I can’t really think of anything that needs saying.

Saturday Flashback: Melanie C – I Turn To You

“TOTAL. BANGER.”

Tim: So a couple of weeks back some random on Twitter posted that

https://twitter.com/Swank0cean/status/1001667827697422336

Tom: The thankfully forgotten Gym & Tonic by Spacedust.

Tim: Oof, blimey.

Tom: Yeah, never mind. What did you get?

Tim: This TOTAL. BANGER.

Tom: I had forgotten quite how much NINETIES SYNTH there was in that. Actually, I’d forgotten most of it, but especially the NINETIES SYNTH.

Tim: Isn’t it fabulous? Now, depending on how you frame it, you can logically make a case for several of the Spice Girls to have had the most solo success, with the possible exception of Mel B.

Tom: Harsh. Judge on America’s Got Talent, presenter in Australia, television host in the UK? In terms of how many people around the world would recognise her in the street, I reckon she’s probably in the lead right now.

Tim: Ooh, hmm, maybe a bit harsh, then, I guess.

Tom: How about the others?

Tim: Geri Halliwell had the most number 1s, Victoria Beckham’s married to, well, David Beckham, and Emma Bunton’s got a steady gig on Capital Radio. On the other hand, Mel C has three of the top 5 best-selling solo singles, and came out with Northern Star, an album with one of the best killer:filler ratios ever; it is LOVELY, with the title track being criminally underappreciated at the time.

Tom: Or, you might say, even now.

Tim: And then there was this, a BRILLIANT dance pop number that I just couldn’t get enough of at the time, and to be honest still can’t now I’ve started playing it again. YES to this defining my life.