Tag: Amy Diamond

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.

Amy Diamond – Sommaren Är Här

“Doesn’t the concept make you want to vomit?”

Tim: Charity single! Ask me what charity it’s for.

Tom: What charity’s it for, Tim?

Tim: Not a clue. Something to do with children, though, and you’ll be delighted when you find out how I’ve deduced that.

Tom: Oh, I don’t like the way this is going.

Tim: That’s right, it’s CHILDREN’S CHORUS TIME! It’s also, joyously and sickeningly, a song with lyrics written by said children, whose title means “Summer Is Here”. Doesn’t the concept make you want to vomit?

Tom: Yes. Yes it does.

Tim: AND YET: doesn’t the song make that impossible, because it’s so lovely? Said kiddy-written lyrics are as harmless, happy and, let’s face it, banal as you’d expect, talking about fishing with grandpa, eating ice cream, walking the dog and dancing to Moves Like Jagger.

Tom: I did have to go back and check that I’d actually heard those words and that it wasn’t my brain making Swedish words sound almost-English. Nope. “Moves Like Jagger” is in there. I’m assuming that “um te um te um ti um” doesn’t need translating.

Tim: I don’t think so, no. Now, you (Tom and/or reader) may be feeling grouchy–

Tom: I am. Believe me, I am. I wasn’t before I heard this song.

Tim: –but do this for me: force a smile on your face, listen to the chorus, sway your body from side to side and SING ALONG. If that doesn’t keep the smile on your face then you’re just an EVIL PERSON who HATES CHILDREN.

Tom: Hey, you don’t have to be evil to hate children!

Tim: No, but you’d have to be evil not to smile and hate children not to like this song; ergo, an EVIL PERSON who HATES CHILDREN.

Do you want that to be you? DO YOU? No. So BLOODY WELL SMILE.

Tom: You can’t see me, but I’m flicking the Vs at you so much right now.

Tim: Fine. I will console myself with the fact that your earlier protest made it seem like you were fine with people thinking that you hate children, as long as they don’t think you’re evil as well.

Tom: I actually am fine with that.

Tim: And I think that proves my point.

Amy Diamond – Ready To Fly

Badly sampled Coldplay, repeat until fade.

Tom: A suggestion has flooded into our mailbox! It’s from Roger in Sweden, who read our review of Amy Diamond’s track and wrote in with this alternative:

Roger writes:

“This is the only completely new track from Amy Diamond’s Greatest Hits album. IMHO it is much better than Perfect and the other records they use to promote the album. I have no idea why they do not use this – can you give me some insight – please?!”

Tom: Well, I reckon it’s because it’s not that good. The trouble with Greatest Hits collections is that the odds of the ‘extra tracks’ being classics are pretty slim – Robbie Williams’ recent “Shame” being a notable exception.

Tim: Odd, that, isn’t it? You’d have thought they’d want to make them extra-special so they stand out on their own.

Tom: The backing sounds like they’ve badly sampled Coldplay; and it seemed to settle into ‘repeat until fade’ half way through the song.

Tim: Yes, and my word, does that result in an earworm and a half. I first heard it about twelve hours ago and it’s still going.

Tom: And then it didn’t end properly! It just kind of fizzled out.

Tim: BUT, it did get a bit fun going from side to side. That made me happy.

Tom: Could do better, I think.

Amy Diamond – Only You

It doesn’t help that my brain keeps singing Atomic Kitten’s ‘Whole Again’ over the top of it.

Tim: Question: How do you make a British person think it’s Christmas?

Tom: Put “The Great Escape” on the telly?

Tim: Is one option. The other is to play ‘Only You’, a song that has, much like The Power of Love, been on every single Christmas compilation for the past twenty-odd years despite having no relevance to Christmas whatsoever, all because of a December number one (in this case, a version by The Flying Pickets in 1983).

Tom: My word, that’s an awkward video. It doesn’t help that my brain keeps singing Atomic Kitten’s ‘Whole Again’ over the top of it.

Tim: YES! I couldn’t work out what it was – I kept thinking Eternal Flame, but then listened to that and realised it wasn’t. Anyway, this version is by Amy Diamond, who had her first single back in 2005 and is now releasing her version to coincide with a Greatest Hits album at the grand old age of 18. Yes. Eighteen.

Tom: She has been in the charts since she was twelve, though; that’s almost certainly more justified than, say, Blue’s compilation album.

Tim: I know – I watched her first video the when I found this, and it was just weird.

Tim: I’ll be honest: this doesn’t do a huge amount for me. Formulaically, it’s all there – calm instrumentation soon backed up by a dancey beat, the soothing voice, the gentle key change that prompts an immediate reaction of ‘Ooh, that was nice. Right, what was I doing?’ There’s just not enough oomph, I guess – there almost seems to be a lack of humanity in it.

Tom: I got a completely different vibe from that key change: I instinctively grimaced at it. It’s just sugar piled on top of sugar.

Tim: Actually, I know exactly what it is. Anecdote time: when I was about ten, I played the piano. I was entirely unsuited to it, with no real music talent at all. However, I was good at the theory stuff – time signatures, various voices, cadences and all that malarkey. So I took the grade tests and everything, and at the end of each one you had to compose a short piece as well, and due to the aforementioned lack of musical talent I would just write what I’d been taught was a good piece – beats in all the right places, harmonic chords, good endings, the lot. And this song (or at least the production on it) is exactly that – nothing added, nothing taken away, just exactly what there needs to be. Except, well, there needs to be more.

Tom: I’d argue there needs to be less. About three minutes less, to be exact.