Tag: Eric Turner

Eric Turner vs Avicii – Dancing In My Head

Count The Typos! (Contains masterful but truly appalling pun.)

Tim: You may remember Eric Turner as the guy who added excessive inhalation to Written In The Stars a couple of years back.

Tom: Oh, but what a voice he had – if you ignore the inhalations, it sounded beautiful.

Tim: Now, he’s breathing less, but to compensate for losing that annoyance he’s got a whole new one. So let’s have a game of Count The Typos!

Tim: It doesn’t get off to a good start – a misspelling in the first line is hardly what you’re after – and then we have missing apostrophes, question marks in silly places, and all sorts of other stuff to irritate the pedants.

Tom: I actually switched to another tab – the bouncy hyperactive camera movements and graphics were a bit too much. I couldn’t properly listen to the music at the same time.

Tim: I quite liked that part of it, to be honest.

However, we’re not here to criticise that (not that that’s ever stopped us before, but anyway), we’re here to do the music. Which is good.

Tom: It is, although crikey, it does seem to go on a bit. The melody is something that a primary school kid could sing easily – perhaps a bit too simple, instead of soulful.

Tim: Simple, perhaps, but that does make it a catchy chorus with a great backing to it (though that was probably a given).

Tom: True. It sounds like Aviici’s regular style, and that’s a good thing. Eric Turner’s voice is lost among the instrumentation though.

Tim: The lyrics of said chorus work well as a slightly weird metaphor to the ex and proper instructions to the crowd in front of him when he’s doing this live, which is presumably the point. The only thing that I don’t like (well, why? wouldn’t we finish a positive review with a negative point) is the ‘cursed’ bit – if he let her go, as he tells us, then as far as I’m concerned he’s only got himself to blame. Foolish man.

Tom: You know what I’d like to see? A concert with Eric Turner, Frank Turner and Tina Turner singing together. I’m not sure why.

Tim: That would be interesting, but what I’d really like is a week of X Factor dedicated to those artists, because that way Bonnie Tyler could come on at the start and introduce it as the Turner Round.

Tinie Tempah – Written in the Stars

Tim Jeffries, ruining hip hop for other people since 2010!

Tom: I know it’s not the normal style of music we review, but the new single by Tinie Tempah is bloody amazing. It’s released on 27th September, and it’s called Written in the Stars – not to be confused with the old Elton John and Leanne Rimes track. There are three reasons why I like it:

  • Tinie Tempah actually shouts “let’s go” just before he starts.
  • The hook is lush. I don’t mean that in the slang sense, I mean that in the same way you’d describe a tree. It’s a genius bit of complicated, layered, melodramatic major-key pop genius with a synthesised string section behind it.
  • He namedrops Malorie Blackman, the young adult science fiction writer. I had to listen to that line again just to make sure I heard it right.

His earlier stuff seemed gimmicky, but this isn’t: it’s a full grown-up British rap track, and it deserves to go worldwide.

Tim: Good: the music. Perhaps even ‘very good’. The chorus is excellent, and while the rapping isn’t my thing I could happily have this on in the background. Eric Turner is definitely someone I may look into at some point in the future.

Bad: the lyrics. The second half of the first verse and the second verse seem to give a vague ‘look at me, I started low down, but I’ve worked my way up slowly but surely’ autobiographical idea, showing us he’s a good guy, he’s had stuff to work though; let’s think about him and feel for him. This would be great – it could even be slightly motivational for school kids who are feeling down on their luck. Except it can’t, because he starts out by more or less saying ‘look at me, I’m flipping awesome’, Flo Rida-style, which makes him seem like an arrogant prick and kind of destroys any desire I have to get to know him. I’m sure you’re not, Tinie – in fact, you’re probably the lovely guy we see in the rest of the song – but you’ve ruined it. Sorry.

Horrendous: one lyric in particular. ‘Was leaded astray’. I don’t care if it was to make some (not particularly apparent) point about a bad education or something: it’s awful, and no excuse will change that. You’ve had enough dodgy stresses elsewhere that ‘I was led astray’ would work just as well and not be massively annoying.

Like I said, I could more than happily have this on in the background. The music’s brilliant, and I can’t really fault it. If I have to listen to it and pay attention to it, though: sorry, but no.

Tom: Damn. Now you mention it, it’s like the spell is broken. That ‘brap brap’ in the first verse annoys the hell out of me, come to think of it, along with some of the dodgy stresses you mentioned. It’s a shame because the rest of it really is so good.

I tried hunting for other music by the same team, but the producer’s name is simply “Ishi” – which is ungooglable – and I really can’t find anything else about this particular Eric Turner online. That’s annoying because I want an album that sounds like this… only without Tinie Tempah.

Sorry, Tinie.

Tim: Hurrah! Tim Jeffries, ruining hip hop for other people since 2010!