Saturday Flashback: Ida Corr – Christmas Time

“Let us love, let us live, let us heal the broken heart.”

Tim: As necessitated by December, it’s Christmas Christmas Christmas for the flashbacks, and here’s one from 2016. We never featured it at the time as her label originally only uploaded the first 90 seconds to YouTube, but fortunately, it’s all there now. How fun!

Tom: Mm. I’m not so sure about ‘fun’.

Tim: Let’s face it, Tom: Britain right now is kind of garbage. This bloody election, which initially I was actually excited for, has turned into such a festering dungheap that my preferred outcome would be everybody losing and the whole country being governed by Miss Jenn off High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, who is absolutely my favourite person in the world right now.

Tom: If our reader is wondering, then no, I couldn’t be bothered to Google that reference.

Tim: However, as Ida points out: it’s Christmas time, it’s around. Let us love, let us live, let us heal the broken heart. It’s time to forgive, and get a brand new start. And right now, I’m very up for that. The fact that this message has been brought to us by a fairly decent dance pop track with all the jingles of festivity just adds to that. Let’s feel good.

Tom: I think you’re being overly generous there: I woke up for the middle eight, but other than that, this just seems rather dull. It’s repetitive both within each chorus, and over the whole track — and yes, that can be a good thing, but in this case it’s mostly just putting me to sleep.

That’s not the Ida’s fault: she’s performing it perfectly well. I even tried bumping the playback speed up to 1.25x — it was an improvement, but it’s still just think it’s, well, a bit of a boring song.

Oliver Heldens feat. Ida Corr – Good Life

“That’s a surprisingly retro track.”

Tim: Oliver’s a Dutch DJ who’s been going a few years; Ida’s off Denmark and has been going 14 years but has had a quiet patch recently; we’ve now got this.

Tom: And it’s a tie-in with a video game. We don’t see that all too often, but there’s (surprisingly) some good recent history, there.

Tom: Well, that’s a surprisingly retro track; a lot of those synths and rhythms could fit into the late 90s.

Tim: Yeah, a whole lot of it’s good, but it’s got one massive flaw: that line that first appears 34 seconds in. That exact same vocal sound and possibly the same notes as well, has been used in a very prolific song from a while back – it took me a long time to place it, and no small amount of “aaaargh, WHAT IS THAT?”, but it’s The Time Is Now.

It didn’t stop me appreciating everything else about this track – using strings for the main line was a fantastic choice, bringing to it a sense of urgency that I can’t imagine much else doing. Just a shame about that one line – different vocal style, or a different rhythm, or some melody variation, and this’d be great. As it is, though, I just can’t enjoy it as much as I want to.