PICK OF THE WEEK
Tourist Feat Years & Years
Illuminate (Tourist/Polydor)
What Will Phillips, AKA Tourist, has done here is nothing new or innovative but, like a perfectly gooey boiled egg, there’s a satisfactory level of shining competency on show. That may sound like a bit of a backhanded compliment, but it isn’t: Illuminate does basically everything right. The drums are sharp, the melody is galactic, the chorus is sweet… the only thing letting it down is the vocal, which has a touch of cynical Sam Smith-ing about it, but that’s negligible. It’s a skill to craft these things so cohesively. Appreciate it, like a novelty whittled nude man in a European market.
U2
Every Breaking Wave (Island)
Chances are that you’ve already heard U2’s latest single Every Breaking Wave after they stuffed it unceremoniously into your iTunes earlier this year. It was a bit like someone randomly bringing a plate of cold Heinz Macaroni & Cheese to your desk and having to complete an assault course in the rain before you could bin it. Anyway, Every Breaking Wind is the sort of song you can hear a thousand times and still have no memory of how it goes.
Gwen Stefani
Baby Don’t Lie (Mad Love/Interscope)
This is just about one of the strangest pieces of music I’ve heard all year. Yes, I know 2015 is only a week old, but it’s going to be hard to out-weird Baby Don’t Lie, a poppy dancehall track made by a 45-year-old white woman whose voice veers, at times, into Vic Reeves’s “club singer” impression. And the rest of it is bizarrely European, Caribbean and Middle Eastern all at once. The whole thing is a peyote-trip hellscape of bad ideas.
Indiana
Only The Lonely (Sony)
If the music biz is a large, amorphous blob-monster, disintegrating musicians in one of its 15 evil, acidic stomachs, then Indiana is already on her way down the colon. There is absolutely nothing distinctive about this song. I’ve listened to it seven times now and can’t muster even a small compliment for its ferociously mediocre stylings, its limp, mealy-mouthed Lorde-esque topline, and its just-about-produced backing track that’s probably already being recycled for some other poor young singer that Sony will try and clean the meat from and poop out into a useless little pile of disappointment.
Kant vs MK
Ey Yo (MK remix) (Warner Music)
Marc Kinchen and Kant nearly made a decent tune here, even though it’s a remix, but a superfluous vocal gets in the way. You don’t need whole verses of rapping on a house track – people don’t listen to house for bars and bars of lyrics, especially with that pitched-down nonsense, which sounds like the man is in a permanent state of just being about to belch. Not a bad effort otherwise, though. I give it a respectable three 808 cowbells out of a possible five.
