I don’t watch/or care about any of these talent show programmes, so I’m going to totally ignore this fact for this review, as it should not effect anyone’s opinion of an album. If it does, you’re a snob and a cock.
I’ve also been informed that she acted in some films aimed at stupid women. This does not effect my opinion of this album.
This album is good. It’s not usually the kind of music I’d listen to, but there is a real mix of styles and influences on this album make it very listenable. At the heart this is your basic ‘Woman sings RnB’ album and we all know we’ve heard enough of them in the space of the last 50 years, but this is one of the better ones in recent years. I assume this is down to the long list of renound producers that were involved in the making of this album:
Ne-Yo, Stargate, Jim Beanz, Timbaland, Missy Elliott, T-Pain, Robin Thicke ,Diane Warren, Polow da Don, Brian Kennedy.
I really don’t want to enjoy the album, the genres listed being Pop, RnB and Soul, which shouldn’t be conducive of a successful album. Believe me, there are some god-awful moments on the album, ‘What’s Wrong (Go Away)’ is cringe-worthy bad. Overall though, these moments are forgiven and the album as a whole is very well performed and surprisingly endearing.
There’s a strong hip-hop vibe throughout the album, even in the non hop-hop based tracks and I think that this is what goes most of the way towards this being a good album. We’ve all heard this in male RnB, but it’s so much rarer in RnB from the fairer sex.
I get the feeling that Jennifer is going to be around for a while, and while I don’t know how strong her career is going to be in the UK, it wouldn’t surprise me if we heard a lot from her.
As I say, if you can look past the tracks that make you want to smash your head off the nearest brick wall, there is a lot of enjoyment to be had from this album.
Listen to this album: While wearing big high-heeled boots.
Rating: 76%
Extracts from ‘If this isn’t love’, ‘What’s Wrong (Go Away)’, ‘We Gon Fight’ and ‘And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going’
Pop punk is a genre that stops you ageing. Offspring, who should be 80 years old now, are still 21. So a band that came out before they had hair on their balls are doomed to be so for the rest of their life, or until they grow up and become boring (like Blink 182).
McFly, while being the better of the two pre-pube pop punk bands did lose a lot of credibility when covering Queen. They still are just filled to the brim with childish charm and fun, like a young Cousin at a family party that wants to sing a song for everyone, and you can’t help but encourage the poor thing.
Now I know that I’m not the target audience for this band, and, should I admit among my peers that I listen to the band and don’t puke up, they may put me in a big wicker man and set me on fire. I do still very much enjoy the album, if still in a slightly ironic way.
The worst songs on the album, are the ones where they try and be grown up and sincere. ‘POV’ is one such song and it really ruins my enjoyment of the album. Again, bringing it back to the Cousin simile, when (s)he’s finished performing and succeeding in making everyone happy, they go and throw a strop and ruin the rest of the day with their misbehaviour, that’s what McFly do with their ‘meaningful’ songs.
Thankfully, they quickly return to making thirteen year olds pogo about like beads on a trampoline.
The album is quite short, so you can fling it on, let it make you feel good and turn it off again before anyone finds out.
This album has also been given away free with the Daily Mail, and so at least old, small minded racists can listen to the music for free!
Overall, this is an album to steal from your kid sister when she gets bored of it.
Listen to this album: When you feel angry at grown up stuff.
74%
Extracts from ‘Do Ya’, ‘Smile’, ‘Corrupted’ and ‘The Last Song’
To begin with, the first track comes on and floods me with horrible repetition, bland beats and boring lyrics. Good start, I’m beginning to dread the next 78:17 of this Forever edition of the album. I think it’s called Forever, because that’s how long this album is feels like it takes to finish.
The rest of the album, I can see what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to make R&B less rubbish, by adding some of the more fashionable styles in hip-hop to his music, There’s flavours of every rap, hip-hop and R&B style in there all at once and it just sounds terrible.
It just sounds messy, like they’ve really tried too hard and the strain of doing the album made them really ill, but instead of taking time off, they rushed through it so that they could go to bed.
I really feel physically uncomfortable listening to this album and I really needed to struggle through it.It really wasn’t worth it
Listen to this album: Laying on marbles, it might make it a more comfrtable experience.
Rating:59%
Extracts from ‘Picture Perfect’, ‘Help Me’, ‘Nice’ and ‘Superhuman’
Until hearing this album, I was on the ‘NOT’ side of the impressed scale for Death Cab for Cutie, I thought that they were bland and pointless and stupid. There are songs on this album, that still fall into this category. After an interesting start to the album, I do not want to turn it off and am being sucked into this album, like a pea in a black hole, they decide to turn the suction to reverse with the rest of the album. At first I was hopeful, and thought that I was going to get some interesting variation on the standard indie by numbers format, especially when reading that the producer of the album say ” “thus far it’s pretty weird and pretty spectacular; lots of blood. It’s creepy and heavy…” I was really expectant, but all I am now is thoroughly disappointed and think that producer, Chris Walla is a liar.
There are some interesting points to the album, ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’ and ‘Grapevine Fires’ are different and refreshing in a dessert of never-ending blandness. I must admit, this is better than a lot of the indie that is around at the moment.
Listen to this album: While eating sand.
Rating: 69%
Extracts from ‘Bixby Canyon Bridge’, ‘No Sunlight’, ‘Grapevine Fires’ and Long Division’
The Ting Tings are a band that I had heard in passing and disregarded as annoying, but listening to the album it’s actually a lot of fun and I have totally rethunk my perception of them. Although they are still a bit annoying.
It’s simple, and nothing particularly new, but they are unashamed of doing something that’s fun and a bit stupid, but still has integrity.
Lead singer, Katie White sounds like she’s been educated to the age of 11, and then let loose in a theme park and made to write music. She also sounds like she can’t really form words properly and that the time she’s singing the words is the first time she’s seen them, but it’s an innocence you can’t really dislike, but at the same time, you don’t want to have to deal with it all the time.
It’s like when you’re looking after someone elses child and they’re chatting all the time and you humour the kid, and it’s okay, but if you actually had to deal with it all the time, it would get old, fast.
There is a sufficient level of diversity in the album, to keep your attention from one song to the next, and although the surface moves around throughout the album, it retains the foundations of the music throughout.
The best songs on the album are in the first half. They are catchy and fun and amusing, but ultimately annoying. Whereas the last part of the album is tedious and lazy, but not as annoying.
Listen to this album: Pogoing in quicksand.
Rating: 76%
Extracts from ‘That’s not my name’, ‘Fruit Machine’ and ‘We started nothing’
Real life ‘High School Musical’ without the comedy.
If you’ve seen High School Musical, and like the music for it’s own merit then you’ll like this album. It’s cheesy and sickening and I wasn’t really taken with it. I loved High School Musical, but more for the hillarious comedy way that everything was executed in the film. This album doesn’t have the comedy element to the music, and so it has much less to give me.
The male and female harmonies are really slick and the music is light and cheery, there’s nothing but fun on this album which can sometimes get a touch overwelming and annoying.
It’s an album you would buy for your seven year old daughter, but not something for anyone else, really. It’s just all a bit over the top.
If this album was food, it would chocolate with cream cheese on top…yummy.
Listen to this album: While riding a pogo stick
Rating: 61%
Extracts from ‘10000 Nights of Thunder’, ‘Into the Jungle’, ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘The Hours’
It’s quite hard to listen to this album and not feel optimistic. If you’re in the depths of autumn, you know that winter is coming but this album reminds you that spring is just getting it’s wellies on. The only exception to this is the song ‘My name is despair’, which, as you can probably tell, is less about the optimism and more about despair but don’t let this worry you, there’s still a pinch of optimism in there.
It’s a nice, safe album that wraps you up in a familiar blanket and puts you to bed with a drink of hot milk.
The tidy guitars and the soothing vocals surround you and give you a cuddle and a kiss on the forehead. The drums tuck you in at night and the bass keeps guard outside the door to protect you from anything scary and unfamiliar.
The album is very well presented and should be a good companion for you.
Listen to this album: Tucked up in bed.
Rating: 82%
Extracts from ‘Mis-takes’, ‘A day for letting go’, ‘My name is despair’ and ‘This is the end’
Because she’s not and it’s quite embarrassing to see her trying to be cool and failing. It’s like when your mum tries to take an interest in pop music, or your dad trying to dance at a wedding. You just cringe and feel a huge amount of embarrassment for them.
Yes, she used to be shocking and abrasive, but we’ve seen it all now and there’s nothing left for her to do but shut up and go away.
She obviously does it because she enjoys it, and I respect that, I just find it hard to believe she actually thinks she does it well.
On this album, she’s just surrounded herself with rap artists and I do believe that the people who will buy this album, will do so, not for her, but for all the other people on the album. Does this make her the winner?
Everything on the album does have a degree of success, plenty of the songs are quite catching and I find myself bopping along to the music, but seeing where Madonna came from it just feels like such a fall from grace.
Listen to this album: While being a mutton dressed as lamb.
Rating: 67%
Extracts from ‘Miles Away’, ‘Heartbeat’ and ‘Incredible’
A jaunty sound, a glamorous persona and a fake punk attitude this band do seem to be trying to mimic Madonna, also, the singer sounds a bit like her.
Just looking at the band name and the title of the album, I imagined either whining girls complaining about boys, or militant feminists who think that all boys should have their balls cut off because one once broke up with one of them. Thankfully neither of these things are true, but unfortunately it’s all a bit mindless, shouty and fake punk. They do have a nice mix of pop songs, shouty punk and slow and weird, which all indie girl bands need to have nowadays, but it all seems very contrived to me.
There are a few nuggets of wisdom in the mix here, “Round the Hairpin” is a very interesting track and I did very much enjoy it, although through most of an album is a muted vibrating noise like the sound a mobile phone makes when it’s on silent mode. This was rather distracting. “I like the boys” is quite good, although I lost interest in the last minute of the song and wandered off to see if my legs would unscrew.
There isn’t a song on here that I thought was bad enough to embarrass and name and shame it here, but much of the album was of a sub-standard.
The most annoying song of the album was “Here comes the serious bit” repeating the lyric over and over again, without even approaching the subject matter indicated by the song title and lyric left me rather unfulfilled.
There are a couple a skit pieces before some of the songs and these are by far the best bits of the album. Totalling approximately 7 seconds in total. Well worth the cost of the album.
Extracts from “Century”, “I like the boys” and “Round the Hairpin”
“Weekend Without Makeup” from the album “Someone to Drive You Home”
Listen to this album: On a motorbike wearing high heels
From ‘them who did loveshack’ and the ‘ones who did Rock Lobster that was on family guy’ comes a new album, with more cheese than a cheese pizza with extra cheese and more cheese being eaten by Bob Fosse.
Mr and Mrs Talky-Shouterson are back!
It just fun and filled with shouty mayhem.
“Keep doing what we’re doing ’cause we’re doing it right. Keep doing what we’re doing ’cause it’s what we like” and this is true. I do like it. It’s a style that only the B52s seem to be able to perform well and they continue to do so. There’s nothing shockingly innovative about this album in contrast to their others, but because nobody else is even trying to do the same things, it’s still sounding as refreshingly new as it did when they first came out in the 80s.
Listen to this album: With a huge hat on
Rating: 84%
Extracts from ‘Ultraviolet’ and ‘ Deviant Ingredient’
