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[Mark.]

from popjustice

It's Britannia, bitch
Story filed Wednesday, 12 November 2008
The Britannia High album isn'r half bad. In fact, to move away from fractions and into percentages, it is precisely 58% bad. Mostly bad, you could say, although this also means that almost half of it is good.

It's not really like a proper pop album because a proper pop album tends to keep all their good bits within certain songs (usually the first three songs and the sixth or seventh), whereas Britannia High happily revels in songs with terrible intros, terrible first verses, terrible bridges and then AMAZING CHORUSES, or songs with woeful choruses but GREAT MIDDLE EIGHTS.

To use an analogy which makes more sense in our heads than it will written down, what we basically have here is an 18 track saucepan full of chicken heads and unidentified liquids which, with a bit of 'reducing down', could have ended up being a nice tasty 10 track soup.

It's hard to imagine how this lack of focus has happened, considering how few songwriters were involved with these songs. We mean, they've only roped in...

Matt Prime
Bryn Christopher
Elliot Kennedy
Gary Barlow
James Bourne
And...

Karen Poole
Jem Godfrey
Martin Terefe
Martin Sutton
Andy Hill
And...

Gary Go
Steve Lipson
Nina Woodford
Phil Thornalley
Chris Braide
And...

Steve Robson
Christopher Nell
Francis White
Steve Mac
Wayne Hector
And...

Mark Owen
Ina Wroldsen
Bill Padley
Sarah Osuji
Hannah Thomson

And...

Alana Hood
Lucie Silvas
Guy Chambers

You've got to admit, that's a pretty impressive selection of (mostly) British songwriting talent, although you also have to remember that most of them, like a lot of other pop songwriters, have spent the last eight years living off the royalties from b-sides to 2001 Top 75 chart non-smashes so when someone comes along and says, "hello, we are putting together a seemingly endless album full of pop stuff, have you got any spare songs knocking around?" the phonecall is probably cut short when the songwriter goes to their demo cupboard, opens it, and is crushed under the weight of eight million unrecorded songs avalanching onto their head.

Among our favourite songs on the album - and it's not all quite as jazz hands as the chronic TV show suggests - are 'Weight Of The World', 'Without You', and 'Do It All Over Again'. (Bizarrely, the album seems to have almost been sequenced in reverse with most of the best songs in the later stages.) We also like the 'Changing Man' chorus...

...which means that 'Changing Man' is today's Song Of The Day. Anyway the album's going for £7.99 on Amazon so it's probably worth a while if you've got, er, £7.99.