Five men, twenty women, tangential relevance at best to the music scene in 2014 AND ALL THE BETTER FOR IT

 

COMING SOON

*_*

(here for LA ROUX domination. Don't let me down..~)

Looking forward to this :wub:

(here for LA ROUX domination. Don't let me down..~)

i will be letting you down (but gently)

Commencing prior to the countdown with an honourable mention for this slice of REDUCTIVE TITS OUT JOY

 

i'm expecting at least a little TITS TO THE WIND *.*

babe, we're a bunch of gays who listen to cheap eurotrance and strictly female power vox, acts such as adelen, indila and sofia marinova.

 

QUITE RIGHT TOO

QUITE RIGHT TOO

i see you edited that quickly

 

it was a celebratory I AM WHAT I AM statement tyvm *.*

14 ;; Kelis; Sal Masekela, 'Bless The Telephone'

 

 

'It's strange the way you make me feel with just a word or two

I'd like to do the same for you.'

 

I can't decide if it's ironic or poignantly fitting that Kelis had her greatest triumph on this year's album Food with a love letter to stability. Kelis - pop's greatest journeyman figure, flitting magpie-like between genres, tones, styles and moods with each separate album, and possibly the only figure in mainstream music with more of a claim to reinvention than Madonna in a shorter space of time. The case for it being poignantly fitting is fairly strong. Bless The Telephone is dedicated to that moment of reliable solace in a changing world, two minutes and thirty seconds of layered warmth in a bed of soft guitar harmonies and Horlicks vocals - that call connecting you to something stable and unchanging regardless of what else is going on (a sentiment all the more appealing to someone who moved halfway across the country to high pressured job in a city of strangers a third of the way through 2014).

 

Moreover, the case for Bless... being poignantly fitting comes in that in a bizarre way it represents Kelis herself within pop's tapestry - consistent for her inconsistency. Kelis has become something of a quadrennial reliable with each reinvention the last eight years - from the punked out ratchet-before-it-was-ratchet figure of Kelis Was Here spitting attitude over Bangladesh and Max Martin productions (with the notable exception of Lil Star, Bless...'s closest sonic relative in Kelis's back cat) to the imperious dancefloor ice queen of Flesh Tone, reliably scoring one hit from each barely-selling album (and nothing thereafter); each album at first glance slotting neatly within prevailing pop trends at the time, yet each subtly a half-step away twist on those trends. To the casual observer Acapella would've seemed to just herald 'Kelis does Guetta', as everyone and their dog (though she prefers to be known as 'Miss Rowland') was doing at the time. Anybody listening to Flesh Tone in full would've found a full homage to the San Francisco house scene and the works of Donna Summer, at once a very different beast to the mindless four-to-the-floor Ibiza pleasing trend that was later to evolve into the EDM LOLpop scourge that dominated the beginning of the decade.

 

Yet this is where the case for irony comes in - Bless... and indeed Food represent the first break from Kelis offering her own twist on each era's prevailing trend (and notably for the first time since 2001's Wanderland, Food didn't have a single UK hit attached to it). No progressive deep house or the dubstep demos of 2013 here, but instead a back-to-basics soul record rooted in the comforts of the kitchen, openly revelling in a lack of concern for trendchasing or commercial performance - possibly the consequence of this being Kelis's first album unbound by a major label contract, as it's obvious from the sheer affection this record drips with that this is an album she's wanted to make for some time. Irony probably wins the day, given Kelis's dedication to stability represents her most inconsistent move of all.

sadly i do not like this song :(

i do not like you

but i love you :(

Gorgeous start, the only thing I liked from that album actually.

but i love you :(

it balances out because i love this song

Gorgeous start, the only thing I liked from that album actually.

Cheers Rich! I enjoyed the album but Bless is the only one I've really gone back to since - not so much that the rest is bad, just that it wasn't anywhere near as compelling and hooky as, say, half of Flesh Tone.

13 ;; Linnea Dale, 'High Hopes'

 

 

'The first time I spoke your name, they said that's a bad idea.'

 

There aren't many songs I can think of where the verses are the obvious highlight compared to the chorus - after all, the nature of pop means that generally if that happens you've either put the cart before the horse and put your best hook in the verse, or totally let the song down by giving it a spectacular build up and a half-baked chorus (or option three: you're Xenomania, in which case each verse is probably a different hook and each one would probably pass for a career-high chorus for anyone else so we'll let you off).

 

However, High Hopes isn't really the kind of track based around a big hook - it's a haunting psychodrama of a pop song, crafted immaculately to put across the fear and paranoia of falling in with an emotionally manipulative one night stand/lover (which one it is is never made entirely clear). Those exquisite verses are the height of it - an ominous, insistent, pounding earworm that gets under your skin just as the object of those high hopes did for Linnea, who puts in a superb performance as a cooing ingénue at turns yearning and broken.

 

That isn't to say the emotional collapse of the chorus isn't cop though, dominated by a swirling claustrophobia of overproduction for effect as the narrator's hopes crash around her (again). But even the highest of choruses would struggle to match up to verses that all but follow behind walks home at night.

I really liked Kelis new album :wub:

12 ;; Indila, 'Dernière danse'

 

11 ;; G.R.L., 'Ugly Heart'

 

 

'But if you don't won't shed a tear

Yeah I can guarantee'

 

Outside context added so much to what this song became that it rubbed out exactly what it was meant to be - an unassuming debut doubling up as a low-key mission statement. In the girl group pantheon, it's not quite up there as an establishing piece with Wannabe (but then, what is?), but Ugly Heart gives far more of an idea of exactly what G.R.L. have come to do than, say, If This Is Love ever did about The Saturdays (which is incidentally my pop analyst wanker pet theory for why The Satz come across especially superfluous compared with the rest - without a statement track at the outset or any particular personality or angle in what they do outside of filling the gap in the market for a British girl group, they're forever only as necessary as their last single). Solidarity, sisterhood, and sass: Ugly Heart isn't exactly reinventing the wheel in introducing G.R.L. as a set, but it succeeds far more than many others. Parade, Girls Can't Catch, Mini Viva, we hardly knew ye - mainly because you didn't really say who you were. When the hits dried up (or never came), was there a particular reason we should have kept you in mind?

 

The hideous news about Simone's passing made this track even more perfectly done in retrospect - indeed, it's probably the only girl group début with enough poignancy to it to work just as well as an epitaph as it did in the top forty. (Though I'm sure Sound of the Underground could work at Sarah Harding's funeral for very different reasons.) But not just poignancy - it bottles two hundred seconds of bristling energy, attitude and punch, serving as a flawless sign-off for Simone and a snatched glimpse of exactly how wonderful G.R.L. as a five-piece could have been.