Another Year In Pop: 10

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Duffy, H20 and Nickelback are still refusing to budge from the top 3, so what's new in the chart this week? Almost a clean sweep for indie, that's what.

[Poll #1151744]

(Westlife were cruelly omitted from last week's poll! Tom, how could you?)

C-Pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What's Chinese pop music like? I want to know now before Alexis Petridis annoys me tomorrow by finding the Szechuan Bis or somesuch and laughing at their funny name.

Famous like the Ninja Turtles

[credoimprobus]

I'm seriously late to the boat on this one, but what the hell:

As hugely belatedly clued into via mixtape download last week. Awesome bounce, ridiculously hooky hook. Can't stop playing it!


Also, POPTIMISTS, YOU HAVE FAILED ME: this was out at Christmas?

Westlife mumblings

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

(I would have posted this on the chart poll comments earlier today but I had to do Work innit.)

Over the last four months or so, I've started to take an interest in Westlife. I think it started with them doing a top 100 countdown on Hits!TV, when I realised that these days it's extremely easy to tell them apart. There's the Lead Westlife, who grins all the time and looks super smug in the Post Office ad. There's Bleached Fringe Westlife, who is currently leading the pie eating stakes bless him. There's Tall Cross-Eyed Westlife, who generally has spiky black hair. And there's the Other Westlife, who is the one that least springs to mind (spiky blonde highlights). Process of elimination, innit. Oh, and the Not In Westlife Anymore Westlife, who married Kerry Katona that time and who looks like a bigger-faced Daniel Bedingfield. See? Easy!

For most of their TEN YEAR career I managed to utterly avoid any exposure to Westlife, so I have no idea if their voices have matured over time, or if they've finally relaxed into the current line-up now NIWA Westlife has buggered off. But I have a sneaking suspicion that both of these things are true, and that it's paying dividends. In 'Us Against The World', the boys are confident enough to let the beautiful melody come to the front with minimal faff, but still deliver the powerful oomph that enables the chorus to soar away over their heads. It's like they respect that the song is the end, and they are merely the means.

Oh man, that chorus! I hum it while I'm doing the washing up! Sometimes I imagine the melody over the top of the schaffle-bosh noises from Basshunter's 'Now You're Gone' instead of the delicate piano.

Regular readers will know I rarely pay attention to lyrics; with crisp piano ballads like this they're harder to ignore. It's a well-trodden crooner theme of 'we'll get through these hard times because we're in love'. You think it's tough now, come to Sligo! What's interesting though is that each member of Westlife could plausibly be singing this to the other three: "Cause it's us against the world/Me and you against them all/If you listen to these words/Know that we are standing tall." Don't worry chaps! We, the pop group Westlife, are all-powerful! Fie upon the h8tas! We sell loads of meta records and there's nothing they can do about it! Mwahahhaaha.

Of course no-one is buying this record because they're interested about the 'Loife's internal politics. Except... I am! I mean, how the hell have they been going for ten years? Does one of them ever fancy doing something more up-tempo and get shouted down? Why does no-one make bosh remixes of their songs? Are they aiming for a different audience to the one they're getting? Why are they immediately written off by pretty much everyone who writes about music in the UK, including myself up until very recently? Surely this must piss them off immensely?

Most importantly, do any poptimists out there have even the slightest bit of interest in Westlife, or is there actually something wrong with me?