A kung fu fighter in a disco

We had K Minnow in last year's polls (it briefly nudged into the chart at Xmastide)!

The one you've missed out is the other Adele single, which I don't think ever charted before.

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Oh well, Adele can wait till next week I'm sure.

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lockedintheatti.livejournal.com

This link is better than the radio 1 one, as it has the full chart, and is easy enough to see which are new to the top 40

http://uk.launch.yahoo.com/c/uk/single_charts.html

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Or I should probably just leave it to the pros (I thought Tom might be busy writing his paper this lunchtime!)

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jeff-worrell.livejournal.com

No worries - the presence of "Wow" means I can avoid the dreaded NHA box this week

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I was! Thankyou Kat! I am no doubt going to be pottering about on LJ despite paper panic tho.

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Also I make mistakes every third week anyway.

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Yeah - the chart commentary can be quite interesting too.

This (http://theofficialcharts.com/top40_singles.php) has the full top 100.

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Hot Chip - this is a lovely little tune but I wish his voice wasn't quite so weedy. I can totally imagine Superpitcher or Apparat doing this in a proper awesome ubercoolische microgoth emo way, but every time I hear this I find myself thinking "it'd be way better with a stronger bassline *there*" and so on. Borderline non-tick as I don't really want to hear it again until someone else sings it.

One Night Only - worst band name ever. They sound a lot like Keane but with guitars. One of the dullest things I've ever heard.

Elliot Minor - aha it's Busted but dressed in black. Not bad but the chorus isn't quiiiiite good enough for a tick.

Kylie - er, again. Whoops.

MB ft SC - god this is dire. Bring back This Could Be Underwater Love!

URBNRI - oh GOD this is even worse. Why would anyone want to emulate Bobby Gillespie's vocal style? Boring riff, boring sounds, terrible vocal.

*sniff* I'm gonna have to go for DON'T LIKE ANY :( :(

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ohh aye mon the ri...fuckin love them !!

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Hot Chip - yes please! as per my review of it. I think it's probably the best song they've ever done though obviously by themselves they'll never touch the skyscraper heights of Erol Alkan's remix of 'Boy From School'.

One Night Only - the entire song sounds constipated

Elliot Minor - not even bothering any more

Kylie - as meh as it was last year

Mark Brown and Sarah Cracknell - OK I guess? probably the lowest level of tickability though

The other Adele single is really fucking terrible, what is she playing at? The lyrics are like a 10-year-old's response to 7 July or some shit. (http://music.guardian.co.uk/electronic/reviews/story/0,,2249847,00.html)

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awesomewells.livejournal.com

The thing with Hot Chip is always that they're playing round with other styles of music and by and large getting them wrong, but they often get it wrong in a wonderful way. Sometimes they just get it wrong full stop mind and I've never been 100% sure whether the amateurish feel is a fault or a virtue, or swinging between the two several times within the course of one album. This one falls into the latter category. A trancey remix would be nice though.

The Mark Brown/Sarah Cracknell one brings out some kind of Pavlovian response in me where I feel an irrepressible urge to go out and get a mortgage or a bank loan or something. I don't want my pop music to remind me of the financial services industry thankyou.

Haven't heard any of the others and don't really care.

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'other styles' suggests that they're not sticking to their own type or the music they should be making...but what would this be anyway?

they are just the Junior Boys You Can Dance To for me half the time.

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Alexis Taylor can only dream of having the emotional pull of Jeremy Greenspan's voice! HC are a lot more ramshackle and have-a-go than J Boys (which is why they're nowhere near as good).

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awesomewells.livejournal.com

I think they're about on a par with the Junior Boys but I love the Junior Boys' best stuff far more.

I think his vocals are fine and actually quite affecting when he's doing soft and fragile. What bothers me is when the tempo and the abrasiveness pick up and he comes across as someone trying to punch above his weight and failing. Out At The Pictures for example. It's a minor quibble though, I really like the album on first listen.

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Haha it's the other way round for me. I think his songwriting skillz - melodies, hooks and so on are good enough, and the propulsiveness of their dancey numbers effective enough to carry him along, but when the arrangements are sparser his vocal failings are magnified a lot more. (A pity because I think some of their ballads would be really, really good with a better singer, or someone who wasn't so QUAVERY at least.)

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i disagree here. if anything Taylor's voice being even brittler at times can result in an emotional pull just as strong as Greenspan's but in a different way.

if the Junior Boys did something uptempo i don't think it would sound any less 'ramshackle' (maybe this is why they stay slow).

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Maybe Greenspan just knows his range better but he never sounds as if he's straining to hit any notes (and he can belt it out at times, and he's not averse to sustaining notes). I can't imagine J Boys would ever sound ramshackle - they make a point of always sounding very clean, pure, pristine; and when they're remixed to be uptempo it's always worked fine.

The key difference between Greenspan and Taylor though is that Greenspan's voice comes into its own when the music is stripped away (eg 'When No One Cares' or 'FM'), whereas Taylor's sounds exposed.

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i don't really like the sound of Greenspan's voice as much tho to be honest, so any technical superiority isn't so relevant to me. i do like the JB's but find them less fun (as i'm defining that for this argument's sake).

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awesomewells.livejournal.com

I'm not making that suggestion, they're dilettante indie kids and I'm sure their love for all their influences is genuine and what they end up making is far better than whatever pale indie nonsense they'd come up with if they sat in the comfort zone.

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are they particularly 'indie kid' tho? not really sure what defines this anymore

i guess their sound isn't as directly 'black' as Jaxx's or even GA's but they're no more eclectic than those two.

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Hot Chip - This one has been going round in my brain all weekend after I didnt play it at Poptimism: HOT CHIP'S REVENGE. I think Matt is right about the amateurishness working on this one. In my head the vocal sounds like China Crisis! Tick.

One Night Only - I quite liked its bounciness but rly is there a special school where they train people to be boring singers?

Elliot Minor - I always think, oh EM get a raw deal, we all like Busted dont we, and then I hear them. They are OK at writing verses that make you think you're going to get a really great pop-punk chorus, on this evidence.

Mark Brown ft Sarah Cracknell - residual loyalty to la crackers doesnt stop me recognising and disapproving of the hook here. Also she's pretty watery on it. Incidentally, there is a fucking DELUGE of post-Feist nonsense on the advertbox at the moment.

URBNRI - SWEET CHRISTMAS. I think the phrase is "God help us if there's a war".

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what is the Cracknell hook? I don't recognise it...

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The cut up opera singer vox are from a Lloyds TSB advert (though I misremembered it as being from a phones advert, but it's mimsy whatever the product).

(Well, the whole track is a TSB ad, but not the cracknell bit which is added on to turn it into a song)

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Oh ffs, adverts. Lloyds TSB eh? This may be enough to push it below tickworthiness for me.

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it'll be the DREADFUL Alesha single next which is being entirely promoted through the medium of a car advert.

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Yikes I saw that on PJ - the song does sound pretty good but the video is SO UNSETTLING.

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I think the song is pretty awful too! Horrid play-it-safe dishwater ballad-by-numbers which is made even worse when you think of how amazing Alesha once was. It's depressing to think that the best pop star this country has produced this decade has been reduced to this. WE WERE IN MIS-TEEQ. WE SANG 'B WITH ME' AND 'ONE NIGHT STAND' AND 'SCANDALOUS'. And...now...this...

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