Yet Another Year In Pop: 5

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The wintry weather hasn't stopped Lily parachuting straight in at number one; other high climbers using their pickaxes and oxygen apparatus include Alesha (who moves into the top ten) and Jason Mraz (who just misses out at 11). The rest of the chart might as well be stuck in a snowdrift.

[Poll #1342054]

Comments

[koganbot]

Lily Lily Lily Lily. I am seven thousand miles away from the cultural context that makes people dislike her or get offended by her, but my guess is that if I were closer I would like her even MORE, would comprehend her cultural dissonances and restlessness as even more dissonant and restless! What she does without fail is to put cultural and personal dis-ease in beautiful settings, which alway works as music rather than as cheap irony - or works as music as well as working as cheap irony, I should say - because she is absolutely, totally, committed with her heart and her brain to the beauty, even if she has to sample the beauty as she did in "LDN" which I still think is her best song.

Anyhow, the week's songs in a wrap-up. The Fray live in my town and are reputed to be very nice people:

Lily Allen "The Fear": Girl w/ scrappy-voice-gone-gentle. Does it pretty well: lush setting, Lily lyrics that suggest anxiety, of course; the gentleness a balm, which is not "of course"; is touching, actually. TICK.

Tommy Reilly "Gimme A Call": Lo-fi guitar is pleasant, but what's impossible to take is the vast, ugly, sloppy wooziness of the singer. NO TICK.

Shontelle "T-Shirt": Coulda been a good combo of sauciness and loneliness, girl in nothing but the absent guy's t-shirt. But the voice is nothing too. NO TICK.

The Fray "You Found Me": A friend of mine back in my NY days wrote a comic piece entitled, "Opening Lines Of Books I Stopped Reading After The First Line." Iirc, one of 'em was "I first met Jesus Christ in a bar in Acapulco." Anyhow, this song is that book. (Actually, this tune does have a zing in its chorus, but there is far far far too much and too loud of a whine. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if back in my singing days my own voice had just such a whine. Horrible thought, isn't it?) NO TICK.

The Pussycat Dolls "Whatcha Think About That": Prime silliness w/ the anti-Dude chant at the start, followed by a sweetly aching "baby baby." But when the song isn't going "baby" its stuck with its drab melody, and the chant sounds tedious when it returns. NO TICK.

The All-American Rejects "Give You Hell": Toy keybs, and even at the start, before klonking our brains down with the inevitable guitar crunch, these guys are already buffeting us with scratchy pillows. NO TICK.

The Airborne Toxic Event "Sometime Around Midnight": Warm strings make me a bit queasy right at the start, and the sensitive, affected voice intensifies my biliousness, though I think there's some talent here, the godawful but half-effective emotionalism and those guitars coming down like curtains. But, "She's holding her tonic like a crux"? No! NO TICK.

Actually...

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

I think "I first met Jesus Christ in a bar in Acapulco" could be a decent opening to a Cutter's Way-style hippie burn-out noir.