The NME should revive their singles column, shouldn’t they?
Anyway, here’s the least successful pop sensation of the year, an artist stymied by her record label’s extraordinary, foot-shooting release policy. It’s a moot point whether Carly Rae Jepsen would have done better over here if her album hadn’t already been out across the world six months earlier, but it couldn’t have done any harm. ‘Run Away With Me’ has 1989 confidence and appeal, and all for nothing.
Love Ssega wins the battle of the former Clean Bandit vocalists with this chunk of new-wave dance, a bit Talking Heads, a bit LCD Soundsystem who are a bit Talking Heads. It’s a good song that feels a little underwhelming here, and Junior likes it at first but then says, “It gets boring.” Pop careers flash by in a moment these days, don’t they?
Give or take a week, Jess Glynne was No.1 in the charts all year, which is quite a feat for one of the blandest pop stars in recent memory. ‘Hold My Hand’ is pick of the bunch for its joie de vivre and that bit where Jess’s voice goes way too high at the start of the final chorus. These are the tiny margins that make a smash.
Junior lights up. “Does this mean the others are going to be really great?” The jury’s out.
In good news for The Go! Team, Junior thinks this should be 19 and Waxahatchee should be 20. In faint praise news for Gardens & Villa, she likes the end of this song, but she does manage a grin at the solo.
And in not sure if it’s good or bad news, she also reckons this is “a bit Beach Boys?” Hands up, that’s obviously why I like it. It’s also why I like Fixers, Miracle Fortress, Panda Bear, ad infinitum through the harmony glass.
We’ve been doing this for 10 years now – Junior was 20 weeks old; I was, well, a younger man. It used to be a daily thing but now it’s pretty much annual, what with the demands of homework and CBBC.
She’s busy too.
The Go! Team were actually in our very first year-end top 20 and this is their first return since, so is it time to call it a day, all wrapped in a neat bow? Let’s see how we go.
In 2015, The Go! Team are just Ian Parton and guests. Frankly that’s all anyone thought they were in the first place and the good thing is they’ve lost none of that old runaway-motorbike exuberance. Can’t say that for all of us. “It’s got a nice melody,” says Junior, in an exuberance-free monotone. That’s how we’re going.
Junior’s favourite bit is the line “hide away and find your peace of mind with some indie record that’s much cooler than mine” – as much for the delivery, of course, as the actual lyric. Taylor Swift has grown up, become caustic. When she called a boy “mean” on Speak Now, well, that was never going to cut anyone to the quick. But she has the arsenal now. Where once a chap could make “a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter” now he just bleats away on the phone while Taylor rolls her eyes, exhausted.
When this starts, with its curious forestalled guitar intro where ‘No Scrubs’ and ‘Long Train Running’ meet, Junior shouts, “Taylor!” That’s the crossover talking. I’ve mixed feelings – I loved Fearless and Speak Now but can’t begrudge her smart step into the straight-up pop market. She should be heard by everyone and this is a wonderfully joyous, barbed, free, sarky, emboldened record to pull that trick with. It does everything right, with glee.
So all hail Taylor Swift’s leap up from billion-seller to billion-and-one-seller. She’s really made it now.
Next up, Junior and I will tackle 1980 and get all tiresome about Dexys Midnight Runners. Although I think I said that last year.
Solange Knowles is a hipster. Just look at those hips move!
She’s also a great popstar who possibly never will be. That’s all about where you align yourself too – no one ever had No.1s hanging out with of Montreal, Dirty Projectors or Dev Hynes. I met Hynes about four years ago, standing at the back of a We Are Scientists gig. I asked him what he was doing there and he told me he was a friend of the band. Five minutes later he’d disappeared only to burst onto the stage with a grin as wide as his hat, toting an acoustic guitar. That’s what he does, pop up all over the place having a whale of a time and alchemising absolutely zero hits.
In Solange he has a muse for his True Blue instincts and in purely melodic terms it’s working just fine. In fact, in pure pop single terms it’s working just “fantastic” according to Junior 2 and I’m right there with her. ‘Losing You’ is sweetly heartbreaking but so spry it feels like hope. Still, the whoops and clattering beats are just the party happening outside while Solange frets within.
Junior sulks about the strawberry bits in her yoghurt. Somewhere a clock chimes.
This is big in my house. It could hardly fail with all those “ee-ee-ee-ee”s and the increasingly manic yowls of “I know it’s gonna be” that Junior 2 apes perfectly even when it’s not playing. Junior herself has a rather unsettling ‘hoochie mama’ dance to accompany it, and I’m always sent by the sheer pop vastness of the song. The only dissenting voice is Junior 3 who wants to hear, “Na-na-na-na baby give it up give it up baby give it up”.
I know we were all supposed to be blinded by Ellie Goulding’s talent a couple of years ago but I couldn’t hear anything that wasn’t flimsy. Weak squash. Something was there but it could’ve benefited from some concentrated flavour. I can hear that here. ‘Anything Could Happen’ has sonic force, a crucial shiver in its first verse and sees Goulding switch her setting from cutesy to gutsy as the synth barricades go up.
You can understand why Everything Everything get up a few noses. Jonathan Higgs’ swooping – unexpected, unpredictable, frequently falsetto – vocals, the tricksy time signatures, the nonsensical name (from Underworld’s ‘Cowgirl’, right?), the boilersuits, the spelling (‘My Kz Ur Bf’), the faces, the rainforests, the civil wars, the dearth, the surplus, the rapacious zeal of the banking system, the government, the abundance of channels but nothing worth watching.
Good though, aren’t they? If anything, ‘Cough Cough’ is a softening of the EE proposition but it’s still as jerky – in tempo, in vocal delivery – as any of their greatest nose-getting-up moments and is nothing like any conventional pop you’re familiar with. Even so, it has a proper chorus of peaks and higher peaks, an ideas-crammed compactness and the exuberant pride of the daft.
Inevitably it’s greeted with a lot of forced coughing around here, which makes a change from the involuntary torrent of the last couple of weeks, and Junior seems to know swathes of the rabbiting lyrics. She doesn’t even look annoyed.
Jukebox Junior 