| Janelle Monáe, School Of Seven Bells, Foals/5 July 2010 |
| Written by Shabby Ranks |
| Monday, 05 July 2010 14:42 |
 This week’s singles are brought to you by THE
BOOK OF REVELATIONS. Best ones at the top, getting worse as we go down the page
INTO HELL.And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars Janelle Monáe/Tightrope The album (The ArchAndroid) is having some pretty big claims made on its behalf, which for my money are a little too big, but this is the real business. It's what syncopation was made for. The sort of classic 7" that means that you're always going to be on a party mixtape somewhere in the world even if you never have another hit. The stormer to play when you've only got 10 minutes or so of your DJing set and you want to keep everyone right up on their feet. The sort of thing, in fact, that Big Boi has been dropping A* raps over for the last 15 years, and does so again here. Watch the video (or the Letterman appearance) and fall in love for 289 seconds. Can new black music start being better than or as good as new white music in 2010, please? The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues Oooh, it's 1991. Blissed-out pop with blank-sounding pretty girls! Big guitars multitracked then buried in the mix! Big finishes with interlaced vocals! There is no reason to have made a song so stuffed with clichés, other than it being tremendously lovely, which it is, so that worked out all right. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth Foals/Miami This is... this is the beat from, bloody hell it is as well. Foals seem to have been 'inspired by' or 'interpolated' Straight Up by Paula Abdul. Quite a lot. Well. Fair enough. It's got something about it, a useful bit of clatter and jitter and jump. They're as technically capable as any white-boy guitar band in I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first. Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee Sia/Clap Your Hands Sia appears to be one of those people who live and work and write in the professional machine of pop music. She has sung with Zero 7, written for Christina Aguilera, had a long and storied career, and probably knows the biz like an alcoholic knows the opening times of the local offies. This is a really well made bit of bouncing, pumping pop, but it bores the arse off of me and couldn't be more sterile if it was being used for major surgery. It stinks of pro-musicians, expensive studio time, and finishing in the Top 40, but not the Top 35. Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth JLS/The Club Is Alive Good Fucking God. Among all the debates about whether Rage Against The Machine were apposite, opposite or complicit in the great Cowell hijacking of Christmas 2009, the point was lost a bit. The point being that Cowell's involvement in anything with a stave and an octave tends to be a miserable aesthetic car crash, bereft of life, joy, decency or hope. The musical minibus of morons JLS not deviating one bit from that norm. This is a horrific parody of three-year-old R&B tropes, and the chorus is based on the hook from The Sound Of Music. Without any irony, or even a relieving pinch of camp. Repent
Janelle
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