Single Honours
The single reviews this issue begins, inevitably, with some garage rock. C’Mon C’Mon by The Von Bondies is inoffensive enough – not in the same way people describe Coldplay as ‘inoffensive’, euphemising their perpetual ennui with a term suggesting that Chris Martin and his pals are nice people, but in that it’s not godawful shite like most garage rock. If a song as simple as this is going to be produced by anyone, it has to have a severe pop bent, and this song does indeed jump your consciousness and live there symbiotically, simultaneously making you slightly more cheerful, while feeding off synapses. Possibly.
The Blueskins’ effort, Change My Mind, is less impressive, although the bluegrass-style slide guitar riff which slinks in and out of the song does raise the stakes slightly higher than the average offering.
All of which leads quite nicely to those loveable American fops The Strokes, on whose enjoyable pop-rock retro-revivalist success we can legitmately blame most of the rubbish bandwagon-jumpers that followed timidly in their razed ground. Considering that everybody already owns Room on Fire now anyway, a new single seems a little gratuitous, but they’re released Reptilia nonetheless. It’s an unbalanced affair, with the verse and bridge implying a bit of a misfire, only for the track to be saved by a classy chorus; the riff is reminiscient of a less intricate Pretty Girls Make Graves, or Interpol, and is therefore infinitely more intelligent than almost all of the rest of the Radio 1 playlist.
As engaging as The Strokes’ single may be, it’s kicked in the head a bit by Oceansize’s four-and-a-half-minute, three-guitar affrontive Catalyst. Bearing the influence of Muse, The Mars Volta, and the better bits from OK Computer, its music not to dance to, or to sing along to, but to listen to, without any distractions necessary to enjoy it. The lack of a clear hook, and some slightly frustrating dynamics prevent it from being as good as it could have been, but the potential is undisguisable.
The opposite of Oceansize, in terms of energy, innovation and quality, is Longview. Their latest single, Still, seems to be under the misapprehension that it is an ‘epic’, as every U2 song suffers from the same delusion. It chugs along at about 4 beats per minute until it stops, which proves to be the most interesting moment of the whole sorry fiasco.
It would be easy to categorise Damien Rice’s new single as the less assuming counterpart of Longview. A summary of the two songs reveals a number of similarities; they’re both slow, probably too uneventful to trouble the top 40, and neither chart any remotely original territory. Rice’s Volcano, however, gets away with it. It’s much prettier, for a start, and the lack of pretension lends it a personable charm. The middle eight, too, just about gives the song enough of a kick in the corduroy jacket to actually get to the end.
Having tried to compare and contrast the other singles in terms of genre, there are, annoyingly, a couple of tracks that aren’t anything to do with any of the rest. Thank You by Jamelia appears to follow a similar course, lyrically, to Christina Aguilera’s Fighter. Unlike it, however, Thank You isn’t an especially memorable pop song. Pop lyrics and pop vocals are rarely worthy of the well-crafted backing they front, and this is no exception. Except that the backing isn’t as good as most other pop songs anyway. It is, mercifully, quite easy to ignore, though.
The best single of the issue is notably the most disparate from the other offerings. Kasabian’s Reason is Treason does have a rubbish name, and will probably be – incorrectly – grouped with other danceable rock outfits such as Franz Ferdinand, The Rapture, Electric Six and the like. But unlike its relatives, Kasabian actually seem to give a shit. In being beat-driven, partially electronic, very angry and very good, their overall sound is closer to recent Primal Scream, something which can only be a good – refreshingly good – thing.
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