PICK OF THE WEEK
BEA
Filthy Believer (Self released)
The beginning of this song is so incongruent with the end that you have to keep listening to it just to remind yourself how you got there. It starts with calming Buddha-bar synths, like you’re stepping into a sandlewood incense treatment room at a Groupon hotel. Dutch vocalist BEA sounds not too dissimilar to the Banks/Lapsley/Shura set of electronic breathy girl vocalists, all cooing vowel sounds and random elongated syllables. But then horns start to rise like panic alarms and the whole thing becomes a hysterical racket – cold sweat shrieking – all while those calming synths play underneath. The sound of having your heart ripped out at a bikram yoga class.
Charli XCX Ft Rita Ora
Doing It (Asylum)
Oh, here they come with their first names like Coronation Street alcoholic grandmas, or as I like to call them: The Who’d Have Thunk Its. More than five years since Rita left in the early stages of a BBC1 competition to find Britain’s Eurovision entry, and a decade since Charli released her debut about all-age concerts and glowsticks, these two have become global stars. This is an old-fashioned song about dancing to the song itself: S Club’s Don’t Stop Moving if it were produced by M83.
Selena Gomez
The Heart Wants What It Wants (Hollywood Records)
This is supposed to be Selena’s Cry Me A River, a look-what-you-lost number aimed at Justin Bieber. But because we’re the Thought Catalog generation and we get what we deserve, it begins with some voicemail emoting, Selena choking up with, “I’d be completely shattered by something so stupid, and then you make me feel like it’s my fault.” You know what, babes? Save it for the in-house Disney-child-star therapist.
Iggy Azalea Ft MØ
Beg For It (Virgin EMI)
I do feel for Iggy. It must be rough to study and perfect the music that you love, become a rap superstar against all odds (the odds being a part-Aboriginal Australian who grew up in a mud-brick hut and ran away to America when she was 15) and then be rejected by the hip-hop community because you’ve adopted their accent but distanced yourself from the racial politics. Having said all that, she doesn’t help herself with songs like this: a cheap rip-off of her hit Fancy, the same schoolgirl chorus and flow g-g-g-gimmicks.
Hannah Wants & Chris Lorenzo
Rhymes (Virgin EMI)
One of the most depressing aspects of today’s pop is the shift from inventive sampling to the wholesale copy and pasting of recent hits, stripping them of the subtleties that first made them enjoyable. A simple compare/contrast: take Daft Punk’s Technologic, which was used as the beat on Busta Rhymes spectacular Touch It (Remix) in 2005, but is now lazily re-sampled on a song that exists for no reason other than people like what they know.
