PICK OF THE WEEK
Dappy
Beautiful Me (All Around The World)
It’s easy to see Dappy as an eternal punchline – thrown out of Alton Towers, kicked in the face by a horse – but he’s always had an ear for melody. There’s nothing laughable about this emotional belter. Coming on like a Kentish Town R Kelly, his supple vocal is both vulnerable and defiant, while plangent piano gives way to gospel resurrection. The candid video, raking over legal and personal humiliations, is self-directed too. God knows where he’ll end up. Cagefighting Thomas The Tank Engine? ODing on Yakult? Probably. The thing is, when Dappy’s not being dippy, he’s actually pretty great.
Py
Ghostdance (Tilehouse)
What do disco ghosts and Whitney Houston have in common? They both have no body to dance with. (I’m here all week.) Londoner Py serves up some excellent electro shivers and retro R&B vocals, while the spooky production sounds like the creaking timbers of a haunted house.
Ed Sheeran And Rudimental
Bloodstream (Asylum)
He’s bloody everywhere, isn’t he? I was on a flight recently and his music was playing out of the sink in the toilet. You literally cannot escape him in a piss-cubicle 45,000ft in the air. Anyway, this is one we know, the one where he hums the hook. Yep, it sounds like Ed Sheeran. But it’s also dressed up in Rudimental’s finest drum’n’bass, so you might enjoy it, like you might enjoy Super Noodles drizzled in truffle oil.
Solo 45 Feat Preditah
Feed ’Em To The Lions (Island)
Graduating from Wiley’s Boy Better Know collective – AKA grime’s “it” crew – this pair have delivered what is known in the parlance as “a beast”. Not so much a banger as a bludgeoner, but either way it’s impossible to deny. Brutal, ruthless, definitely your new jam. Particularly if you like jam that has steroids in it.
First Aid Kit
Waitress Song (Columbia)
“I could move to a small town/ And become a waitress/ Say my name was Stacy,” sing the Söderberg sisters in this dreamy country paean to self-erasure after a hard breakup, or to-do list for a witness protection programme. Either way, the songwriting chops are evident; though if youthful Swedish YouTube stars feel this desolate, God help the rest of us.
Luke Friend
Hole In My Heart (Simco)
Mate, that is a real medical condition, you shouldn’t just use it as a metaphor. There’s nothing lovey-dovey about ventricular septal defects. You wouldn’t write a song about your first kiss called Pulmonary Embolism or a breakup ballad titled Overactive Bladder. Ignoring the hackneyed lyricism, and the fact that Luke looks like a dreadlocked cabbage patch doll, this is singer-songwriting at its most insipid. Doctors say there’s no cure for that.
