TRACK OF THE WEEK
Vaults
Midnight River
It feels like Midnight River is a bid by this London-based electronica band to trick YouTube commenters, those idiots, into thinking there’s a new Sia song of which they are unaware. The video has lots of grey and ballet (like Sia!), singer Blythe Pepino has an abrupt bob (like Sia!), and it also sounds a lot if not exactly like Sia (like Sia!). But the song deserves more than lazy comparisons: with the “ooh-hoo-hoo hoo-ah-loo-loo” refrain and the big, big piano chords, it’s very “soundtrack to a compilation video of the best, most emotional summer of your life”. Which is… like Sia?
Jennifer Lopez
Ain’t Your Mama
I see what’s happened here: Jennifer Lopez has been slyly following me around my entire adult life: Jennifer Lopez behind doorframes, Jennifer Lopez crouching outside windows, Jennifer Lopez, always listening, transcribing every telling-off I’ve had from girlfriends and turning them into a forgettable pop banger. J-Lo is tired of my laziness and it’s time things changed. “No more playing video games,” she chides, while twirling around a casserole. Please, Jennifer Lopez. Please stop turning my problems into sing-alongs for the masses.
Pitbull With Enrique Iglesias
Messin’ Around
Messin’ Around is, truly, an awful song, but one you can forgive. You get the impression that Pitbull and Enrique Iglesias made it as a drunken joke at Pitbull’s lavish champagne-and-silk home studio, Iglesias woke up to find, with horror, that Pitbull had already emailed it to the label at 4am and now they have to go through the horrible charade of releasing it. We’ve all made mistakes. We must forgive theirs.
MNEK
At Night (I Think About You)
This is good because it starts off a proper “sobbing on the nightbus because that boy stopped texting” and then it goes all huge drops and you’re not sure what MNEK wants you to do, here, like: am I meant to slutdrop to this, MNEK, or am I meant to listen to it alone while looking thoughtfully out of a rainy window? It’s hard to know.
Biffy Clyro
Animal Style
The consistency with which Biffy Clyro push out songs that smell of bummed cigarettes outside your town’s only rock venue is quite something. They recall your untidy room and unwashed bedding; waking up at 2pm and feeling every lyric in your aching bones, longing above longing, please mum, can I get a tattoo? Animal Style is that, only three years after you stopped wearing your only Osiris hoodie.
