PICK OF THE WEEK
Disclosure
Jaded (PMR)
Disclosure are now one of the biggest acts in the world, having managed to successfully straddle the worlds of cool and commercial, dance and pop. Really, the only thing they have counting against them is themselves: two pasty-looking brothers from the home counties – who, when put into the face-swap app, would come out looking exactly the same – are just not the sort of people you want making your life-changing house music. It’s a problem they’re tackling head-on by making a series of songs so svelte and sexy you keep forgetting it’s not Prince’s new future garage direction. Jaded sounds like getting with the hottest girl at the party and then it turns out she’s got to go back to Istanbul tomorrow but would you like to come with, on her yacht.
Ellie Goulding
On My Mind (Polydor)
It’s been a mad month for 200-1 outsiders coming through. First Roberta Vinci beat Serena Williams in tennis’ US Open, then Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership contest, and now, most shockingly of all, there’s a really quite listenable Ellie Goulding single. Rumoured to be a response to Ed Sheeran’s song Don’t, an account of their brief fling, it’s got some cute lyrical point-scoring (“You wanted my heart but I just liked your tattoos”) and smart Max Martin production. Best of all, she’s stopped doing that breathy thing with her voice where it sounds like she’s singing into an electric fan. If you’d put a two-quid accumulator bet on Corbyn, Vinci and this track not being awful, you’d now be rich enough to own property in central London.
Demi Lovato
Confident (Hollywood)
Probably the ugliest dichotomy in pop at the moment is that between “good girls” on one hand and the more desirable (and disposable) “bad bitches”, as if the moral fibre of the world’s women basically comes down to whether or not they’ll do butt stuff. Lovato’s Confident is a sex-positive new take, as she announces, yes, she is up for doing more in the bedroom but that it’s going to be on her terms. It’s a song about taking control and prioritising her pleasure, sidestepping the “sexual experimentation = ho” equation. “What’s wrong with being confident?” she asks in the chorus, plainly not expecting an answer.
Fetty Wap
RGF Island (RGF/300)
Fetty-Wap is the one-eyed singsongy rapper whose 2014 sleeper hit Trap Queen led to him becoming hip-hop’s biggest new star. Now he’s back and yes fine, all his songs are starting to sound the same but you know what so do all the Handel songs and people bloody love him.
Naughty Boy ft Beyoncé and Arrow Benjamin
Runnin’ (Lose It All) (Virgin EMI)
“Where else can I go?” whimpers Beyoncé in her first new release in a year. The answer, presumably being, literally anywhere: pick a producer, any producer, from Kanye to Aphex Twin. It’s a mystery why she chose to lend her vocals to this run of the mill, drum’n’bassy chart filler from Britain’s most prosaic knob twiddler, although judging by the way she’s barely mentioned this track on social media, one can only assume the answer involves a few too many snakebites and a lot of morning-after regret.
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