Thursday, December 30, 2010

Best Before End: Thank You For The Music


According to Pop Justice the best album of 2010 is...(drum roll/rolls eyes) Happiness by HURTS. Pop Justice are of course entitled to like what they like and to have an opinion about it. Here's mine. It's really not very good. Wonderful Life is ace, Better Than Love is ace but the rest of the album is two guys posturing as if they are Tears for Fears/Black/Blanmange/Lotus Eaters/ insert name of generic 80s band here. The tracks sound like they've been put through the Guy Chambers cliche blender. It's not a good album, and any comparisons to Pet Shop Boys are particularly daft. Pet Shop Boys make better music, Pet Shop Boys are more original, Pet Shop Boys are Better Than Hurts.

But if PJ wants to champion this, along with many misfires it has in the past, and write about the damp squibs and X Factor with any kind of passion and continnual irrelevance than that is really up to them. It is, I suppose, a harmless, curious website which could have something going for it, if for the life of itself, it knew what it really wanted to be. At the moment it seems to thrive off pretending to really, honestly, really like cheap pop music, especially the pop music that seems to be fiddled into the ear lobes of the great unwashed via the medium of ITV. This is wrong. Not because there is anything wrong about music of all types but because, well, at a time when there is genuinely more exciting pop music around like Grum, Aeroplane and Cut Copy, to name three, PJ forever feels that the burning discvoveries or pointless inanities we, the reader, really, really have to know about, because it's so amazing is/are: The Saturdays, JLS, Mini Vida, X Factor, Scouting For Girls, Girls Can't Catch (remember them?) X Factor, Alesha Dixon,  and oh yeah, X Factor! Of course PJ mentions Gaga, Kylie and even Pet Shop Boys every so often to show that they are normal like everyone else. But they prefer their pop stars to be wank, have no stage presence, be totally ordinary, or pointlessly overblown and to make shit music that doesn't set a matchstick alight, let alone the charts or people's imaginations. Because ooh, that's what you don't expect! Music journalism it ain't.

BEADY EYE
The name of this band is like a pisstake. It's what me and a pal would have come up with to extend the career of a fictional rock star who has lost his mind and ability to make music. Funnily enough the NME don't get this. They believe that there is obviously enough interest in post-Oasis activity to justify pointless hype about the ex-members of the tribute to Status Quo. I guess this is just one of a million examples of why NME has been shit since 1994. So, does Liam's new band push the boat out? Will we get an album or even at least twenty seconds of something that gives the impression that Liam has matured, has progressed, wants to experiment, wants to rip up the rule book and redefine, nay, reform his musical ways, that once defined the conservative, bland pop of the 90s? Will he? Does he? On balance, so far, does he fuck? Same old same old. It's like there was no music created after 1966. Let's have a look at the album cover. Perhaps we'll get something modern, that will piss on the idea of Liam and his pals being some old retro, pub rock band...

Right, remember what I was saying at the start of this article, 'bout me and my pal making up fictional bands? This is what a fictional album cover would look like. I'll give Beady Eye their dues. They are good for a laugh.
BIFFY CLYRO
I don't get it.

No comments: