Who does Chris Watkeys want to "stop assaulting our ears with his monolithically awful brand of pop garbage"? Find out more in this week's singles round-up
Sound Generator's Single Of The WeekCherry Ghost must have taken a leaf out of Richard Hawley's rather lovely book. The Bolton five-piece trade in a similar brand of warm, richly textured, laid back rock 'n roll. While bordering slightly on that much maligned genre known as easy listening, Cherry Ghost are anything but - new single '4 AM' is intensely involving as it rolls, sways, and swaggers towards a wonderfully mellow climax. "There ain't no place on earth / That loneliness ain't been first" croons frontman Simon Aldred, and ain't that the truth.
The pick of the rest of this week's releases...
Katie Melua's 'If You Were A Sailboat' is tantalisingly close to being a great, great single. It's a strong song, delivered well, and augmented with a nicely understated string section. But where Melua builds up to a potentially moving key change, she goes major instead of minor; where the middle eight could be touchingly melancholy, instead it's saccharine and tinkle-tinkly. But that's the way the commercial cookie crumbles, I guess.
So, autumn is rolling in, and with it comes a veritable avalanche of album releases. Some of these - like Iron & Wine's 'Shepherd's Dog', you should be getting quite excited about. Some of them, like
Stereophonics' 'Pull The Pin', you really shouldn't. The creatively barren Welsh trio have picked 'It Means Nothing' as the lead single from their forthcoming full-length yawn-fest, and my oh my is it a stinker. No, that would be doing it injustice - this mid-paced chuggalong isn't interesting enough to be called a stinker. It's just plain
dull.
There are few bands around these days who actually have the balls to call themselves heavy metal, and with good reason. But whatever
Funeral For A Friend like to call themselves, that's very definitely what they are. 'Great Wide Open' opens with a particularly cheesy double-stopped, detuned riff which they may well have found discarded at the back of Bruce Dickinson's sock drawer. The rest of the song is similarly whiffy.
Meanwhile,
Enrique Inglesias is 'Tired Of Being Sorry'. If that's really the case, he ought to pack up his bronzing lotion and his suitcase full of god-awful lyrics, and stop assaulting our ears with his monolithically awful brand of pop garbage.
- Chris Watkeys
