The Arctic Monkeys have managed to sell 60,000 copies of their new album Favourite Worst Nightmare, in one day alone.
HMV’s Gennaro Castaldo told The Mirror: “They look set to sell around 250,000 in a week - making it a surefire No.1 album come Sunday.”
Lisa and I watched Walk The Line a few months ago, and afterwards I sought out Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around album which features the track, Hurt. If you’ve ever listened to Johnny Cash, the album itself is an essential part of Cash’s discography.
Hurt, in particular, has the potential to break your heart. Johnny’s voice is heavy and frail throughout, and the slow pounding piano grows and becomes more insistent as the song reaches its end.
I’ll save the rant about Paolo Nutini’s name for another day. (Is it a stage name? It must be.)
Bizarrely, New Shoes seems to be the kind of song you either love or hate. It’s certainly attracting a lot of negative reaction.
All change this week in the pop chart, as the Beyonce/Shakira collaboration takes the top spot, dislodging Timbaland and denying the Arctic Monkeys their rightful place at #1.
Let’s look at the charts:
So there you go folks, your top ten this week. Tell me what you’re loving/hating in the comments and your predictions for next week’s chart!
I got an email this evening about Cushh - a relatively new act scaling the charts solely on downloads of their single Do It 2 Me.
Cushh stands for Creative, Unusual, Sensual, Hot and Happening, and features a singer known as Miss Nic’ola alongside rapper E2. They’re an odd-looking pairing, but their music is being touted as the UK answer to Black Eyed Peas.
That’s a claim I find credible on image alone - sexy girl fronts group while original musicians take a back seat and lap up the success. Perhaps I’m being cynical, but Cushh aren’t quite as infectious as Black Eyed Peas. Do It 2 Me simply lacks that kind of all-round appeal.
Not that it’s a bad song. Au contraire, it’s a smouldering club track. Sensual, as the group describe. It should hit all the right spots, but for me it’s a little wide of the mark. Here’s where I go all Simon Cowell….
I found the vocals by Miss Nic’ola just a little bit off. There’s something unconvincing in the delivery - technically a decent performance, but not quite raunchy enough for the subject matter. The rap by E2 toward the end raises things a little bit, and he does a passable job of playing the playa.
Again, the video for Give It 2 Me is a bit copycat. Full marks though for working a female mud wrestling scene into a pop video. Better directors have tried and failed. Hell, it was the pop video moment I’ve been waiting for all my life….
All the same, Miss Nic’ola doesn’t convince as a sex symbol. As she gyrates in her skimpies, she sings “I’ll show you what you ‘re missin’…..love and affec-shu-u-un”. Now I checked, and the dictionary definition of ‘love’ doesn’t mention lapdancing or mud wrestling….
Having said all that, I wish these guys the best of luck. I know it’s early days, but if they can polish their act and raise their songwriting game, it would be interesting to see a UK version of the Black Eyed Peas.
One of my paltry claims to fame - I met Duke Special a few years back at an event his sister was working on. He was a bit of a cult hero back then, and seemingly even more so today - his MySpace page has almost 12, 000 friends!
Everything about Duke Special is unique, from the eccentric dress sense to the seemingly absurd range of props he uses to create his sound (cheese graters, wardrobe doors, pianos, harps, brass, strings and an old gramophone).
What you end up with as a result is a genre-busting category-defying artist who seems to be immune from trends in pop music. I’m not drooling, honest. After listening to so many canned acts in the charts, it’s refreshing to hear an artist doing something completely different.
Probably the quote that warms me most to Duke Special is “I wanted to find a way to play the piano and sing that didn’t make me sound like Elton John or Billy Joel.”
Saying that, I think Freewheel is probably the most mainstream of his material (that’s available on MySpace). Duke sings in an unashamed Northern Irish accent, something we’re hearing more of these days. As I said in my Snow Patrol review, the NI accent can sound really vulnerable and emotional when done right. And both acts know how to milk that accent to perfection….
I’m hoping to get my hands on some other Duke Special material in the near future. If everything is to the same standard as Freewheel, then this should be pure gold!
I read today that Damon Albarn has said that the Gorillaz project will disband after a movie score they’re slated to work on in September of this year:
The Blur singer said that the only project left for the cartoon band will be a film featuring a score composition, that has previously been linked to filmmaker and ‘Monty Python’ mastermind Terry Gilliam.
Speaking to BBC Radio 2, Albarn said: “We’re trying to make a film next, starting in September hopefully. It will be a film score. There won’t be another pop record.”
Reports suggest that the cartoon band members will act as alternative characters, as opposed to playing themselves.
I don’t think anyone expected Gorillaz to last this long, let alone forever. So like Simon it’s no surprise (especially with Albarn’s other committments) and I won’t be losing too much sleep this evening as a result of the sad news…
Continuing my obsessive Exteme fanboy thing, I looked up Gary Cherone on MySpace this evening.
After Gary left Extreme, he joined Van Halen for a short while, although I think he joined the band at a bad time in their career and wasn’t particularly well received as frontman.
He’s done some solo recording, and been involved with his brother in a The Who tribute band. (He’s not the only rocker to do the cover tribute band thing - Joe Elliott from Def Leppard had a side project called Cybernauts)
Recently, Gary seems to be involved with a band called hurtsmile, a group which also features his brother Markus. I listened to a few of their tunes on MySpace, and it’s great to hear Gary’s distinctive voice again. It seems to be more straight rock than his solo material, I’ll be interested to see how they develop. I think it’s seriously early days for the band, because they don’t have any group shots, logos or identity yet.
Ah, the beauty of the Internet - looking up your teenage favourite bands and discovering they’re still making music!
I’ve written quite a bit about Extreme in the past - they were one of my favourite bands of the 90’s, and Nuno Bettencourt was my idol as a guitarist. I knew he was still performing, so I discovered his new band Dramagods and managed to get my hands on a copy of their album, Love.
It seems that the focal point of Dramagods is Nuno. But although he’s recognised as a guitar god, Nuno also fronts the group and he’s a surprisingly good vocalist. He carries off a range of material on this album, from hard-edged rock to more sensitive material.
Another surprising aspect of this album is that it isn’t filled with extended guitar solos. Instead, the guitar solos only appear where they’re suitable - they’re not the focus of the songs as I sometimes felt they were in Nuno’s earlier work.
Q4Music has a list on today of the top 10 songs about or mentioning weather. Surely this isn’t the best they can do? It’s all a bit po-faced and uninspired:
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