Discopop Directory: Top 10 singles of 2012

Hello there! Hope you all had a good Christmas. I certainly did, if the number of bottles in the recycling bin are any indication.

Anyway, with the New Year rapidly approaching, it's time for the big TOP TEN of the year. As usual, I've based mine on iTunes play counts (with a little arithmetic to make sure songs released later in the year don't suffer). It's by no means definitive - I seem to have completely ignored some of the year's biggest hits - but if you don't like at least three of the following songs, you're dead in the soul.

10) Cheryl - Call My Name

Old swan dive herself, giving it some welly on a Calvin Harris-produced bum-rattler. "How do you think I feel when you call my name?" she asked. If we used her marital surname, the answer was "very stroppy indeed".

9) Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know

Gangnam Style aside, this is the best pop lyric of the year. Over a plinky-plonky xylophone Gotye spends two minutes whining about being dumped when, all of a sudden, his ex pops up and says: "Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over". Ouch!

They'll be teaching this one at the Brit School for years to come.

8) Kanye West and Jay-Z - N****s In Paris

There's a reason why Jay-Z and Kanye performed this seven times a night on their Watch The Throne tour: They're egomaniacs. But this time, they're forgiven. "Paris", as the radio edit was called, is the sound of two mega-stars goofing off and accidentally creating a hit single. That shit cray, indeed.

7) The Staves - Mexico

The Staves beguiling harmonies are a honey trap. They sound like three chaste handmaidens but take a listen to the lyrics of Mexico, and they're asking to be rogered on their lover's bed. Well, I never.

6) Girls Aloud - Something New

I suspect this made the Top 10 out of sheer relief. That Girls Aloud came back and didn't fumble the first single was a miracle. Sure, Something New has clunky bits (the uninspired rap in the first verse) but it's essentially a distillation of everything that made the band great. Sexy, shouty, stylish, skinny and ginger.

5) Marina & The Diamonds - Primadonna

This isn't a pop song, it just sounds like one. Or so Marina would have you believe. But if we paid attention to every pretentious ambition a pop star had for their "oeuvre" we'd never listen to anything.

Primadonna makes this list for one reason: The bit where Marina's voice drops an entire octave as she sings "I know I've got a big ego / I really don't know why it's such a big deal, though." A moment of melodic genius that stops the song being just another Katy Perry knock-off. The remixes were great too.


4) Little Mix - Wings

A fanfare. Some handclaps. Someone says "shhh" when they really mean "shit". Then it all goes a bit Aguilera. There's an almighty bridge, an astounding chorus. And, what's this? A second chorus. Incredible.

Admittedly, the lyrics aren't perfect. Girl Bands have been peddling the whole "you're beautiful on the inside" line since TLC's Unpretty with diminishing returns. But Wings is saved by that almighty military breakdown in the outro. Best pop moment of the year.

3) Alunageorge - Your Drums, Your Love

If anyone is going to save R&B from drowsy bore kings The Weeknd and Drake, it's AlunaGeorge. Mixing spaceship sound effects with the palatable bits of dubstep and chuffing great pop hooks, they should be getting a call from Beyonce's "people" any day now. This reached a wholly unimpressive number 50 in the charts last October. Seriously, what is wrong with you people?


2) Lana Del Rey - National Anthem

A cautionary tale about a wealthy man who seduces a young ingénue ("you tell me to 'be cool' but I don’t know how yet"), only for her to turn the tables in the second verse ("You said to 'be cool'... I said to 'get real'"). A love story for the new age, it should be the theme to Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby.


1) Jessie Ware - Wildest Moments

Wildest Moments is about a girl who threw a cake in Jessie Ware's face at a wedding.Honestly.

"My nightmare of a best friend," Ware called her in this interview, explaining: "I never fight with people, but me and her fight. That's my girl, Sarah, and that’s what Wildest Moments is about."

A ballad with drums the size of boulders, and a heart that's even bigger, Wildest Moments is neither the most obvious, nor the most original, song on this list. But it is absolutely the best.

Happy listening.

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Beck's video game soundtrack and five other songs you may have missed

A semi-regular round-up of the songs and videos I haven't had the chance to blog during the week... Some excellent tracks this time round, starting with:

1) Beck - Cities
This is one of three tracks Beck has written for a Playstation game called Sound Shapes. Less linear than Guitar Hero or Rock Band, the song takes shape according to your skill at the game - a relatively simple 2D platformer. Cities (below) is probably the best of the bunch but the game also comes packaged with songs from Deadmau5, Jim Guthrie and I Am Robot and Proud.



2) A thousand million people singing Somebody That I Used To Know
Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but there are literally hundreds of cover versions of Gotye's megahit on YouTube. And, as a thank you to fans, he's taken all of those covers and stitched them together into a Somebody That I Used To Know megajam. It's much more enticing than it sounds - rather than a note-by-note recreation of the original, the Aussie singer has re-sampled all of the covers to create a trippy, Avalanches-esque sound montage. Just a shame you can't download it!



3) Jade Alston - Sober
Indie and R&B aren't two words that normally go together, but Philly girl Jade Alston is an soul diva who's independently releasing her own material. Funky and fresh, she's been working with Claude Kelly (Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Jessie J) and Chuck Harmony (Mary J Blige, Rihanna). Her mixtape, Single On A Saturday Night, was released for free last December - but she's just got round to making a video to the cheeky, body-popping single Sober. Definitely worth a look.



4) Regina Spektor - How
One of the most sincere, straightforward songs on Regina's latest LP, How is a heart-rending break-up ballad. "How can I begin again? How can I try to love someone new? Someone who isn’t you..." pleads the New Yorker, dispensing with her usual "hic dong Wallop plop!" vocal tics. This performance, from Jay Leno's show last night, will bring a lump to your throat.


5) Alison Valentine - Peanut Butter
Florist by day, singer by night, Alison Valentine once spent an entire summer following Prince around Europe. There's basically no higher recommendation in my book - and she delivers on that promise with Peanut Butter, a crunchy summer jam with more hooks than a meat locker. It is also - TA-DA - free to download.




6) The Darkness - Street Spirit (Fade Out)
The Darkness have been covering this as their encore for years. But that doesn't make this awful, karaoke-bar cover version any more acceptable. If Ben Elton ever writes a Radiohead musical, it will sound like this.



And that's all... Hope you have a great weekend!

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Apparently Gotye has some other songs, too...

The success of Somebody That I Used To Know has been so overwhelming that I entirely missed Gotye's follow-up single, Easy Way Out. That came out in February, accompanied by a clever stop-motion video starring multiple semi-naked Gotyes going about their daily business before meeting a horrific plasticine-based death.

Gotye - Easy Way Out

Hopefully the next single from the Aussie singer's Making Mirrors album won't disappear quite as quickly, as it's definitely worthy of your time.

Save Me is the counter-weight to Somebody That I Used To Know, where a couple find strength and succour in each other's arms, instead of breaking apart like a jelly in a fan.

You gave me love
When I could not love myself
And you made me turn
From the way I saw myself
And your patient love
Helped me help myself
You save me

The video is another little work of art - produced Piepants Animation, who won a YouTube animation award last year with the world's most elaborate doodle of a sidewalk. I'm not sure what relevance the images are supposed to have to the song, but we get to see Gotye being built out of scribbles, cardboard and rashers of bacon. Amazing.

Gotye - Save Me

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Live review: Gotye in Shepherd's Bush

Here is the singer’s eternal quandary: What do you do during the instrumental bits?

It’s a tough moment to get right, with no one correct answer. Here are just some of the possible solutions.

The Liam: Stand still. Look menacingly at the crowd.

The Beyonce: Shake bottom. Shake hair. Repeat.

The Tim Booth: Flail around like a pony chewing through a power line.

The Florence: Turn to face drummer, raise arms. Hold position.

The Jacko: Repeated genital touching.

Last night at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Gotye showcased an option I’d never seen before. Surrounded on three sides by a variety of esoteric percussion instruments, he would periodically break away from the microphone to bash things with sticks.

The most interesting gadget was a hybrid drum machine and xylophone (I believe it’s called a MalletKat), which he used to trigger samples of everything from violins to wobbly-bobbly basslines. On his left-hand side was a rack of tom toms and cymbals, which were thrashed inside out in a series of drum duels.

The gimmick could have created a distance between Gotye and the audience, but it drew me deeper into the music. The sounds coming out of the xylophone thingy could easily have been produced by a keyboard, but the kinetic energy required to operate the machine focused my attention on the music at a point when normally I’d be thinking "is it time for another beer yet?"

If you need proof, here’s a video of him performing Eyes Wide Open on Jimmy Kimmel a couple of weeks ago.

Gotye – Eyes Wide Open


Lest this all sounds a bit Jean Michelle Jarre, I hasten to point out that Gotye’s music is refreshingly pretension-free. His lyrics are heartfelt and understated, while the songs range from spooky robot rock (State Of The Art) to surprisingly spritely Motown pastiche (I Feel Better).

Former number one single Somebody I Used To Know was lithe and funky, guest vocalist Kimbra appearing from the side of the stage to give her lyrical sparring partner the evils. At the other end of the scale, the hushed whisper of Heart's A Mess managed to bring the audience to a standstill – no mean feat in the notoriously chatty Empire.

Towards the end of the set, Gotye mentioned this was his last date in London "for quite a while". Some people were vocally unhappy – but his reply was superb: "That’s alright, you can listen to the records. They’re magical, they happen again and again."

Ain't that the truth.

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