Justin's suit, Laura's garden and some other songs you may have missed

I'm popping off to Scotland for a week, so the blog will be as blank as Olly Murs' manuscript in a maths exam. To tide you over to the 4th of February, here are a few songs I would have blogged about if there'd been more time.

1) Justin Timberlake - Suit and Tie
This is the lyric video to the audio track that was teased in a Youtube clip spawned from a tweet. All this faffing about would be worth it if the song was slap-you-on-the-tits amazing, but sadly it's still just a 5/10. *sigh*




2) Laura Mvula - Green Garden
Of all the artists on this year's Sound Of 2013 predictapolls, Laura Mvula is the one with the most potential to do an Adele. Hip enough for Radio 1, edgy enough for 6 Music and soothing enough for Radio 2, she's got what I like to call "potential". She also has an incredible voice and amazing songs. Green Garden takes a while to get going, but you'll be swooning by the final, exuberant chorus.




3) Zedd ft Foxes - Clarity
Zedd is a German producer who's been working on Lady Gaga's new album.
Foxes is British songstress Louisa Rose Allen, who we like a lot.
Together they are "Zedd ft Foxes".
And this song is fucking great. Sand dunes ahoy!




4) Jessie Ware - If You're Never Gonna Move (Two Inch Punch remix)
This song used to be called 110% but, for some reason, it's been renamed If You're Never Gonna Move for the US release. Clearly, the new name is a line from the chorus, which is useful for the sort of person who goes into a record shop and says "I heard this song on the radio and it sort of went duh duh duh duh If You're Never something a-a-ah. Do you have it?" Except the only line anyone can ever remember from 110% is "Dancing On My Own" which is a completely different but equally brilliant song. And anyway, the record shops are all closed nowadays and you can just Shazam the song off the radio, so why bother changing the name in the first place? Gah!

The remix, by the way, is excellent: All ambient and spookified. And only available in the US. Double gah!





5) Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness (Monsieur Adi remix)
Do you think Lana approves of this? She spends ages cultivating her doe-eyed, pouty-lipped pop vixen persona, then someone waps her vocals on top of a honking bassline and makes her sound like the queen of the carnival. A carnival populated by the cast of Glee and 10,000 other people with the permanently startled expression of Scooby Doo with a jack-in-the-box.

But who cares what she thinks? It's big, dumb, mindless, and infuriatingly catchy.





6) REM - Losing My Religion
Major Scaled is a project whereby songs in a "sad" minor key are digitally tweaked so they're in a "cheerful" major key. The results are quite startling. You can recognise and follow the songs, but something's not quite right. They've posted a bunch of examples on their Facebook page - but REM's Losing My Religion (recast as Rediscovering My Religion) is the best of the bunch.


That's it - have a lovely snowy week. See you in a bit.
Mrdiscopop

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Goodbye, R.E.M.

A lot of people believe R.E.M. - who announced they were splitting up today - were po-faced, supercilious millionaire rock stars. Maybe they were - but I always thought Michael Stipe had a million times more humour, emotional complexity, and general awesomeness than Bono and Chris Martin the rest of the rock fraternity. No-one who takes himself seriously would ever have written that ridiculous "hey baby" Elvis impersonation into Man On The Moon.

Over the next few days, as they rake over the embers of R.E.M.'s career, you'll hear a lot about Everybody Hurts and how it became an anthem for the broken-hearted, disillusioned, disenchanted "youth of the nineties". People will also say the band never bettered it.

They will be wrong, because they've forgotten about At My Most Beautiful - a Beach Boys-style ballad from 1999's underrated, sonically adventurous Up album. Anyone who's ever fallen stupidly in love will recognise themselves in phrases like "I read bad poetry / Into your machine", and the naivete of the chorus, "I've found a way to make you smile", is audaciously, heart-smackingly beautiful. In lesser hands, the song could have been corny but, as critic Garry Mulholland once explained, it was Stipe's humble delivery that made R.E.M.'s frequently elliptical lyrics resonate with millions.

"There is almost no ego in his singing," he wrote, "only the desire to own the notes and the words, and to plant their roots into the ground."

I think I'll miss R.E.M.

R.E.M. - At My Most Beautiful


PS: LEONARD BERNSTEIN!

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REM in the live lounge - MP3s!!

Readers of the music press will have noticed that REM's latest album, Accelerate, is being hailed as the band's latest "return to form". If you examine the small print, however, the form they're referring to is that of early albums like Murmur and Fables Of The Reconstruction - both superb, but both lacking in the songcraft and emotional impact of Automatic For The People.

But then, the critics always cite the band's detached, pre-millennial masterpiece Up as a career lowpoint, so what do they know anyway?

Accelerate, it turns out, is just an above average latter-period REM album. A vast improvement on the dismal Around The Sun, but no better than, say, New Adventures In Hi-Fi or Reveal.

The band have just been in Radio One's Live Lounge. They were in unusually upbeat form, with Michael Stipe admitting to being grumpy for an entire decade because he couldn't find good vegetarian food in the US. He also revealed the Chris Martin came up with the title for their latest single...

The band then performed that song, Supernatural Superserious, and a cover of The Editor's stately Munich. You should listen to them both, because they are beautiful.

:: REM - Supernatural Superserious [MP3 link]
:: REM - Munich (live lounge cover) [MP3 link]

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Michael Stipe wants to talk to you

FACT: Until I was 14, I thought he was called Michael Stripe.

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Video of the week: Imitation Of Life

Not only is this REM's last truly great single, it's also my favourite REM video (and there are plenty to choose from).

The film, set at a rather posh poolside barbeque, only lasts 20 seconds - looped backwards and forwards over and over for the duration of the song. It sounds like one of those awful Polish cartoons Channel 4 used to show late at night after Hill Street Blues - but it's actually an incredibly intricate and memorable piece of film. You'd see it in art galleries if art galleries actually had galleries of art instead of piles of bricks or plastercasts of syphilitic dogs, or whatever.

That's not to say the clip can withstand the following 'decontruction' of its 'motives' I came across in the New York Press: It identifies the decrepitude of modern vision, infiltrates the tv habits that are sanctioned by swindles like Dogma 95 and the acceptance of rank video imagery and then pushes forward.

No it doesn't, it's just a music video.

A music video that must have been a bitch to pull off, mind you. How did they make sure all the cast were lip-syncing the right line, when they were all filmed at the same time? Thinking about it makes my brain hurt.

And although this sort of visual trickery is usually the domain of Michel Gondry (think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) the clip was actually directed by Garth Jennings, who was also responsible for the Supergrass video I featured a couple of weeks ago.

The greatest thing since bread came sliced.

Buy REM's Greatest Hits on DVD

More on the video at Wikipedia

Unbelievably pretentious review in the NY Press

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Old News!!!

It's like someone pressed 'pause' on the news when I left the country. Two weeks off work and the headlines are all the same: "Government debates ridiculous infringement of our human rights", "Boring Prince will marry boring lady", "Pope still not dead".

Has the music news been any more entertaining? Frankly, yes.

This is what I missed:

Joss Stone tells Robbie to shove it.
"I liked you when I was eight, but I've grown out of it", the twirly-barneted diva told Robbie. Haven't we all, love?

Michael Stipe has blue snot
It's true, I tells ya.

Neptunes: The honeymoon is finally over
They are to take production credits on Jamie Cullum's new album, tentatively titled "Slap my fat, self-satisfied, tit-face"

Alanis - Go USA!
Always one to be contrary, Alanis Morissette has become an US citizen just as thousands of forward-thinking citizens flee in the other direction.

Phwoar!
Natalie Imbruglia's new website has 'gone live', as they used to say in 1987. Lots of gorgeous new pictures samples from her fantastic new album, which is out next month.

Normal service is now resumed.

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