The Song Of The Week is TAPED by Naaz.
Naaz's steady journey in the direction of the pop a‑list takes a big step forward, a big step up and a slight step sideways today with TAPED. "Sometimes, people will hear your pain but not actually listen," she wrote in some blurb I've copied and pasted off the internet. "It's like their ears are taped to whatever they don't want to hear." Additionally, she says that in her mid-teens she'd basically taught herself to stop speaking, as it'd often get her in trouble. Once she turned 18 and her music started taking off she had to socialise more, which meant she had to talk more. "I felt like my mind, ears & mouth were TAPED shut for years, and therefore I became an extremely open person — just to make up for all the years before where I mistreated myself with my mindset."
Additional notes:
- Bastille's Doom Days album is out today, it's the best Bastille album in the entire history of Bastille and Another Place is a Pompeii-sized gloombanger.
- The new Little Mix single is a strange one — it interpolates an old Soul II Soul hit, and by 'interpolates' I mean it just uses the chorus, throws in some new verses that don't exactly push the boundaries of pop songwriting, doesn't bother itself too much with boring ideas like middle eights, and calls it all a day at 2:41. The artwork's really good.
- As noted the other day, Shura's new single is v excellent. It's quite La Roux-esque, isn't it?
- Glowie's new single is Absolutely Fine.
- When I went to the Madame X playback a couple of weeks ago I was impressed, in a strange sort of way, by the way Madonna had insisted on holding back the two songs most likely to have pleased older (and more recent) fans. The safer songs, in other words. One of them's the Vogue-esque I Don't Search I Find, which I've chucked on this week's playlist.
- Not on Spotify but available here as a pay-what-you-fancy download and available to hear here is one of Call Me Loop's strongest songs so far: it's called Property, CML wrote it having been "incensed by recent news", and cash from the downloads goes to the Abortion Support Network.
- For some reason there's a great cover of Natalimbruglia's Torn this week. It's by Swedish Idol semifinalist Hanna 'Fair But' Ferm.
- Taylor Swift isn't angry about Katy Perry any more and in a way that's a bit like homophobia, isn't it? (??) You Need To Calm down is pretty messily executed — and we haven't even seen the video yet — but I'm generally in favour of big artists releasing big songs about knobends being pathetic.