The playlist: pop - Cheryl, Natalie Bang Bang, Asha Ali and more
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Version 0 of 1. Natalie Bang Bang – Dangerous When Wet Until quite recently, Natalie Chahal’s musical moniker was the succinct Bang Bang Bang. For reasons probably hammered out in a record label meeting (she’s got an EP coming out via Island Records later in the year), she’s now known as Natalie Bang Bang. What hasn’t changed, however, is her music, which fuses 60s girl-group harmonies, a big dollop of brat-pop attitude and the underlying influence of bands such as Le Tigre and Sleigh Bells. Or, as she puts it, she wants her music to be like Mean Girls meets Hole. While single He’s So Fine has a glossy chorus and knowing vacuousness that is more the former, Dangerous When Wet – premiered here – is underpinned by the slightly splenetic influence of the latter. A one-off 7in single written and recorded in 24 hours for producer Dan Carey’s label Speedy Wunderground, it kicks off with a cheap-sounding drum machine and some detuned guitars. The opening is a bit of a racket, but once the vocal emerges there’s a pop pull to the vampy chorus of “I want a boy who loves me to death … I want a boy who’s dangerous when wet.” Montgomery – Piñata While most good pop music delivers an uptempo bpm, a big shouty chorus (preferably with “heys” and handclaps) and an overriding sense of jubilation, the slowburn, delicately produced glacial ballad War Cry provides the opposite. The first song to emerge from mysterious Australian singer Montgomery begins over a shower of fractured synths and a 10ft-high wave of sonic sadness. Taken from the forthcoming debut EP, New Clear War, War Cry has now been followed up by Piñata, a song that also wallows in relationship debris but carries a slightly more caustic edge. “I’m your piñata, crack me open like you always do,” Montgomery sings with the shrug of someone who’s been through it all far too many times. Zara Larsson – Rooftop Sweden’s Zara Larsson (who won the Swedish equivalent of Britain’s Got Talent in 2008) was born at the end of 1997. I realise the passing of time is inevitable, but just let that sink in for a bit – 1997! Coincidentally, that was also the year that fellow countrywoman and pop goddess Robyn scored her first two US top-10 hits with her sweetly youthful, Max Martin-assisted singles, Do You Know (What It Takes) and Show Me Love. While that early success didn’t pan out brilliantly for Robyn, at least initially, there’s a similar sense of naive charm about the music Larsson makes, specifically on excellent new single Rooftop. A fairly literal description of an evening at a rooftop BBQ with some mates that suddenly goes awry (spoiler alert: there’s a fight and the police arrive, it gets on the news), it manages that neat trick of mixing teenage longing (“We could be happy, one day, some day or in a whole other lifetime”) with adult pop sophistication. It also feels as if it could have been an early Rihanna mid-tempo single, and you can’t say better than that. Cheryl – I Don’t Care The best bit of sobbing official X Factor judge and sometime pretty-good pop star Cheryl Cole’s new single happens after just 12 seconds. Opening with a disco-tinged, DIY-sounding squelch of synths, it includes a big joyful “whoo” that seems to convey some genuine emotion – unlike most of her previous single, Crazy Stupid Love. The rest of I Don’t Care maintains this sense of euphoria, with Cheryl musing on how little she cares about some awful man in the first verse and the general chitchat of the gossip pages in the second. As with Crazy Stupid Love, this track feels as if she got the verses sorted, made a lovely middle eight and then forgot about the choruses, choosing instead to plump for repetition and a bit of swearing. Still, we’ll always have that “whoo”. Asha Ali – Words Swedish-Ethiopian singer Asha Ali describes her wonderfully melancholic new single Words using the sort of painful and relatable detail only pop stars from Scandinavia seem able to do. “Emotionally [Words] resonates in experiences of previous relationships that entailed a rude awakening into a reality of humiliation and heartache,” she says. “Leaving the relationship is the only way to preserve the little dignity that is left.” Written with Fredrik Berger (who recently co-wrote Charli XCX’s worldwide hit Boom Clap), Words marries Ali’s delicate, precise vocals with a juddering synth and some distant strings to create an intoxicating swirl of sadness that peaks in the airy chorus of “You say listen but all I hear are words, just words … all I hear are words”. Around the 2:15 mark, however, the whole song glides up a gear with Ali’s falsetto layered over pop’s most underused weapon: the spoken-word middle eight. |