New Kids On The Block – Summer Time (Video)
When I picked that name for my occasional round-up of new singles, I didn’t expect I’d ever actually be reviewing a new song by New Kids themselves, and I am even more surprised to find that I quite like it. There’s an odd thing going on here: New Kids existed in the early 90s, and inspired top criminal Lou Pearlman’s creation of BSBs and *N Sync, and somewhat less successfully, O-Town and LFO. Years later, Danny Wood appeared on Totally Boyband, and on its US equivalent was Rich Cronin, who slagged off LFO’s musical output incessantly… and now New Kids On The Block are releasing a song that sounds suspiciously like said musical output! Luckily, I liked LFO a lot more than they apparently liked themselves, and I also quite like this. OK, it’s not at all amazing, but I was bobbing along by the end. However, I still don’t think their comeback is going to be quite the equivalent of Take That, since none of them have had much solo success (unless you count Donnie being Mark Wahlberg’s brother), only one of them is good-looking, and their old songs are all rubbish. They’ll sell tickets for a nostalgia tour, but once everyone remembers their rubbishness, I’m afraid they’ll be back to being forgotten.
86% Poptastic!
Chrisette Michele – Love Is You (Video)
There’s nothing innovative or exciting about Chrisette Michele, but Love Is you definitely does have a simple charm. In the vein of Alicia Keys or Mary J Blige, Chrisette has a lovely voice, and this song serves mainly the purpose of displaying her talent (she’s no glamour puss, and there won’t be any dance routines on her tour), but unlike a lot of songs which share this kind of purpose, it’s not actually boring. I wouldn’t quite say it’s a Fallin’ or an Ordinary People, but it could at least be a Like A Star. I think Chrisette could be one to look out for in the rest of 2008, but equally she could never be heard again, as is often the case with singers who really are just there to sing, and there because singing is what they do best, and because they do it better than 99% of the population. I also support the subversion of expectations – Chrisette may be a blinged-up black girl from New York, but she spends this video courting a white guy in a cardigan in a library! Who says all r’n’b videos are stereotyped?
70% Poptastic!
Britt Nicole – Believe (Video)
Why do all young American female rock-pop stars have to sing in such coarse, annoying voices these days? For some reason, I don’t mind the Canadian accent, as it suited the high school rebel personas of Avril, Skye and Fefe, but my hatred of the way that their American equivalents sing has gotten worse and worse since P!nk jumped on the rock chick bandwagon. She was the first to annoy me, closely followed by Kelly Clarkson, suspiciously similar-sounding Lindsay Lohan and Ashlee Simpson, and Miley Cyrus, who on her rockier songs may be the worst offender yet. It’s perfectly possible to not sound so unpleasantly obnoxious, as Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton have shown, or to channel it into brilliant bitch-pop, a la Tap That by Megan McCauley, and non-Americans like Marion Raven and The Veronicas. The sound is so invasive, and a song like this one could be really good with another singer (the chorus is good and it generally improves as it goes along), just like Ashlee’s last single.
73% Poptastic!