The Music section of Myspace (Livejournal’s less intelligent younger sibling) is the depressing home of teenagers making rock music of whatever variety is currently in, but if you look hard enough you can actually find some interesting new acts. By searching for acts influenced by Gwen Stefani, this is what I found:
The Butterflys
I have two very large bones to pick with this young female duo. The first is obvious. Their name is grammatically incorrect! Everyone knows the plural of a word ending in ‘y’ is ‘ies’. The second is a song that I found in the music section of their web site, called Up In Smoke. They have not just stolen it from Lene Nystrom, but they have stolen Lene herself as I am almost certain it’s her singing. Very dodgy indeed. Their other songs are not bad and apparently they’ve worked with Murlyn (ace Swedish writers/producers), but how do we know the songs aren’t stolen from some other poor unsuspecting foreign popster and it was actually Merlin the wizard they worked with?
Russell Dean Stone
Russell Dean Stone thinks it’s still the 80s, or at least he wishes it was. His song, Ideal Animal, is quite jolly and fun to begin with (certainly better than most things on Myspace) but by the end of it I was rather bored. The second song on his profile, a darker track called Heartache Catastrophe, I couldn’t even stand to listen all the way through.He seems to be aiming for an Apoptygma Bezerk-esque sound, but his voice doesn’t have the deceptive tunefulness necessary for this kind of music.
Eleventh Hour
This group are described as r’n’b/pop/funk which is a pretty good description. Their sound is somewhere between Gwen and Maroon 5, and their song Get Your Head On Straight is as good as a mix of those two should be (ie. ace!), but their other song, So Long is not quite so good. The female singer has a good voice, so it’s not a complete disaster, but the musical backing doesn’t seem to fit very well and drowns out the singing more often than not. However, they do look like a great fun bunch of people so they’re definitely worth keeping an eye on.
Aryana
Aryana seems to have had slightly more success than the others – she’s been on TV singing with someone who is announced as “her royal highness, Regine Velasquez”, although Google seems to suggest she is not royal in the slightest. However, it wasn’t the most successful of performances. The music begins, the lyrics (which another Google tells me belong to I Believe by Fantasia Barrino) appear on screen, Aryana’s (or Regine’s, I’m not actually) mouth moves, but no singing is heard. Luckily, unlike a certain American pop princess (well, she’s about as royal as Regine really), Aryana/Regine was singing live so someone could run up with a new, working microphone for her to sing with. At the end it is finally revealed that Aryana was the girl with the microphone problems, and it is in fact her birthday. Why this is being celebrated by putting her on TV with a fake royal (who probably sabotaged her microphone so she wouldn’t be outshone) I have no idea, but it’s hilarious viewing all the same. As for her songs, she seems mostly to do ballads, but there is a song which sounds like Gloria Estefan combined with Lolly, which I inevitably love.