Posts tagged Leona Lewis
BONG!
- Katy Perry wishes Freddie Mercury a Happy Birthday. [via YouTube]
BONG!
- Adele might record the next James Bond theme. [via Marie Claire]
BONG!
- Another Michael Jackson tribute show has been announced. [via NME]
BONG!
- Queen of Hearts has recorded an excellent Foals cover [via The Guardian]
BONG!
- Leona Lewis reveals album details. [via PopDash]
BONG!
- Madonna is due to release her next album in spring 2012 [via MTV]
We’ve gone of the boil slightly when it comes to updating the blog, but we’re back with a vengeance for a chart battle royale this week. Whose side should you be on? Never fear - we are here to help you decide.
The BIG names involved in this week’s releases (i.e. the ones reasonably expected to make a good go at hitting the top spot) are The Saturdays with ‘All Fired Up’, Pixie Lott with ‘All About Tonight’ and Leona Lewis (/ Avicii) with ‘Collide’. Here at Love Machine we have already thrown our support behind The Saturdays as the best of a decidedly average bunch. The thing with ‘All Fired Up’ is that it’s almost but not quite there. Which doesn’t make it a bad song at all, just not one that excites us as much as some of their other releases. Still compared to the by-numbers-fest that is ‘All About Tonight’, The Saturdays are practically revolutionary. With that said, Pixie’s performance on Red Or Black last night gave her the push she needed to hit #1 on the iTunes chart a scant few hours after The Saturdays had muscled Maroon 5 & Christina Aguilera out of the way. The same cannot be said for Leona’s performance on the same show as ‘Collide’ still languished in the 20s for most of Sunday, but currently finds itself at #4 . It’s going to be close - can’t wait to see those midweeks.
In less tense, knuckle-biting waters, other releases this week come from Wynter Gordan with the brilliant ‘Til Death’. If we had our way, this would be shooting up the charts leaving The Sats, Pixie and Leona in the dust. It’s really cool dance pop that hasn’t been hamfistedly engineered to The Club. Wynter has been on our hit list since ‘Dirty Talk’, and we think she deserves your 99p the most.
The Labrinth produced ‘Neva Soft’ by Ms. Dynamite also drops, a tune that makes us want to dance with our hands in the air. We’ve enjoyed this Ms. Dynamite resurgence - since she popped up on that Katy B. track we’ve remembered how she had a hand in quite a few decent tunes since her career began in the early 2000s and ‘Neva Soft’ is no exception.
Finally, boyband The Kixx have their second single ‘Standing Where You Left Me’ available for purchase. We don’t know what to make of The Kixx. They’re like McFly sped up with more synths. Considering McFly tried to do McFly sped up with more synths last year to no real avail, we’re not sure whether it will ever “happen” for The Kixx. Nonetheless, ‘Standing Where You Left Me’ is good enough to warrant a mention here.
Over the last week and the end of the week before, quite a lot of pop stuff happened. So much that we didn’t really have the chance to stop and take stock of it all, especially after our computer went on the fritz. Now that we’ve gathered ourselves, calmed down and given everything a good listen, we’re in a much better position to give you a definitive rundown in noof the new stuff coming up for the second half of the year. SPOILER ALERT: It’s mostly very fucking good.
Will Young - ‘Jealousy’
Do you remember when Will Young was on ‘Pop Idol’? No, we don’t either. Out of all the reality TV popstars that have had a good crack at success, only Will has managed to shed his origins so naturally. ‘Jealousy’ is one of the best songs we’ve heard all year - epic, electropop of the kind that Joe McElderry would have done a marvellous job with.
Demi Lovato - ‘Skyscraper’
Demi’s post-rehab comeback single is an elegantly raw and impassioned ballad about standing tall when everyone tries to break you down. It’s hard to do it justice with words, but for the record everyone is singing its praises and so are we. Just fantastic.
Mika - ‘Elle Me Dit’
Mika was huge and then he was medium-sized and now he’s practically invisible here in the UK. Not so in France, where everyone still loves him and he loves them and they love him for loving them and he loves them for loving him and so he’s recorded the first single off his next album in their language. It sounds a lot like Yelle, not just because of the French words, but because it’s bouncing and twangy with a chant-along chorus, just like a lot of Yelle songs.
Leona Lewis - ‘Collide’
There’s some controversy surrounding this track, the thread of which we haven’t been entirely able to follow, but it appears the instrumental may have been plagiarised (STOLEN, basically) from another producer called DJ Avicii - a claim that Camp Leona deny. Whatever the story, this isn’t really the lead single we’d hoped for. Not horrible, but it’s no ‘Bleeding Love’.
Pixie Lott - ‘All About Tonight’
‘All About Tonight’ has the misfortune of being the kind of track where you go “well, it’s not very instant, maybe some more plays will help me form a solid opinion…” but then you never get round to playing it again. Thankfully, that’s what radio, music channels and club nights are for. File this clubby number under “potential grower”.
3OH!3 - ‘Robot’
In a nutshell, readers, it’s rubbish. And that’s not snobbery, because we quite like 3OH!3’s energetic brand of frat-pop. There’s no energy or frattishness here though. Just a boring ploddy synth instrumental with some inane chatter over the top about robot girls or something. We only listened once and don’t really care to do it again. What a shame.
Björk - ‘Crystalline’
Everyone can agree that Björk is genius and amazing, but she’s definitely a “niche” artist, isn’t she really? A bit of an acquired taste, even though she’s universally respected. ‘Crystalline’ is not a mainstream Top 40 smash hit by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s still gorgeous, and sounds actually crystalline - like the way we imagine a snowflake sounds when it forms. And the breakdown in the final 50 seconds is brutal.
The Kooks - ‘Junk Of The Heart (Happy)’
This is the best song The Kooks have done since ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’, which was breezy, quirky and lovely. After that we’re not quite sure what happened with The Kooks ‘cause we can’t remember anything of particular note, but ‘Junk Of The Heart (Happy)’ is also in the quirky, lovely vein - a bit warmer and less jangly than ‘She Moves…’ but sweet just the same.
Blink-182 -‘Up All Night’
For fans of punk and pop-punk, the Blink-182 reunion to them is what the Girls Aloud reunion is to us - SERIOUS BUSINESS. Not quite ‘All The Small Things’ catchy, so if you’re not a fan of this genre, there’s nothing for you here. If you like heavy drums and soaring choruses however, give it a play.
Checking our e-mails on the bus home from the first Love Machine clubnight, we were surprised to see we had an e-mail from SyCo Ltd, the entertainment company which keeps Simon Cowell in teeth whitening treatments.
Had he heard already about the success of our Cheryl shot, and wanted to invite us to see her perform on the following day’s X Factor?
No :(
The following user(s) have broken your terms of service by uploading copyrighted material they neither own the rights to nor have permission from the owner to distribute and/or transmit. Namely, “Happy” from the album Echo by Sony BMG recording artist Leona Lewis…
Oh.
I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Much like an ASBO, we are seeing this as a badge of pride rather than a deterrent.
Anyway, we’ve found a much better version which we really should have used from the beginning:
This (this) is the new Leona Lewis single. It is called ‘Happy’.
You can of course just listen to it and form your own opinion, but we’ve fed it into the Love Machine and the analysis is as follows:
1. It is very good. Quite how good will only become clear when you hear it on Radio 1 for the hundreth time and either think “gosh this still sounds surprisingly fresh” as you (we) still do with Bleeding Love, or quickly switch over to Magic where there is at least a 65% chance of hearing a Lionel Ritchie track at any given moment.
2. It starts off sounding like Nothing Compares 2 U, but soon settles into more of a mid-tempo stomp. Aside: Sinead was really ahead of her time with the txt speak, eh?
3. The gist is that Leona’s a bit miffed about something non-specific, but really just wants to be happy. Well, don’t we all when it comes down to it?
4. There’s a bit where she says “don’t you love in vain, ‘cos love won’t set you free”. N-Trance would certainly have something to say about that.
5. There’s a bit where it sounds like she’s saying “this rubber dog’s a victim” but it’s likely to actually be something else.
6. It’s crying out for a key change at 3.18 but it doesn’t happen.
7. There is however a great kitchen sink moment at 3.31 where some fireworks should go off in a video or something.
So there you go.Stream it here: [audio:leonalewis-happy.mp3]
Edit: Removed :(
