I love Spotify, yet still don’t understand how it can possibly work. The record labels seem to be perfectly happy to keep working with it, though – there’s a ton of stuff available on it now, from the mainstream to the super-obscure. There’s even some movie soundtracks on there – after a throwaway comment regarding the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack the other day, I checked to see if it was on there, and it was. Score. Assuming you like Disney soundtracks.
The best thing about Spotify, though, is it gives you the opportunity to “try out” music you wouldn’t think of walking into a shop and buying. Actually, I’ve been known on a number of past occasions to walk into a shop and buy an embarrassing album simply because I either found one of the songs repeatedly played on the radio just a little bit too catchy, or I quite fancied the singer, or both. I haven’t done that for a while, now. In fact, I can’t remember what the last CD I bought was. It was certainly a long time ago now – if I’m buying music these days, I’ll tend to buy it from iTunes or Amazon.
Anyway, two irritatingly catchy things that have been stuck in my head thanks to the stagnant playlist on Radio 1 are Ke$ha (who needs a slap for doing the “dollar sign as S” thing) and Owl City (who I thought was actually a guy called Al City, and was notable for being a recent UK number one that actually had something approaching a decent tune). Now, neither of these artists are ones I particularly felt the need to rush out and buy the albums for, but the songs they’d released were just the right side of the “catchy/annoying” spectrum to warrant a bit of further investigation.
Ke$ha produces from her mouth not only the most American American accent I’ve ever heard, but also sounds remarkably like what would happen if you took Kelly Clarkson and forcibly inserted her into a NES. From her recent single (the obnoxiously misspelled “TiK ToK”) I had assumed that all of her stuff would be along the lines of the interminable stream of crap R&B that seems to flood the charts these days, but her album Animal was a pleasant surprise, including a number of different styles of music, many of which feature appealingly lo-fi backings that sound like they were produced by a synth that had never heard the term “wave-table synthesis” before. The tunes are catchy and the lyrics are vapid bubblegum fluff (one song is called “Party at a Rich Dude’s House” and is, as you might expect, about a party at a rich dude’s house, where Ke$ha proudly informs us that she was sick in his cupboard) but the thing I actually liked about the album is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. So much crap R&B (which there are definite leanings towards) ends up trying to sound “dark” or “gritty” but just ends up sounding like an emasculated twat whining about ooh baby girl, I’ma take joo out, oooh, yeah, mmmmm-hmmmm. Ke$ha sings actual words, doesn’t do that stupid Mariah Carey warble and, more to the point, doesn’t stick to the boring R&B sound. I’m not even sure why I keep comparing her to that, as she’s clearly a pop artist.
Anyway, enough of that embarrassment. (She was fun to drive home to, thanks to the Spotify mobile app on the iPhone. I should shut up, as I’m only making things worse for myself, here.)
Owl City – if you haven’t heard of them, you might recognise the song “Fireflies” which hit the UK charts a few weeks ago and proved so popular for a short period that it was even heard on Radio 2 at the same time as it was on Radio 1. It’s a pleasant little song about fireflies (all right, I don’t know the lyrics and don’t really care enough to go and look them up) with a catchy tune and a vocalist with a distinctive voice. The album is much the same – electronic backings, gentle, slightly whiny American voice over the top. It, like Ke$ha, isn’t something I’m clamouring to purchase for keeps, but it was a pleasant enough listen for a little while.
So there’s Half Hearted Music Review Of The Day. If you have a copy of Spotify, why not try out something you don’t expect to like? You might just be surprised.
On a side note, I have three invites to Spotify available, so if you want one, write me a poem including the word “turgid” in the comments and the best three win an invite. No purchase necessary.
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