Those who didn’t want Little Mix to win last year’s X Factor have been keen to point out that they weren’t the strongest singers in the competition.
Well, for a start, they clearly haven’t been buying “better singer” Marcus Collins’ album.
And, secondly, the girls may not be a quartet of Adeles but you can probably count the number of pop groups who can do this a cappella and be this good on one hand. It’s not quite up there with Stooshe’s ‘Lego House’ but it’s mighty close.
All that stress over whether or not the Aiden Grimshaw single would be amazing or shit, all that relief at it being amazing, and it’s not even doing well.
A space on the Radio 1 playlist pointed it in an extremely positive direction last month, but all hype seems to have died out and promotion has been either non-existent or so invisible it was basically pointless.
This is not as high as I envisaged it going on iTunes.
Yes, ‘Need You Now’ – the song Gary Barlow and Cheryl Cole struggled through only a couple of hours ago – has sold more copies in the last 24 hours than ‘Is This Love’.
Will it be Top 40 on Sunday? Who knows.
Still, it could be worse. Good luck trying to find a single trace of Marcus Collins’ make-or-break single ‘Mercy’.
Forced to draw up a (brief) list of X Factor winners who’ve gone on to enjoy successful careers, we would almost certainly include Alexandra Burke. Three of her first five singles went to Number One, ‘Hallelujah’ is the second fastest-selling winners’ single to date and she even got invited back to be a guest judge during last year’s run.
And yet, despite the success of Overcome, her second album campaign has been fraught with blunder after blunder. For a start, June 2012 is quite a while after the October 2009 debut, and in that time JLS, who of course Alexandra beat in the 2008 final, have released no less than three LPs themselves. Then, once the billion-year wait finally culminated in the premiere of trailer single ‘Elephant’, we were met with a Grower That Never Was. A euphoric dance-pop track without any euphoria. The titular elephant in the room was, unfortunately, that the early signs of Album No. 2 weren’t too good at all.
‘Let It Go’, the second single from Heartbreak On Hold, is much stronger, but by now radio playlisters have made their stance on this campaign pretty clear – there will be no airplay for it whatsoever. The track limped to No. 33 on a meagre 11,000 sales, and suddenly the importance of this album doing well has gone from solidifying what Overcome started to saving her career altogether.
The good and frustrating news is that ‘Elephant’ is comfortably the weakest song on Heartbreak On Hold, and I’m not just saying that for the sake of being dramatic. Whilst the album is generally as original as ending a text message with an X, it is produced and sung to a pleasingly high standard – note especially the stereo-hogging opener (the title track), the gloriously camp ‘This Love Will Survive’ and Euro-friendly late-album blaster ‘Ooh La La’. Oh, and the Kylie-like ‘Love You That Much’. OH, and the relatively dark ‘Daylight Robbery’. Basically there are a lot of very good pop songs on here.
The production may thrive when the tempo is up and the hands are aloft, but Alexandra’s powerful voice flaunts its colour a lot more on the slower tracks. ‘Sitting On Top Of The World’ is restrained and beautiful, and has a slight whiff of Robyn’s ‘With Every Heartbeat’ about it, and closing piano ballad ‘What Money Can’t By’, though not particularly strong as an actual song, reminds us why we voted for her over JLS and Eoghan Quigg in the first place – she’s got a bloody big set of lungs on her. And whilst Heartbreak On Hold may not be the most groundbreaking release of the year, it deserves to make a much bigger impact than I fear it might.
When Little Mix said they were previewing a 30-second snippet of their new single ‘Wings’ on Alan Carr: Chatty Man tonight, I don’t think I was alone in expecting something like a video preview or a focussed ‘segment’ of sorts.
Alas, it was just the music the girls walked down the steps to when they made their entrance.
Not a lot could be gathered from it, what with all the talking and audience applause (damn their popularity!), but the good news is that, after all the inside whispers that it’s an amazing proper debut, it does indeed sound like an amazing proper debut.
Irresistibly catchy and packed with lyrics that gleefully tread the line between inspirational and cliché, its full-length premiere can’t come soon enough.
It’s out on July 22, so don’t expect to be kept waiting too much longer. But the good news is that we could actually have an X Factor-winning act with longevity on our hands.
Watch the show on 4OD to hear it for yourself (skip to the 4-minute mark).
Cheryl Cole is SO perceptive.
The ‘Call My Name’ hitmaker has said in a new interview with Attitude magazine that she was well aware of Joe McElderry’s sexuality before he came out.
She mentored him to victory during the 2009 run of the talent show, and he came out just before his debut album Wide Awake failed to sell enough copies to keep the ink wet on his first recording contract.
Asked if she ‘knew’, Cheryl said:
“Yeah, I think I knew before he did. He didn’t tell me. I had a chat with my boys and I just told them they could tell us whatever they wanted and I was there for them.
“I really don’t know if Joe knew. I had deep conversations with Joe and he never, ever suggested it, and he never said, ‘That guy’s fit’. I think he actually said a girl was one time. But I kinda knew.”
Joe, who has inexplicably let six months pass without releasing an album (not like him at all), is expected to bring out his fourth collection later this year, while Chez brings out A Million Lights on June 18.
With the hype around Marcus Collins’ debut album starting to subside and Amelia Lily presumably taking her time with her rumoured Xenomania tuneage, X Factor‘s Misha B and Little Mix seem to both be planning their first proper chart assaults for mid-July.
Whilst the victorious girlband release ‘Wings’ on July 22, the critically lauded semi-finalist unleashes ‘Home Run’ on July 15.
She says:
“Home Run is about that special someone who gets you so excited, so hyped that you lose control! When I perform it, I feel that same energy on stage – it makes you wanna dance! … It is based on a ballad I wrote about my ex and I just changed it up to give it a fresh, fun vibe.”
‘Home Run’ isn’t as immediate as you would expect, but give it a few spins and it starts to make sense quite nicely. Hopefully it will be a big summer success for her.
Marina ‘And The Diamonds’ Diamandis has premiered the music video for Pop Album Of The Year Thus Far Electra Heart’s second single, ‘Power And Control’.
The album shot to No. 1 but actually had fewer first-week sales than her debut Family Jewels did when it entered at No. 5 in 2010. The album also crashed straight out of the Top 10 on its second week.
Hopefully ‘Power And Control’ will revive the sales a bit, though the downsides of it are that it A) is not ‘Lies’ and B) is not ‘Starring Role’.
It’s a cracking tune though, and sums up the whole point of the album quite nicely.
And the guy is quite fit.
One Direction are tasked with saving the world’s domestic felines in a cartoon from the lead animator of FX show Archer.
Zayn, Louis, Niall, Harry and a brown-haired Liam are ordered by Psymon Cowell to battle the evil Lord Faptaguise in the video, which has nearly had 1 million YouTube views in just two days.
There are cheeky swipes that poke fun at the group, but generally it’s very fan-friendly. There’s even Niall in drag, for crying out loud.
Watch them use the “pussy magnet” (as in a literal magnet for cats – see what they did there) below.
Well, they’ll have a hard job topping ‘Cannonball’, but Little Mix have announced the title of their first post-X Factor single.
The girls will release ‘Wings’ as the trailer for their debut album later this summer, and apparently they’ve co-written it as well.
Early industry whispers are that the track is one of the best ‘proper’ first singles to ever come from a champion of the talent search, joining Leona Lewis’ ‘Bleeding Love’, Alexandra Burke’s ‘Bad Boys’ (no, seriously) and Joe McElderry’s ‘Ambitions’ (no, seriously) on the list of outstanding openers.
The accuracy of these claims can be put to the test as early as tomorrow (June 1), when the girls appear on Alan Carr: Chatty Man and bring with them a 30-second snippet of the song. The interview was filmed yesterday.
With Marcus Collins all but dropped (‘Mercy’ is out on Sunday and has not registered at all on the iTunes chart yet), there’s a real chance that, for once, the winner might actually do better than the runner-up this time.
That is of course unless these unconfirmed Xenomania songs from Amelia Lily are fantastic.
Cheryl Cole is seen looking typically gorgeous as she poses with assorted neon shit in new photos from the A Million Lights campaign.
The record is out on June 18, one week after its lead single ‘Call My Name’, which now has over 5 million views on YouTube.
The songs may include horrific titles like ‘Sexy Den A Mutha’, but A Million Lights has been generating extremely positive early hype from various insiders, who say it’s her best work to date. ‘Love Killer’, a track uploaded to SoundCloud last week, has certainly proven itself to be a grower.
Check out the new images below.
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