This weeks single reviews are brought to you by our regular single reviewer Philip Lickley. If you would like to contribute to All-Noise, send your music views and reviews to [email protected].
Angel ft Wretch 32- ’Go In, Go Hard’
[rating:3.5/5]
Buy Go In, Go Hard
“We should think about the cake next time we buy the custard.” Either that’s this month’s award for the daftest lyric in an RnB song or some clever passage locked in an everyday message. Either way this is a nice mix of Angel’s smooth vocals and Wretch 32’s rap that sounds much friendlier and fun than the usual mixture of rap artists posturing. The slow-paced rapping is not that great but Angel’s excellent silky-smooth verses make up for it.
Jamie Hartman – ’Girlwise’
[rating:4/5]
Buy Girlwise
The former Ben’s Brother singer returns with this atmospheric ballad, very much in the style of his group work and his previous single ‘Happy New Year’. Immediately catchy from its well delivered chorus, ’Girlwise’ is more of the same from Hartman in his trademark stripped back style – but I’m not going to complain when the same is this good.
JLS – ’Proud (Official Sport Relief Single)’
[rating:3/5]
Buy Proud
Sport Relief singles tend to be a varied bunch of mostly inspired re-imaginings to pleasing new tracks, from the excellent modernising of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ in 2002, to the catchy original ‘Some Girls’ in 2003, via the lacklustre cover by numbers of McFly’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, to last year’s under-rated poorly-performing ‘Morning Sun’’ by Robbie. It just goes to show that slapping the words ‘Sport Relief’ on a single doesn’t necessarily make it a success in the charts, but it doesn’t help when the song is a cliché boy band ballad like this. Sure it fits in with the images of people overcoming adversity to do sport and the chorus is as good as you’d expect from the JLS boys, but it’s a little bit too X-Factor, key changes and sweeping synth strings to really stand out from anything else. Not bad but drenched in cliché. It’s been done before and better, for instance with Heather Small’s title-matching 2000 hit.
Katy Perry – ’Part Of Me’
[rating:3.5/5]
Buy Part Of Me
Almost guaranteed to draw tabloid-esque parallels with her marriage break-out, this bonus track from a re-release of her Teenage Dreams album is certainly different from what has come before in musical style. Unlike Jessie J’s similar tactic of tacking on the excellent ‘Domino’ onto her album and re-releasing it and sounding like Katy Perry, Perry releases something much clubbier and house-enthused with a determined beat throughout it that sounds unlike her previous tunes for the most part. Channelling ‘The One That Got Away’ in the break down, however, it feels at times like she’s following a bouncing ball on a karaoke screen to sing the lyrics to the beat. Filled with vitriol, the lyrics tell a great story (though much more vicious than we expect from the usually sweet Perry) and the chorus is club-friendly, but it’s not really up there with the quality of her most recent singles and seems a little forced to be club and radio friendly. Catchy but without much substance.
