TRACK OF THE WEEK
Kate Nash
Good Summer
After moving to LA, founding a feminist collective and collaborating with punk bands, Kate Nash is having another stab being a pop star. Good Summer feels at odds with her recent riot grrrl shtick: it’s a basic, feelgood, Casio electropop ditty that might have scaled the charts in 2007. However, it does bring some “just come to mine and we’ll have a few tins and forget about Brexit” grounding to an increasingly OTT Britain as she sings about being “wild and free”. With Lily Allen busy working on that grime album, perhaps Kate Nash is the everygirl we need right now.
Tom Odell
Concrete
Between the acutely harmonised vocals and claps with more reverb than a Duran Duran concert, this almost sounds as if Tame Impala crashed Paisley Park in 1991 and laid down a parody track. But it’s not. It’s Tom Odell singing about rubbing himself on things, which belongs firmly in the category of the most sexless songs ever to come from someone listing Tom Waits as an influence.
Banks
Meditation Song
The LA singer’s angsty-cum-sultry brand of R&B requires patience, which, despite landing somewhere between FKA twigs and the Weeknd, is perhaps why it’s taken a while to connect with people. It also doesn’t help that her natural expression is that of someone who picked on you at school for being slow to hit puberty. But Meditation Song’s sultry slow build, minimal coo-wail and drippy drums are actually quite inviting, like a trip-hop Enya. Maybe Banks just hasn’t found her clique yet.
Britney Spears
Clumsy
Britney Spears is timeless. She is the only celebrity besides Harrison Ford who could get away with wearing a Fedora in 2016, and consistently releases the kind of singles that only work in European clubs. Clumsy, however, might not even do that. The chorus’s synth sounds as if it’s being dunked in the toilet and at one point Britney’s vocals are sped up to sound like a cassette fast-forwarding. All creative decisions that should have been left in Vegas with her residency.
Green Day
Bang Bang
Arguably the only upside to an America under Trump would be the good it would do for punk. In the meantime all we have is this commentary on mass shootings and social media from Green Day, featuring the lyrics, “I got my photobomb, I got my Vietnam.” Musically, it’s the most ferocious the three-piece has sounded in 20 years. Lyrically, it’s someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt to a Rage Against The Machine reunion.
