Eurgh, Whatever, Here's My 'Opinion'

I shouldn't but I will. The most try-hard thing about Xtina's new video is the grimly inevitable mistake from messageboard posters to equate desperation and trashiness with being a bad thing. Here is what I wrote about the actual song and feel the exact same about its visually abusive promotional clip, which is the best from an A-list diva so far in 2010:

Like diarrhea on spewing tap, Christina's slithery new single Not Myself Tonight shoots itself out in all manner of directions with no thought for the mess, smell or embarassment it causes. It's exactly what I want from the lead single from this artist. Her amazing vocal slaying is on deliciously mindless form, it doesn't matter what she is singing or how, but it does help that she's telling haters to fuck off and I like that. She wants a reaction and even wants you to hate it - vexed concepts such as this (and even Dirrty back in the day) cut two ways. However, after Basics almost bored my balls into becoming a vagina, finally she swells once again with wanton enthusiasm, antagonistic pursuit and trashtastic pride. It will embarass people who don't even like her - sometimes that's all you can ask for.

Kelly Rowald's HQ Commander Is 'Out There' Y'all

Drenched in amazingness, at first I thought it was okay, then not bad, but now it's finally hit me and she even smuggles in a Beyonce diss. Okay not quite, but 'turn the lights on' is a tad from nowhere - Michelle should have just put a stop to it and made that her album title when she had the chance. My second favourite Kelly appears to be taking her second 'anthem of the summer' in as many years.

Sophie Ellis Bextor - Bittersweet

She who loves the make-up, Sophie Ellis Bextor continues to just amaze Diva Incarnate. Here we go again, we've got to stop not buying your music like this. Honestly, what is she like?

Exactly like she was the last time - Heartbreak Me A Dancer's follow-up Bittersweet has even less of a chorus and seems quite content on being solely reliant upon the familarly exuberant production courtesy of the work-shy Freemasons. If that was not enough, we need to wait until August for the album. It is certainly wise to promote a record with 3 singles, but the third one just happens to be a song that was originally recorded by Roisin Murphy (who is the Annie Lennox of the 21st century) and leaked back in 2007! Well good luck Sophie, no doubt you shall write yet another memorable personalised newsletter to the blog but I doubt even that will save you. And yes Make A Scene was the better album title, not Straight To The Dumper, which just sounds like your sophomore one.

Kimberly Wyatt - Candy

I seem to have a blind spot for music that wasn't made by anyone from the 80s and 90s, but Kimberly Wyatt has made a surprising splatt (yes I went there) at the top of that elusive countdown all guest vocalists strive for, the MTV UK Dance Chart. Credited to Aggro Santos ft. Kimbery Wyatt, the song is called Candy and with its ingratiating facebook foreplay lyrics I think it's decent. Wyatt is under no delusion to become the next Beyonce unlike a certain bandmate of hers, and her seemless slide into cute and enticingly frivolous dance makes her labour miles better than a certain Nicole Scherzinger's sterile efforts.

Friggin' Fabulous

My favourite diva Cher is promising to out-gay the gays with the release of her long-awaited return to rock music with the follow-up album to 2001's dance-lubricated Living Proof. The 'gay' part is that she's Cher, but also with regards to rumours that a deluxe version is to be made available upon release comprising a second CD crammed full of glossy dance remixes. I can't wait for more information to leak and speculation to ensue. Cher is expected to debut the new single Already Been There at the World Music Awards 18 May in Monaco. The Oscar winning superstar's publicist has gone on the record to state:

This is going to be by far the most successful album Cher has recorded in her 45 year career.

Jennifer Rush - Now Is The Hour

The 49 year old 80s crossover diva Jennifer Rush is back. In Germany, and in Greece. Her impressive voice, the sound of a mouthful of tampons soaking up serious emotions, has always been a cult reputation and The Power of Love is the original once in a lifetime powerballad. On the best cuts, where the beats and tunes kick in when you just don't care less what organ she's singing through, you'll just be grateful that she is. And so her mysterious top grade cheap tricks prove a hit on new album Now Is The Hour, her first studio set in over 13 years - beat that Kate Bush. Her Octomom-identified glamour lends itself well to the thumping ethnic eurodance. Her synthetic Cher move is only 12 years too late, but game bird Rush is still keen to lick from a variety of sources including gay-dance, ethno-dance, opera-dance, rock-dance, midtempo-dance, and even ballads. After her career took a nosedive in the early 90s, so did her face, and like her face, J-Ru is giving it a lift whether it's butchered, botched or just botoxed.

A river of piano keys form a stream into Dream Awake's tempestuously insatiable craving for ravishing romance. The flickering heat sees Rush gushing about her boundaries being blurred, but I would suggest a good wax to sort that out. The disco is serious and the woman herself probably lubricated.

We have Natasha Bedinfield to blame for the Middle-Eastern flavoured Betcha Never - I'm guessing that description makes it very obvious the song sounds really lame in spite of some breathtaking toungue lashings such as 'don't hide what you feel inside'.

Lyrics of the flesh and spiritual quiverings to put Mary Kiani to shame are symptoms of a woman 'way beyond the spoken word', but Window can be summed up quite easily: forgettable, but definately defendable if the intense soundtrack of a middle-aged woman getting herself off to the Hallmark channel is something you can work with.

The juicy beats of Down On My Knees are certainly no chore, penetrating so fast you won't even feel them touch the sides. A simmering disco blisters as the poor lady is 'begging for mercy' whilst, you've guessed it, down on her knees - she has most likely still got the whole football team to get through. She talks a good game, but I do worry she will get pins and needles.

The glittery surfaces on the mid-tempo piano-rippling ballad Head Above Water is akin to Celine 'A New Day era' Dion. It turns into a mini-opera, with delicate vocoder effects. Rush pulls off the balladeer moves with strenuous skill. The rousing I Never Asked For An Angel salutes life's mistakes with some sort of self-belief, but my will is to press skip.

Second single Echoes Love is a tropical dance current with the kind of thick bassline groove reminiscent of Michelle Williams or Alexandra Burke's All Night Long. Orgasmic. She's hitting the piano keys again on I'm Not Dreaming Anymore and I'm hitting the drink.

Title track Now Is The Hour is a solemn hymn-like pledge, which would be fine in small doses if she hadn't passed through similar stunts already. There is a key change and it's almost worth it. The chugging Like I Would For You gets back to work, accelerating into a wheeping chorus that has wind blowing in her hair (probably the only body part she has that can actually move). The album's first single was the ballad Before The Dawn, which I can take or leave, but it's admittedly the best conventional torch song on offer.

Rush goes robotic on Eyes of A Woman and let's hope it has nothing to do with her top drawer. The track has more lust than Ashley Cole in a mobile phone shop. The greedy dancefloor beats of the Milftastic Just The Way are worthy of Metro's stunning performances for Anna Vissi, Cher and Lara Fabien. This would be the broad's best bet for a British comeback - seriously sensational.

Kylie cohort Steve Anderson snatches his paycheck on the after-hours ballad Ain't Loved You Long Enough, which if I am being generous would have sounded great on Minogue's abandoned after-hours ballads album if she had actually seriously planned such a career killer. I don't not like it though, and she does wail magnificently. On Still she sings as beautifully as the falling rain, but I've swallowed enough syrup here - not many albums clogged with as much ballad as this are worth the trouble, yet Rush gives it her all on all 15 tracks.

I isolate the dance tracks, ressurecting this beast back into business whilst her token melodrama on the ballads show up a diva well past her prime. Her ballads are at least gratifyingly straightforward if nothing else, although only when she threatens to compete with Celine Dion's spangly A New Day Has Come album on Head Above Water does she sound like a contender. Her campy kicks are magnified on hyper disco flashes such as Dream Awake where the music is high gloss and, as on Eyes of A Woman, sexually committed to utter trash. There is drama as well as declamation here - her concept of cheap thrills will charm the pants of anyone with Cher, Tina or Diana Ross remixes in their playlists. As far as divas who outlast their peak with unthinkably flashy and gutsy dance-orientated music, Jennifer Rush is the one to beat.

Good Luck Boys!

Ex-Baser Jenny Berggren stuns anyone with ears by releasing the best song she has sung on since Life Is A Flower, her debut single Here I Am. It's fucking brilliant isn't it?

Tina Turner's Primark Heartache

So facebook morons are wanting to get Tina Turner's size queen anthem Simply The Best into somewhere high in the UK singles charts. So what's the issue, what is the risk you are wondering? Everyone loves the song....

Above: Tina bravely asks Glasgow not to stab one another.

Unless it gets blasted in Glasgow when Braveheart 2 will happen. The city closed down last year when Primark had it playing to promote their annual buy-1-shoplift-5-free thongs campaign and there was more blood than in the factories where their clothes are made by children who have at least 4 of their original fingers. Tina was mortified - she wanted to know where her free thongs were, how else is she going to up her game now that Beyonce is ripping her off, and ripping her thongs off as well?

Above: only one person is owning this stage and she isn't the one wearing donkey pubes for a weave.

I like so few of Tina's songs, but I Don't Wanna Fight I do a lot, which is almost ironic. The chart-rising song is synonymous with one of our local football teams and incites a fair bit of visceral hatred between Catholic and Prodestant sport fans. Turner is officially banned from playing it in Scotland.

Cyndi Still Scrubs Up

Cyndi Lauper's new front cover for forthcoming album Memphis Blues. Intriguing, there are so many artists who have done the concept, this has possibilites to go either way.

Shelby Lynne - Tears, Lies & Alibis

Quietly coming from nowhere, Shelby Lynne has released an album boasting some of the best songs of her entire career. With her trailor-trash blonde beauty and tough-cookie persona, her silky Dusty-esque timbre ought to sell for millions. The fiercely independent country/rock not-pop singer releases her stripped back Tears, Lies & Alibis. The more I listen, the more I am amazed - an acoustic-and-voice collection that will lift you in your lowest or most pensive search for some kind of redemption.

The light acoustic shower of Rains Came is the jaunty opener stretched to the impossible length of 2:25 minutes. Why Didn't You Call Me is even shorter. These first two songs - neither lasting longer than 2 minutes each - are mere bait, but she's a gifted singer and her jazz-folk songs are arranged to stregnthen her lyrics. She's finding the subtle details that she craves with generous ease.

The poignant Like A Fool is half a dozen tattoos from being a softer Ani Difranco song. Her touching eloquence blossoms on all 10 tracks. The sultry Alibi is almost cinematic, I can only hope she never tires of being disappointed by her lovers.

The torchly Something To Be Said About Air is a 3:34 minute of climactic poetry, it's almost jazz. Too gritty to be anything near edgy, Family Tree is a smouldering gear shift (faster strums basically, think Kelly Llorenna by herself in a toilet cubicle). The sultry and seductive Loser Dreamer is self-amused and settles into your heart like a sunset. This is the sound of day-later melancholy, I totally see glimpses of myself wanting to say these things myself.

Shelby's buy-now pay-later love orders 'make it a double' on Old #7. Her stubborn vocal contours on Old Dog ('there must be someone out there somewhere') suggests a brave future. Her rich vocal flavours flesh out Home Sweet Home, a sentimental song sung sweetly as if it's cold outside.

Subjugating melody to the natural music of language itself, her hardened-Dusty crooning, romantic dilemmas and pensive reflections satisfy an intensity and softness. Impressively cunning. Songs worth going back to.

Jennfy Frost Is So Hot

I am constantly astounded that Atomic Kitten's lubricated blonde Jenny Frost (presenter of BBC3's Snog, Marry or Avoid) never broke free of her MOR-ballad leash and leached onto the dance-pop bangdwagon she was expected to. The evidence is on the former girlgroups's album Feels So Good, which boasts a whole two Frost outbreaks of motivation, Baby Don't U Hurt Me and So Hot, which tellingly are the best things on it despite Natasha permanently hogging vocal duties. Yes, that Minoguer woman co-wrote the title track (no comment on its quality), but this is all about Jenny Frost - her cum-glazed, sleazy pop jams were all the rage. Neither of these are losers, and only her modesty really hurts anything. Her tasty voice is more flavoursome than the condoms in her hanbag she pretends to use.

After earning her art badge with such lyrics as So Hot's 'I'm yours for the night if you dare' and 'make you hotter than the one you ever tasted' Frosty clearly slams her pussy even harder than she sings. Composing herself as a fulltime hot person causes her token speciality to express her awareness of it, and one can scoff at mere honesty - just tell that to Kerry Katona. Of course, with Frost songwriting or actual music isn't really the point, but her catchy hooks prove that even her voice can't get in the way of her lusty soundtracks. She pumps her pop like giving Eurovision a colonic, and boy do these stinkers give fans of trash their fix of mediocre dance-pop and then some.
Atomic Kitten's pre-fab Never Ever's were a bit much for me, so to get sent this album as some kind of compensation for not getting a CD I ordered (or getting it late, I cannot remember) was an accident - it was not until I skipped to tracks 12 and 13 that I introduced myself to the accelerated form of a makeshift replacement member blossoming into a formidable solo star with the only thing stopping her being her chavvy girlband colleagues and the fact that she cannot sing, and for the most part doesn't. JF attacks her sporadic lines with a warm slinky burr on indubitably tuneful dance songs that speak to slightly jaded and pregnant teenagers and the gays who got bullied by them at school.

Kylie Backs Out of Whitney Cover For New Single

For 23 gruesome years, Kylie Minogue was hell bent on stopping her younger sister take over the world. All Kylie could manage was Europe, but she still succeeded in reducing her sibling to nothing more than a gay icon with a really hot baby daddy. As if that wasn't enough, she is also releasing a new single. It sounds reallu good. In blogsphere this news will have more coverage than Heidi Montag's herpes, yet I couldn't resist regurgitating the sample of the first single, which celebrates K's well known love for equal opportunity gangbangs, All The Lovers:

Above: it really is hard to tell whether or not Kylie is singing in this clip or not ('LOL').

The new name for her new album? Aphrodite. It's not the first time she's taken inspriation from Lady Miss Kier Kirby (just go with me on this one), but I'll let it slip when it sounds this AMAZING.

Billie Ray Martin - Systems of Silence (Jr. Vasquez Remix)

Dance might insist its own functionality, and for barely-functioning-anyway Billie Ray Martin it is not hard to imagine that her biggest hit (some say only one) Your Loving Arms leaves the impression that nightclubbing rewards were her natural reportoire. But in fact, her debut album Deadline For My Memories was more Dusty Springfield meets Everything But The Girl than playing any part in 1995s throbbing soundtrack of Grace, Livin' Joy and Strike. Billie's sophisticated vision of electronic soul was far more expressive than her peers, and the singer's 4 Ambient Tales e.p was positively unconciousl and still. However, when committed to dealing with her one-hit-wonder reputation as a disco diva, which was a tremendous up when she was, she was a force to be reckoned with. The cool melancholy tingeing Honey made it the hit that never was, but from her own (admittedly cheapskate) In Memphis record, the brilliantly titled Eighteen Carat Garbage, an introverted drum n' bass influenced cut called Systems of Silence was given a gigantic remix by none other than Jr. Vasquez and can be found on her remix disc Recycled Garbage. Going about its elegant 9 minute opus business of sounding nothing like the album it came from, it is given such a grandiose setting that Martin's chillingly seductive paranoia inspires the kind of distaste and fear only George Orwell could match if he penned a song for Grace Jones (hear her scream that middle-eight). Swathed in a storm of Hi-NRG tumult, Billie's German diva gestalt reinforces her unnering kinesthetic, whilst Vasquez renders the session phantasmagoric. Cinematic, thrilling and terrifying, 2:28 is when the smouldering vocal enters the picture.

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De Nuit - All That Mattered

If sumptuous sunset-lilting house music with downbeat male vocals is your thing, De Nuit's melancholic All That Mattered (Love You Down) will melt into your ears. A modest hit, it barely scraped into the UK's top 40 but it could only boast a more relaxing texture if Dannii Minogue were to record it whilst resting in her sling. The East Sunshine version is the one I constantly go back to for more, it's scary to remember it came out back in 2002/3!

Corona - Baby Baby

Continuing my 90s dance skidmarks, the decade didn't dump a bigger whallop of rampant Eurodance than Corona's galvanic sexdrive Baby Baby. You simply wouldn't have gotten a more lethal dancefloor dosage unless Kelly Llorenna was injecting you with heroine. It was smeared all over the charts in 1995, nudging top 5 in the UK and grazing the summit in the land of Dana International (aka Israel). I can't 'bear' to look at naked fat men porno, so always chose the underground transport setting of the second video shot for the single, although Olga's jawdropping good looks - as their 1998 comeback proves - could survive even the most Dannii Minogue of budgets:

Corona still had their second album to come, reviewed here, but the attention-grabbing beats and overly subtle lyrical harassment of the first album's hits still explain their spectacular appeal most convincingly.

Crush - Jellyhead (Motiv8 Pumphouse Edit)

Despite all sounding the same, Motiv8 remixes remain an essential component of the decade's very best dance music. Synthy, exuberant and ready to pound the shit out of you, DJ Steve Roadway's magic touch transformed such dross as the flat-chested original Jellyhead by Crush into enhanced fuck-me pumpers. To understand just how amazing Crush were, just to put it into perspective - they were even better than Vanilla. Before you jump off a cliff at the very thought, like Xeonomania before them, Roadway knows exactly how to transform a turd into the sophisticated trash-dance fantasies Mary Kiani still wets herself over whenever she remembers she once had a career. More mouthy than Cheryl Cole at a KKK meeting, this Geordie duo's pugnatious dual-delivery beats such contemporaries as Vanilla and Milan hands-and-fishnets down. This track's a classic, and they deserve it. It's got a great line: 'so what if your jeans are torn, they've been torn since Bros were cool' is the stuff of stacked teen bravado, suggesting some poor buy had better tuck his penis back in, muscling into their vocals with a brashly lubricious blind spot for diplomacy that would wound the Billboard Hot 100, reaching #72. Record buyers never looked back and sadly that was that.

Linda Sunblad - Perfect Nobody

As reported on countless other second-rate blogs such as this one, Linda Sundblad's next Manifest single is the non-shabby ballad Perfect Nobody. It's not as quirky as the piano-trodding Serotonin, as lyrically fused as Making Out, as gutsy as Pick Up The Peices, or as - you get the fucking picture - Cherish-era Madonna as It's Alright, but it's seductive pathos is totally bewitching and props Sundblad up as being just as artistically vital as the aforementioned Madonna during her Like A Prayer era. Exaggeration, much? Not quite - just imagine all these cuts being showcased with $1,000,000 videos and a world tour as epic as Blond Ambition. Madonna is the Queen of Pop, it cannot and will not be challenged no matter how many mobile phones and burger sponsers Lady Gaga's undigested-influences pop whores itself out to. Instead she birthed the Pop Princess - the female pop star capable of emotionally captivating music but without the same budget and life-threatening desire to 'rule the world'. That is the way I see Sundblad - the album is bombing in Sweden, but here in the UK I genuinely believe there is a gap for music this fleshed out and ferocious as 2 All My Girls and the even more superior Let's Dance.

If You Thought Nikki 'I Have NEVER Shopped At ASDA' French Was Desperate....

In her biggest budget since her last face-lift, Bonnie Tyler singes the very highest spot available for out-of-work singers from the 80s - singing a jingle to her biggest hit for a TV advert.

Courtney Love - America's Sweetheart

After Hole split up, Courtney Love couldn’t keep hers shut, fast becoming more and more of a car crash without the red carpet gloss we had sort of began to adore her for. And so before Hole come back with next month's Nobody's Daughter, the rock star's last flash of brilliance was simply her last album, 2004's America's Sweetheart, a solo one that was much more than a pitiable attempt to cash in on her personal destruction - it was an affirmation of just what makes her such a star wherein her shocking state is captured immensely on every thristy second.

Music lovers just grateful to be spared yet another Max Martin protégée weren't smug for long when it was revealed Linda ‘Christina Aguilera’ Perry was co-producing. The proof of Courtney's brilliance can't even be dimmed under Perry's production that is thinner than the singer's mid 90s septum. The commercial compromise is the reason it even got made, so I won't keep bitching about Perry if I can help it - in fact, Love herself puts blame on her old flame Jim Barber for the drowned sound.

Aurally astute and articulate but - heavens no- not clean, nevermind neat, and much less mysterious, lead single Mono's guitar riff could give a lesbian a boner, is instantly noticeable and provokes a ferociously determined vocal that even momentarily sounds strikingly in control snearing to God 'are you, you are the one'. The chorus' blatant gender aggression proves she's not dead, not overrated and not over no matter what she looks or sounds like.

As on the sexually-satisfying vow to out-coke the fashion-conscious skinny rock stars But Julian, I'm A Little Bit Older Than You, it also helps that the emotional high of her songwriting sometimes approaches her medicated ones, although when 'the pornoriphic girl is me' you'd best duck or expect herpes.

With a cute but tired-sounding melody, the heartrendingly broken Hold On To Me has a riff that's bruised and helplessly exhausted.

Attaching herself to literally any body, on the ravishingly sleazy I'll Do Anything she emotes words over the cruddy-but-importantly-loud guitar noise. The theme of exploitation has always prevailed for Courtney, and here she positively demands it at gunpoint.

The sludge of the guttural purge All The Drugs makes her voice sounds like her throat has got wood lice. She's dense, deluded and demanding, even if she out-strips Perry's abilities which leave us a bit short-changed.

Forever the valley gurl, she celebrates that 'my dress is the prettiest' even if she sounds like the type of 5 year old who had to hit the other girls for not being her friends. The very Celebrity Skin era sounding Almost Golden is Courtney smoking her Stevie Nicks LPs again. Thank God. The lilting Sunset Strip is just as good ('I got pills for my coochie cos I’m sore') - it's a toss up between these two for being the catchiest thing since Malibu. Both these tracks would be glorious Hole circa 1998 tracks, yet in 2004 sounded unwittingly tragic – 6 years later the guilt and concern from wanting her to sound better is now (hopefully) unnecessary and they do sound majestic.

Lousy mother sings lousy song; Life Without God is shot to pieces. It’s pretty repulsive and unbearable.

She must have had a sleepover at Elton's, Uncool is the collaboration with Bernie (sadly, not of the Nolan clan) Tauplin, and despite the sweet lyric 'you're pretty face has grabbed the headlines' it inadvertently cultivates a pre-Lindsay Lohan trainwreck sensibility when that time is clearly past her ('I'm too young to be this old' she slurrs on track 7).

Likeable throwaways Hello and Zeplin Song both approach and miss their stop for B-Sides R Us, so you'd better get used to them being here. Ever the creative marketer, the singer sticks in a Smells Like Teen Spirit lyric (clue is in the title). Seriously, it's great to hear her with this much verve and cheek. They're not top notch, but at least she's trying, and she doesn't sound like the hot mess she actually is in 2004, with news on Zeplin I wasn't about to guess.

She does sound dismal on Never Gonna Be The Same though, but beautifully so. Just because her voice is crippled doesn't mean her heart is. She lives and dies singing these overwhelmingly sad lyrics, which at the time sounded like her last fingernail grip.

With her voice in shreds, it's no longer even pretty on the inside. She needs 1991-98 bandmate Eric, she can't lift the heavy weights on her own. Nobody's Daughter will sound 'classier', but this is Courtney getting an Avril makeover courtesy of Linda Perry and thankfully the shit don't stick - Courtney won't stay still and play game for anyone. We might deserve better than the state she is in here, but I can't resist the music. Her grand self regard and chainsaw-throat vocals find legs on the lead single, the hooker-slurred pomp thrills of I’ll Do Anything and All The Drugs, and a few others that are all more than worthy of being struck on some belated half arsed compilation, which might be the only other chance these songs get. Amazing artwork by the way.

Toni Braxton - Yesterday

Toni Braxton brings back the joy to our li-i-i-i-ives (subtle Unbreak My Heart reference there pop fans) with her new single Yesterday - God knows how this will do, but MOR Milf Rn'B has worked for Whitney and Monica so I don't see why it can't work for the 90s star who momentarily posed a threat to the likes of Houston, Carey and Dion. Most enjoyable of all, hoewver, is the run-of-the-milf Bimbo Jones remix:

Sue Sylvester - Vogue

Every other blog is doing it, so why shouldn't I? Yes, Glee have unleashed their Sue Sylvester tribute to Madonna's Vogue. Certainly a nice vanity peice for the actress, but there are less than 5 minor references to who the character actually is - the rap is the only explicit moment I can imagine is actually meant to be funny. Perhaps it shall make sense in the context of one of that shows gripping 'storylines' (it should seriously look at the duller than dull Ugly Betty and realise that pantomine-comedy should be its strength). Here it is, although I doubt anyone won't have already seen it: