Wig-on-a-turd Agnes is back and this time she's changed enough about what we love about her to actually mean it. On & On was originally a full on collision between a Tina Cousins and Culture Beat - it was just that good. This is a decent remix, but now sounds like an anonymous 90s remix which feels like a really bizarre ploy to tell fans of the original that they are in fact wrong in a bid to get a hit - Release Me wasn't exactly generic dancefloor slush, it had adrenaline, a rampant quality and an unminstakable surge or euro-pop, so this rinsing of its essential nutrients is almost insulting. The video would be a great treatment for a Velvet track, but I won't hold my breath for it to catch on.
Above: the wind has been completely knocked out of that melodramatic middle-8. The song was previously really gut-wrenching, now she's just dry purging the same bile as Swedish cougar Velvet.
Above: old turtle-head face sings her love song to toilet roll and gets ready to release the 'cleansing wipe' dance remix before flushing it down the UK airwaves.
Swedish wig-on-a-turd Agnes Carlsson wipes herself clean with the UK single edit of her new single I Need You Now. Here it is after getting its radio premiere on Radio 1. Part of me is really cynical of the gunpoint Cry For You esque poise, but it also manages to salute to her previous single Release Me's gorgeous sense of elegance. The rampant calamity of On & On was originally my clasped first choice for her second British single, but this new mix is more cleansing than a buy-1-get-1-free colonic.
Below: her stodgy package of high street honet meets Divine Brown has set the standard for UK Radio edits to follow.
The gorgeous waves of trance splash majestically whilst her vocal keeps it together - stoic, brittle and then in complete agony. The sunbathing tempo and the haughty self-service lyrics make it sound like a superior Peter Rauhofer cocktail divas like Whitney, Lara Fabien or Deborah Cox would rip their weaves off to down.
Above: AATW label mates Kelly Llorenna and Karen Parry smile whilst taking myspace pictures, but there are 5 men and cover versions to fight over.
Now that wig-on-a-turd Agnes Carlsson has gone and settled the worldwide chav dispute between Kelly Llorenna, Karen Parry, Tina Cousins and Dannii Minogue over who is 'Queen of Clubs' at AATW, I think it is best not to forget what a high drama it was - all that waiting for up to 6 months at a time just for a myspace update (Kelly's current mood is 'up yer maw' apparantly, with 3 pages of comments from her loyal fans), which was more excruciating than a post Ibiza visit to the GUM clinic (you just don't know what you are going to get, etc). In celebration of these gutter divas it is important to pay tribute to their behind-the-scenes legacy's.
While her chances of the crown are thinner than her eyebrows, the classy mother of six-by-twelve-different-fathers Karen Parry is largely unheard of outside her estate in northern England despite a colossal sized number 3 smash hit in the summer of 2002 with a Flip N' Fill usurping production of thewayward Shooting Star, an achievement she cherishes almost as much as her ASBO and teenage appearances on talkshow Trisha for reasons I won't go into.
Above: Parry's face had so much make-up applied it resembled a paper mache art project by ironic 5 year olds. Vying for title of 'Queen of Clubs' on Llorenna's home turf was clearly a faux pas on her part, as upon leaving the venue Parry was impregnated by 5 very angry and turned on lesbians.
From the moment her widescreen green-lit forehead shines gruesomely in the midst of an ilegal garage party in the Shooting Star video, a star was born, and also sworn (her atrocious bad language has saw her barred from appearing on British TV and radio leaving her forced to promote in clubs so dire that Kelly Llorenna wouldn't even squat to take a piss in). Despite being in debt, Karen is guaranteed to masacre any half-bad dance track that's going to pay for the vodka and cigarettes lifestyle she worked so hard for and has the rashes to prove it. She earned that success, and to Kelly Llorenna's cost started to steal favour with the critically acclaimed Pascal on their classic trance version of I Think We're Alone Now, which finally gave the song some personality exploiting Parry's trademark warmth and sensitivity. However, if she starts shagging the fat bloke from N-Trance, Llorenna will probably have her killed (just look what happened to Aaliyah). Parry sings with more clarity and honesty than most of her recent D.N.A tests would suggest, and her next logical move is to beat the Swedish tranny at her own game with a Flip N' Fill remix of her rival's On & On.
When not crashing planes (and her 9/11 whereabouts are still a mystery, despite her protests that she was locked safely in a tanning booth that week), old cowpat face Kelly Llorenna, the original chav-before-chav 'Queen of Chavs', has sang on no less than 4 top ten hits throughout her 15 year career in clubbing. Not without a sense of humour, her well-documented brawls over post-gig leftover kebabs scavenged from bins earned her numerous baseball bat injuries and the right to call her debut album All Clubbed Up (she even wears shades on the front cover to hide her black eyes). Affectionately labelled 'an old slag' by her former N-Trance producer on the official AATW messageboard, Llorenna is still waiting to crisp her skin up before taking to the stage again and reclaiming her crown - with skin like crispy batter, she'd better keep an eye out for Danniigoose swooping down and taking even more pecks at her.
Above: Llorenna languishing in the spotlight of Manchester's M.E.N arena, gurning to save her life. Kelly proves she really does call the shots, performing as N-Trance on their one truly enduring hit single Set You Free (notably bypassing Forever), as well as her two biggest solo hits Tell It To Me Pimp and True Tans Never Fade.
Below: Tina's hunched shoulders can't hide her homophobic discomfort, lip-synching in front of gays more interested in practicing their felatio technique on empty Bacardi Breezer bottles, in Glasgow's Bennets nightclub. Only when she got her cock out did the crowd fall under her dark spell of apocaliptic trance and MILF euro-pop. Tina's drink of choice was a shot of Amyl nitrite mixed with diet Fanta with no ice. Equally as trodden on if her close-ups are anything to go by, Tina Cousins is my favourite bulbous-nosed antipodean stretch-marked dance diva - her stoic verses are cautious and seek justice for various narratives that all vary on her favourite subject of being a loser in love, life and the music industy. Her erupting choruses are so stodgy and epic they could block a toilet as they overflow with so much of the shit that woman has been through. Unwilling to fight anymore, Tina lost out on the chance to record Dannii's 2005 trash smash Persperation. These anxious days bored fans can look forward to being promised new singles every 2 years and are only too happy to help clean up her shit as I wasn't joking about her toilet issues - girl goes through bog-roll like Dannii does cancer victims.
Speaking of survivors, Dannii Minogue's 18 year slog in the music industry is well-documented, but her tactic of collapsing under pressure has taken a palpable influence in her infrequent, revered Ibiza hits. Dannii was never truly up to competing for the AATW crown; tantrums ensued, telling her fans (i.e. me) to fuck off for suggesting she release unreleased material and then doing so anyway, refusing to record trashy anthems such as Dannii's Theme by the then-unknown Shapeshifters (telling me again to fuck off for wanting this confimred) showed she wouldn't lower herself by recording anything as tacky as a number one hit single. Dannii still leaves smug voicemales to Cher, mocking the Oscar winner for cashing in on her leftovers and the damage it did to the potential record sales of the Believe album ('can you believe I'm in Ibiza and you're stuck in Las Vegas perfoming on stage - later, bitch' was a low blow from even Dannii who can't acknowledge her self-destructive sunlounger weekends are starting to bring out the worst in her). At least she never hung around with this lot for chem-friendly group sex in a Travelodge hotel:
Since crimson antipodean dance warrior Gina G decided that growing a human being in her baggy womb was far more important than giving gays a reason to live, her 1 album legacy of 'love goddess' Hi-NRG perfection has finally found a pretender to her thrown. She comes in the form of 'Swedish Idol' winner Agnes Carlsson - with a name that just screams to be lit up in neon lights above dingey gay bars across the world, not only does she have the looks many transsexuals would kill for, her luggage of national popularity and an even bigger forehead set expectations high indeed. Her 3rd album Dance Love Pop has qualified her to 3 native top ten hits and currently sees her releasing Release Me as her missile into the UK and other European markets.
The album's first domestic single was the technoid On & On, a full-speed collision between early 90s Euro-dance duo Culture Beat and Tina Cousins. Impact is instant, and Carlsson is unflinching whilst a rave-up flares not a million miles away from the racaus carnage of Dead Or Alive's Nukleopatra.
The haunting Love Me Senseless is a cross between Laurent Wolf's No Stress and Love Inc's Broken Bones. A great pun wasted nevertheless, the track is melancholy with all the anguish of having trapped wind that won't shift in time for an internet meet. Agnes takes drastic action, and the track is as compelling as sex life strife in popworld gets.
The radio-ready current single Release Me is tamer yet her emphatic dedication remains equally evident, revving up comparisons to Lara Fabien and various Hex Hector remixes. The video bears a most unflattering resemblence to Madonna's Hung Up promo where an ensemble of stage school embiciles pretend that hip hop is their way of life whilst dancing to a disco track. Making up for the misguided choreography is Angnes' own drag queen worthy strutting as she minces to her nearest gay bar. Inside, some of the videos best shots are shown as the track's instrumental spins in drunken bliss - if that girl does not leave the gay bar for a mmf sleepover now then she will probably never leave the guy she is whingeing about.
How Do You Know? is not only my standard responce to overweight female customers who limp their wrists at me as I sell my soul in order to sell face and body products to them ('take this into the shower you'll be making noises your husband hasn't heard since you first got married'), but this is also about Agnes defending her decision to become a woman; the young Andreas would be proud as he becomes the pop diva he always creamed of whilst stealing his sisters Just 17 magazines to sneak peaks at AJ from the Backstreet Boys amongst others.
Elsewhere, saggy Aggie returns to her full-throttle capabilities on the stodgy stomper Open Up Your Eyes where her theatrical wail never sounded better. If only Mariah would record a song so frivolously sleazy. Carlsson's impatience snaps into anthemic proportions after her un-named sex partners can't bear to look at her anymore. Undaunted, Agnes is at the top of her game and warns Don't Pull Your Love Out.
Look At Me stimulates similar emotions to Whitney's jittery So Eotional, but achieves the same effect by sticking two fingers up (although 'look at the way I spread my legs' goes a bit too far). Her slick campaign of unabashedly uptempo numbers is a high-impact assault that will take place in the hearts of dance-pop lovers all over the world and will probably leave Lisa Scott-Lee crying into her empty packets of cream crackers. Gina G will most likely be too knee-high in baby dirt to notice, but a new pop pricess has arrived.
Wig-on-a-turd Agnes is back and this time she's changed enough about what we love about her to actually mean it. On & On was originally a full on collision between a Tina Cousins and Culture Beat - it was just that good. This is a decent remix, but now sounds like an anonymous 90s remix which feels like a really bizarre ploy to tell fans of the original that they are in fact wrong in a bid to get a hit - Release Me wasn't exactly generic dancefloor slush, it had adrenaline, a rampant quality and an unminstakable surge or euro-pop, so this rinsing of its essential nutrients is almost insulting. The video would be a great treatment for a Velvet track, but I won't hold my breath for it to catch on.
