#alex ivers | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

deadcactuswalking · 1 month ago

Text

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 28/09/2024 (Alex Warren)

For a fifth week, Sabrina Carpenter remains at #1 with “Taste” - it’s been there since release, and shows no real sign of decline. I suppose time will tell, but for now, welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, G-Eazy

Rundown

This is a pretty slow week, and if Alex Warren having the biggest debut doesn’t tell you that, everything else should, but that doesn’t mean nothing happened and of course, we start as always with our notable dropouts, songs exiting the UK Top 75 - which is what I cover - after a peak in the top 40 or five weeks within the covered region. This week, we bid a fair adieu to, firstly, a couple songs that really did not kick off and are gone really early like “ALL RED” by Playboi Carti after just a week in the top 40, “Moi” by Central Cee and RAYE, “Nobody’s Soldier” by Hozier and “Pretty Slowly” by Benson Boone, alongside two more seasoned hits in the form of “Fortnight” by Taylor Swift featuring Post Malone and, thank the heavens, “I Don’t Wanna Wait” by David Guetta and the hacks over at OneRepublic. I have never once said my coverage is unbiased.

Apart from Ariana Grande’s “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” back at #74 and “i like the way you kiss me” by Artemas at #71, just creeping back up in a slow week, alongside Coldplay’s “Yellow” at #62, we don’t have many returns of note, so we can look towards the interesting and relatively significant gains for “KEEP UP” by Odetari at #51, kind of surprised that’s making it higher, “Close to You” by Gracie Abrams at #47, “Who” by Jimin at #40, “Diet Pepsi” by Addison Rae at #37, “Carry You Home” by Alex Warren at #32 thanks in part to the new song which we’ll talk about later and the album next week. Then we have “feelslikeimfallinginlove” by Coldplay at #32, “WILDFLOWER” by Billie Eilish at #23, “Embrace It” by Ndotz taking virality up to #20, and finally, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #15.

And as for our top five, well, it’s mostly stagnant. Sure, at #5 and #4, “Please Please Please” by Sabrina Carpenter swapped places with “Die with a Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, but our top three stays still: “Espresso” by Sabrina at #3, “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan at #2 and of course, “Taste” at #1. Now to run through our batch of new songs, a small but really mixed bag here, starting with:

New Entries

#73 - “I Only Smoke When I Drink” - nimino

Produced by nimino

Alright, I’ll bite: who the Hell is nimino? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter? This is a woozy, bordering on fuzzy and lo-fi, spin on a house tune from a producer based in London who has been active since at leasst 2018 in EDM but hadn’t broken out with a big single until now. Firstly, here’s a way of telling if someone is more of a real deal bedroom producer finally getting a deserved break instead of an opportunist TikTok viral moment: this is a bit of a deep cut of a sample, isn’t it? R&B singer Rayana Jay released her song “Hangover” in 2019, it’s a smooth jam with just barely over a million streams on Spotify and a post-success feature from G-Eazy alongside the much more unknown and definitely much more talented Beni Moun. It’s not something that stands out to me, but is a cute enough song that closes her album - it’s rough to finish your record with a G-Eazy feature, though. It stood out to nimino though! He takes not the chorus but the opening line I wouldn’t think twice about to make the titular hook, turning it into a mantra unrecognisable from its original context.

This new song has flittering percussion and synths similar to a Fred again.. track alongside the filtered, more typical house drums which all eventually collide into a louder, almost overwhelming melodic blend against the original cooed hook. The main synth may be too loud, actually, but it phases in very well into a chirpy rhythm that really reminds me of the late 2010s with the cute vocal sound effects and one-offs like the kid laughing, the shuttered future bass-esque synth and nice little percussive percs that show a level of detail to the production here. The sound design is top-notch, the drop is not one-note as the second time around, we get a much more filtered rendition that renders everything into pitch-shifted fragments and even new elements from the original sample coming in, before a final lead-up to what seems like a crescendo amongst 2-step drums… and it just doesn’t arrive, which in this case is genuinely disappointing, because the potential is there for a longer song and really impactful third drop. For what it is, though, it still exceeds my expectations greatly and is a neat, fun little jam I wouldn’t be against seeing chart for a few weeks longer. I believe this is what the kids are calling “stutter house” but I may also need to check out more of nimino’s other work to see what he’s been up to outside of this viral hit, and also to see if he ultimately fits into that genre or, like many EDM DJs nowadays, is a jack of all trades. I feel like his late-summer, wavy sound will fit into many different styles. For now, I recommend this… and not really the song it came from.

#72 - “TEFLON DON” - Future

Produced by Southside, Topp, Peeb, MoXart Beatz, London on da Track and Desro

So, Future dropped an album. Or mixtape. Or album called mixtape. Either way you shake it, it does not seem like this drop will make as strong a wave of his duo of collaborative projects with producer Metro Boomin, primarily because of how there are no features, and it’s an overall rawer project that spends most of its time in and out of short, hard beats with a lot of decadence and deviance from the main affair and no-one else. Given its shorter length, the lack of other voices does not really lead to it dragging as you’d expect, and outside of other long-time collaborators Wheezy and Southside, there aren’t many recurring producers, and a lot of beats have varied contributions from several. There’s a snappier and more diverse palette of instrumentals than you could have expected as a result. However, that doesn’t translate to sales, and this album debuted at #11 on the UK Albums Chart, with only one song charting - I didn’t expect to discuss MIXTAPE PLUTO at all but I’m sure the last-minute music video helped matters, though it’s also the opener - I assume many tapped out after realising there wouldn’t be any guest stars, but Pluto does hold the tape well on his own. This has a hard trap beat, some operatic textures, and splintering production amongst the other alien loops that find themselves in his mix serving one verse from Future, comparing himself to John Gotti like many a rapper before him and not saying much of interest. Why do I prefer this to many other trap bangers? It’s simple: firstly, the beat has a genuine dark menace with the vocals and strings, but mostly because of Future, whose relentless flow locks him into falsetto vocal cracks and nonsensical ad-libs that add so much more character to this track than needs be. It’s far from my ultimate favourites on the album - “SURFING A TSUNAMI” and “LOST MY DOG” are what I recommend - but it’s a fair opener that primes you into exactly what you’d expect from a decent trap solo tape from the king of the genre.

#70 - “S P E Y S I D E” - Bon Iver

Produced by Justin Vernon and Jim-E Stack

Sure, Bon Iver. We’re just doing whatever the fuck this week anyway, it appears, so why not Bon Iver? Ostensibly an indie folk band around since the 2000s, the catalogue of which I’m admittedly not familiar, Bon Iver is synonymous with its lead songwriter and vocalist, Justin Vernon, who will often use the name when in collaboration with bigger acts like Ye, Taylor Swift and Travis Scott, with the Bon Iver albums themselves also increasingly using outside collaborators, making the name feel closer to, say, Tame Impala, even if they’re yet to be that level of one-man band, though they started out as such initially. It doesn’t appear that any of the band actually play on this one, though, with pop producers Jim-E Stack and BJ Burton helping out for a lead single I also did not expect to chart at all this week.

He has - or they have - got an EP coming out and interestingly, this has less of the folktronica, art pop and R&B influences Vernon has been messing around with for the past decade now, instead going for a stripped-back, conventional singer-songwriter track with some great acoustic guitar playing from Mr. Iver, alongside a falsetto vocal that I have always struggled to distinguish from James Blake if I’m honest, especially since I usually hear him in a poppier context. There’s not even a chorus here, but there is a delightful swell of strings jumpstarted by a floaty, almost flippant falsetto chirp from Vernon, though that same swell has a certain melancholy to it, fittingly when there’s a great deal of despair in the content. Vernon begs at the end of the song for him to be made a man from what’s left of his life, one that he acknowledges as full of mistakes, nothing like how he’d have hoped. He starts to enter the stage of sobering up, realising what’s been wrong by the tail-end, but that’s only after moping about self-sabotage for so long that actually articulating what the problem is seems unnecessary. The last verse’s last glint of hope is not a plea for fixing, but more a rearrangement: he barely even resembles the man he’s supposed, so with whatever remains, make a new one. It’s a sombre ballad, it won’t last on the charts, and there isn’t a particular moment that really resonates with me like a specifically poetic turn of phrase or vocal inflection: there’s little to the song over than vocal, guitar and strings, so it’s not very layered in that front. There’s something missing that prevents me from gravitating to it in a specific sense, outside of the context of the tracks it will be sandwiched between, but it’s a powerful vocal, pleaant listen and downright earnest song that deserves well enough to be here.

#66 - “Heavy is the Crown” - Linkin Park

Produced by Mike Shinoda

Well, I suppose with all the controversy floating around, you’d want to move quickly and release some good songs to shut everyone complaining up, right? Well, potentially, that method will work - given the YouTube comments and the tour on the way, with pretty much guaranteed sales, I don’t doubt it will. It won’t work on me, though, primarily because this song sucks. I liked “The Emptiness Machine”, but this feels pretty transparent in its approach: let’s recreate “Faint”. From their 2003 album Meteora, the single starts with an eerie strings sample before dropping into the distorted guitars and a jungle-adjacent drum sound, as co-lead Mike Shinoda raps slightly awkwardly with his characteristic digital stutter, before Chester Bennington crashes in for not just the anthemic chorus but a guttural screech for the bridge. It peaked at #15, but this isn’t a direct sample, instead just a very similarly-structured song which could be a decent thematic song, but it feels a tad lazy when Shinoda is referencing his own rhyme schemes and newly-hired Emily Armstrong also does a long scream in reference to Chester’s iconic one from “Given Up” that really just does not hit the same: technically impressive, but it doesn’t feel as “real”, especially with all the electronic, reverb-heavy production that has flattened this song in terms of having the impact it wants to, including that gross Auto-Tune pre-chorus and the unnecessary echoing. More than actually creating new and interesting music with their new members, this song feels more like a corporate-requested Linkin Park compilation of revisited ideas in a song that’s not even three minutes, squashed into some promo link with League of Legends. Yes, really. I appreciate that since they’re in a genre where sounding like you care is kind of required, they can’t go fully into autopilot, but this has erased some of my hopes for that new album, given this is completely a retread, very transparently, and nothing else.

#35 - “Burning Down” - Alex Warren

Produced by Adam Yaron

You know the stomp-rock revival is really coming to a head when we’re giving Alex Warren, who barely really has the one hit with “Carry You Home”, a serviceable folk-pop tune but nothing special or distinct, a second hit… and an album this week! Maybe we’ll see how that does to see if he can join Noah Kahan in being the figureheads for a really unexpected turn in pop - rock? - music, but for now, he’s got a new single to promote it, it’s debuting over trap legend Future on one of his many peak runs, a Bon Iver lead single, and megastar band Linkin Park’s video game crossover marketing launch, so there must be something to it. There must be. There’s not. Okay, I suppose, the gospel organs are a tad unique, even if it’s moreso just bringing the Christian imagery that’s often subtext in folk songs to a more explicit angle, reflected in the choral vocals and a tone from Warren that resembles David Kushner - yikes - over a dark atmosphere leading into the song that completely flails into a swinging tune by the time the chorus hits. It’s a nasty post-breakup piss-off, but it’s not fully unlikeable given the smug tone has some more genuine drama, with the backing vocals doing a lot of heavy work there, and the chorus being genuinely catchy helping a great deal too. I do find Warren’s vocals here actually pretty shit, generally, he sounds dull on the verses and I have no idea what emotion he’s trying to convey the rest of the time, not sure he does either. In fact, given the mediocre writing that doesn’t really give much detail, he’s the weakest link in a song that sounds more professional than the breakout track, but also in a variation of this genre I don’t have much patience for. It’s once again serviceable, and I appreciate that there is much more character to this than “Carry You Home”. The problem is that I don’t really like that character, and whilst it’s not as immature as a Benson Boone, at least he sells that unlikeability factor in a really uniquely stressful way. This is just unremarkable.

Conclusion

That word does tend to summarise the week, both chart-wise and with the quality of these songs, though most of them remain on a pretty positive edge of the spectrum. nimino, whoever that is, grabs Best of the Week for “I Only Smoke When I Drink”, with Bon Iver just cutting Future off for the Honourable Mention with “S P E Y S I D E” - if it were another track, he could have ran away with it. I can only give one bad title here, Worst of the Week to Linkin Park’s “Heavy is the Crown”, but it’s not as offensively bad as much as it just being utterly see-through. As for what’s on the horizon, expect Kylie Minogue and JADE to land their new bops onto the chart, then maybe something from Alex Warren and Lady Gaga’s soundtrack companion album… and then The Weeknd and Playboi Carti following up their faltering singles with an immediate collab that will probably debut pretty high. I can’t say I’m excited for all of that, but we’re entering the end of the year, with just two months of non-Christmas chart-reviewing, so I suppose we’ll have to see. For now, thank you for reading, long live Cola Boyy and I’ll see you next week!

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #linkin park #alex warren #nimino #future #mixtape pluto #bon iver #s p e y s i d e

3 notes · View notes