New Singles of the Week

21st January 2016

Ekkah – ‘Small Talk’

Hey, this is fun! Birmingham’s Ekkah (the two members are called Rebecca and Rebekah respectively) have come up with the perfect antidote to the January blues. ‘Small Talk’ brings shimmering funk-pop to soothe cold hands and colder hearts with three minutes of what Ekkah describe as Post-Disco-80s-RnB. It’s the kind of thing that you’d hear in a Topshop fitting room while trying on spray-on jeans and t-shirts saying funny things like ‘If Found Please Return to Pub’. Everyone is sexy, let’s get naked!

The song is accompanied by an equally cheerful video. ‘Ecca and ‘Ekah sing their tonsils raw, surrounded by an assortment of abandoned fairground rides and unwanted neon signs, while nubile lasses hula-hoop with gay abandon. Spare a thought for the backing band, however. Despite sporting a pair of guitars, Ekkah are too preoccupied with making the arm movements of a couple of air traffic controllers to strum a decent chord, leaving the poor unfortunate lads at the back to do all the hard work. Get on the blower to your union fellas!

Laura Mvula – ‘Overcome’ ft. Nile Rodgers

Unsurprisingly for a song which combines the talents of Laura Mvula and Nile Rodgers, this track is really pretty decent. Mvula, who came to prominence with her outstanding single ‘Green Garden‘, hasn’t yet released a follow-up to 2013 debut album Sing to the Moon, but at least this single should keep fans appeased. Although it doesn’t use her interesting vocal stylings to as much of an extent as previous releases, ‘Overcome’ benefits from having a backing track featuring the guitar which has produced more musical success than any other, Rodgers’ £1.3 billion hit-maker Fender Stratocaster.

Elton John – ‘Blue Wonderful’

The original crocodile rocker is back, ‘Blue Wonderful’ being the latest single from Elton John’s 2016 album Wonderful Crazy Night. The track is likely to be well-received by stalwart fans – the Daily Mail has deemed the video “stunning” and “magical”, adjectives which coincidentally also featured in their reviews of Wagner’s Das Judenthum in der Musik. (A little gag there for the rabidly anti-Semitic portion of our readership).

The track is the aural equivalent of eating an extra papadum in Oh! Calcutta – pretty bland and entirely unmemorable, yet somehow sickeningly filling. It’s also easy to see why the Daily Fail would find the video so endearing. A nice-looking Caucasian lady fannies about her spotless house before being charmed outside into the spotless suburban street by a nice-looking Caucasian chap. Their romance is entirely sex-less (sex being a distasteful modern construct by those communists at the Guardian) and instead the pair spend their time grinning at each other vacantly like brainwashed turnips, making sure that they don’t accidentally bare any of the skin lurking beneath their layers of clothing. A nice, polite, sanitary start to 2016.