Mutya Buena - 'Just A Little Bit'
Shh! Don't say it. Don't let the name even flit across your brain. Try and think about something else, OK? OK, so Mutya is continuing her old school soul makeover, and yes, she's got the big gospelly backing vocals, and the (almost too) slow bass-quake strut thing chuntering away, with shiny brass parps and everything. In her mind she's in the Muscle Shoals studios in 1968, and Dusty Springfield has just taken a tea break from recording 'Son Of A Preacher Man'. And, more importantly, she's really comfortable there.
Oh sure, there are those of us who consider Mutya's voice to be a perfect weapon against heat of all kinds. In her Suga-best moments, she possessed the capability to reduce grown men to quivering wrecks with just a stern look and a well chosen croak. So to hear it in such warm surroundings is a little unnerving.
But actually, going solo has allowed a different side of the Buena character to emerge. She no longer seems like the stone-faced snoot with the confusingly deep and velvety tones, even if she is still prone to wearing the kind of shoes you can only get from specialist websites (y'know, the sort with the metal studs on the inside, she's a pair on in this video which look astonishingly uncomfortable).
Nowadays there's a note of humanity to her robotic sex-appeal, which is kind of sweet. And she's smiling in videos too. I'm fairly sure she has done this before, but that's not the point. The point is no-one can remember her smiling in videos, and why? Because she's Mutya Buena, dammit!
So, to recap, she's gone '60s soul, she's a little unnerving, her sexiness is curiously unsexy, she still has to capacity to dress with a style which confounds human sense, and she is occasionally very frightening indeed. All you need is to plop a curly-perm hen night wig on her head and we've got Joss Stone - The Sequel...
...BAH! I knew I couldn't make it to the end without invoking THAT name...
Download: Out now
CD Released: October 22nd
(Fraser McAlpine)
Comments
I must admit that back in the glory days of 2005, when the Sugababes were at their peak, it never crossed my mind that the Surly One would turn out to own the talent. I'd always figured it was the Cute One, with the Smiley One just there to make up the numbers,
So I am spending most of this year eating an array of hats, as the Surly One hoovers up all the good tunes and knocks her erstwhile colleagues into my sole remaining cocked hat.
Smazing.
[Sorry, your hat is WHAT? - Fraser]
A cocked hat is a hat with the brim turned, like that of a bishop. It is also applied to the military full-dress hat, pointed before and behind, and rising to a point at the crown, the chapeaù à cornu. "Cock" in this phrase means to turn; cocked, turned up.
Naval officers wore this hat without decorations, but those worn by military and civilian officials may be lavishly decorated with coloured ostrich or swan feathers.
However, in the game of nine-pins, three pins were set up in the form of a triangle, and when all the pins except these three were knocked down, the set was technically said to be "knocked into a cocked hat." Hence, utterly out of all shape or plumb.
A somewhat similar phrase is "Knocked into the middle of next week."
Ninepins was a game played with nine pins, or pieces of wood, set on end, at which a wooden ball is bowled to knock them down. A precursor to skittles, it was popular on board ship.
Even Samuel Pepys joined in;
"This morning sending a packet by Mr. Dunne to London. In the afternoon I played at ninepins with Mr. Pickering, I and Mr. Pett against him and Ted Osgood, and won a crown apiece of him. He had not money enough to pay me. After supper my Lord exceeding merry, and he and I and W. Howe to sing, and so to bed."
Honestly, kids today, they know nothing.
[So what did you do to all of your other cocked hats? - Fraser]
[So what did you do to all of your other cocked hats? - Fraser]
As per my earlier post, I had to eat my hat(s), after thinking the Cute One was the power behind the Sugababes, when it turned out to be the Surly One.
[Oh right. What a hectic day you must be having - Fraser]
[Oh right. What a hectic day you must be having - Fraser]
It really is a hard life over here in the land of Metalania. All you have to do is sit around, hoovering up your huuuuge 91Èȱ¬ expense account, while I have to eat the bark of trees and try and make sense of the new Impaled Nazarene album.
That's proper work, matey, the reviewers equivalent of making shoes in a Chinese factory.
And once that's over, I have the joys of a French death metal concept album "about the slow fall in psychosis of a man with fragments revealed in each song as flashbacks of his life".
I could weep....
[You've got to love the increasingly tortuous names dark metal bands have had to resort to to try and mention Jesus in a snooty way, haven't you? Impaled Nazarene, indeed! Whatever next, Thorncrown Resurrector? Godboy Nailystick? It's a little playgroundy, but not without charm. - Fraser]
Just off the top of my head, here's a few actual, genuine, 100% real and not at all made up band names from the worlds of black and death metal;
Fecal Corpse
Baphomets Throne
Corpse Vomit
Bestial Warlust
Angel Corpse
Rotting Christ
Cadaverous Condition
Meads of Asphodel
Cannibal Corpse
Hellhammer
Amoebic Dysentery
Cattle Decapitation
Cryptic Wintermoon
Defleshed
Exhumed
Panzerchrist
Gorerotted
Pungent Stench
Inkubus Sukkubus
Malevolent Creation
Forest Of Impaled
Regurgitate
Mortification
Necrophobic
Scent Of Flesh
Six Feet Under
Thy Serpent
Vomitory
And that's without using any of the ones with sweary words in their name.
But no matter how awful the name, not one of them comes close to the horror that is the worst band name of all time. Ladeez and gennelmun, I give you....
Cute Is What We Aim For [shudder]
haha.. no I still like Cute is What We Aim For.. it just sounds.. cute.. in a sickly kinda way.
kat, i thought youd hate them.. its the dreaded 'c word' and all :P
Yes, I'm also really suprised and pleased at Mutya Buena's remake - particularly good for her street cred to do that song with Groove Armada.
It is just baffling how she manages to come across as having no style at all - the tattoos, the skin tight clothes should at least be adding some sultry sexiness but no; it just all looks wrong on her.
Still, I'm surprised at how much I like her music and perhaps having been a sugary pop clone for so long, it might take a while for her to develop a style and a look that truly suits her.
i like ur songs its so gd !!!!!!!!!!!!! so wa u bn up 2 these days ??????????? w/b from rosie lol x