Esmée Denters - 'Outta Here'
Some things are stupid, some things are clever. Then there are things which are stupid-clever, like 'Bonkers', or 'Boom Boom Pow', and things which are clever-stupid, like Razorlight, or Peter Andre claming he won't talk about Katie Price in the press because his children will read it one day, and then doing exclusive interviews with the press about Katie Price, while making a TV documentary, and releasing a song about it, all at the same timzzz...
Stupid-clever things are the best, clearly, because you can giggle at how dim they sound and marvel at how brilliant they actually are at one and the same time. Here's a good example: Punk pioneers the Ramones were once asked why their songs were so short, and Johnny Ramone replied "well, they were long songs, played quickly": Stupid, and yet clever.
This is why the bits in this song where an un-named shouty man bellows "ONE-TWO-THREE-TWO!" are fantastic. Particularly with Esmée emoting all over the shop about self-empowerment and not taking any rubbish any more.
The message seems to be, if your man can't count to four, get the hell out.
(. It's a non-stop laptop pop strop.)
Esmée herself has confirmed something along these lines, saying, "it has a strong message that says when someone treats you bad, just get out of that situation and think about yourself first."
Although technically, if you listen to the lyrics, she's actually begging for someone to come and rescue her, which weakens the 'independent women' message a smidge. Even if it is sung by a very nice-looking young lady, acting tough in the video, with a very nowadays pop production (I made a bet with myself I could get through the entire review without mentioning a certain female pop star who is So Hot Right Now, so "nowadays" should cover it, sound-wise).
Speaking of which, hasn't Justin 'executive producer' Timberlake done a nice job here? The song is taken at a slightly hurried clip, with the languid, deep booming bass drum hits being forced to hurry up by the over-eager handclaps. There's probably a deeply-worked out artistic reason for this, in that it forces Esmée to gabble and wail like someone would if they were at their wit's end. But in the end it's good because it's more fun if a pop song has a bit of a spring to its step.
Or to put it into stupid-clever-speak, this is a long song, quite a good one, played quickly.
Download: Out now
CD Released: August 17th
91Èȱ¬ Music page
(Fraser McAlpine)
Comment number 1.
At 20th Aug 2009, hackerjack wrote:So much talent out there struggling to get noticed, and we get another Timerland/Timberlake inspired import who had an undoubtedly sweet voice but so so little interesting to actually project through it.
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Comment number 2.
At 21st Aug 2009, MozFoz wrote:The song's boring, I can't actually say anything else. Though I just did. This is why I'm not on Twitter...
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