Joe McElderry - Ambitions
Like waking up to a Stock-Aitken-Waterman nightmare.
Read more on Joe McElderry Listen to Joe McElderry on Spotify
The day was inevitable and here it is at last. After losing out on the Christmas number one spot in the most inventive viral campaign of 2009, the wide-eyed Geordie and reigning champion of The X Factor is back with his first legitimate release - a non-ballad single that replaces the usual dreary ‘climb the mountain’ clichés of the winner’s songs with obnoxiously chipper clichés about making it in the big world.
Listening to ‘Ambitions’ is like waking up to a Stock-Aitken-Waterman nightmare. The strange syncopations and hollow melodies have been manufactured to the point where there’s no soul or invention in there, leaving an artificial and soulless track that plods along at high speed without any thought to where it’s going. The less said about using CGI effects to super-impose his face onto a dancer in the video, the better.
Joe’s defining characteristic as a contestant was his soul and powerful voice, but on this single, even more so than the abysmal ‘The Climb’, a bizarrely shrill falsetto mixes like oil and water, creating two separate and discordant sounds that makes for unpleasant listening. It’s as catchy as an aggressive case of the flu, no question, and it certainly makes you smile, but there’s no substance to it. And just like the flu, repeated exposure can make you quite sick.
RSS Feed
Comments