Thank you for this though - I will vote once I listen to all of them (and recover from Guess…
Oh I missed all of this (I think I thought there'd be posts for each group?) - are there more…
Also relevant: Bob Crewe, who co-wrote a bunch of hits for the Four Seasons, including "Let's Hang On" with Linzer…
That's actually good! Would've loved being on that dancefloor, surrounded by all those colors.
Never realised Linzer produced "Cherchez La Femme" (and the whole first Dr. Buzzard album in fact), but it makes total…
Ranking Joe "Tribute to John Lennon": "Good thing John Lennon never killed by a black man" jumps out as dead-on…
The Romantic Noise "I Fell In Love With A Baby": Hard Rocking Shit from the early Seventies that somehow has…
[Sigh... Apologies if these end up as double posts. WordPress killed my original attempt to post so now I'm dividing…
Say what you like about Diddy, he’s a great pop star and I love the hyperbole and drama of his songs! Smashed it in this group!
My space-saving explanation for why I still love ‘Crying For No Reason’ so much after nearly 10 years.
Let me see if I can.. yes! (apparently)
Thanks!
Apart from this very much post-hoc awareness of subliminal, now-obvious influences, I’m really drawn to the unusual scenario of non-specific guilt and mental anguish. It has something of The Winner Takes It All’s unresolved circularity, but everyone knows exactly *what* Agnetha was singing about.
Also, huge bonus points for that preposterous outro and the choice of a hard ending over a fade.
Flesh Tone is such an undervalued LP and this is such a triumphant way to end it, so I’d have voted “Song For The Baby” even if DDM’s “Coming Home” wasn’t a balancer.
But “Coming Home” is totally Diddy’s finest moment! Last Train To Paris is more fascinating than good for me, Diddy’s equivalent of the Chris Gaines record, an astonishingly rich megastar trying to make a record for the critics. It’s still pretty good but more significant for giving Dawn Richards a break than anything else. HOWEVER, “Coming Home” is where he gets it right, marrying the more personal approach of the LP to the huge corny pop instincts of the rest of his career. Also I got to admit, as a still recent Dad when it came out, the “I ain’t finished growin!” bit got me in the feels.
This might be the cruelest group one of my noms has ever been in!! I adore all four of these songs. (But “Song for the Baby” is dearer to my heart.)
Song for the Baby is great and I feel like Kelis needs to get more of her due.
Four great pop tunes. Went for Crying For No Reason but Little Man could be a golden beat.
The Swedes once again coming to the rescue when the Anglo-Saxons come up with two awful (Diddy & Katy B) and a meh (Kelis) song. Little Dragon should burninate the competition here.
The only one of these I don’t have on CD is Little Dragon and I didn’t enjoy it that much. Not keen on supporting bracket balancers but DDM clearly best here.