She may have kissed a girl, but, more importantly, she can pull off the 1950s.

it’s no surprise the lovely katy perry is still sitting on number one, is it?

is there a more clever idea for a hit single than including a little girl on girl innuendo (enough to be amusing and a wee bit scandalous, but not enough for street riots), catchy pop chorus, lily allen style english slang and a video that, frankly, could be an advertisement for a lingerie company (albeit an upmarket one)

the gals love it, the guys love it, the gays love it, and i’m pretty sure the lesbians must love it too. genius.

kudos to katy, she cracked it.

(are we really sure she isn’t the same person as zooey deschanel, though? it could all be an elaborate hoax)

Mercury Mercu-Mercury’s in
Mercury Merc-Merc-Mercury’s in
Mercury Mercu-Mercury’s in
Mercury’s in retrograde

This is not the time, the time to start a new love
This is not the time, the time to sign a lease
Try not to worry about what’s forgotten
Try not to worry about what’s being missed

Scars on my shins, scars on my knuckles
Today I woke up in the basketball court
John Joe’s in Sydney and he ain’t returning
I’m sitting in Soho trying to stay drunk

In any part of the world
From Silver Lake to Williamsburg
You can pick another stranger
And fall in love

Mercury Mercu-Mercury’s in
Mercury’s in retrograde
Mercury Mercu-Mercury’s in
Mercury’s in retrograde

This is not the time, the time to start a new love
This is not the time, the time to sign a lease
Try not to worry about what’s forgotten
Try not to worry about what’s being missed

Bleeding gums and v-veins protruding
You try to hate all of your clothes
The Mayor’s in L.A. and she ain’t returning
I’m sleeping with people I don’t even like

In any part of the world
From Silver Lake to Williamsburg
You can pick another stranger
And fall in love

Mercury Mercu-Mercury’s in
Mercury’s in retrograde
Mercury Mercu-Mercury’s in
Mercury’s in retrograde
Mercury Mercu-Mercury’s in
Mercury’s in retrograde
Mercury Mercu-Mercury’s in
Mercury’s in retrograde

When I saw you last night, I wanted to say,
‘Run away with me, away from the cynics
That this could be the start of something truly real’
But all that I could say was, ‘hey’,
Was, ‘hey’, was, ‘hey’, was, ‘hey’

I’m actually really liking the last few lines there, (actually there are a few more (My mercury’s..) after that, but really, do you care?) which are rather poignant and such, but this song will doubtless be labelled brilliance when it is in fact fairly nonsensical and probably only makes sense to the person who wrote it.

But still, probably I am missing the point and these lyrics are actually highly political, scathing dystopian poetry critiquing the flaws of modern life.

thanks to bumpershine.com

Oh yes. They’re back. Those fun loving, Jack White dissing, multi racial English boys who write songs about witches, and alarm clocks, and military aircrafts.  Yes, they are Block Bloc Party!

According to wikipedia, the band were discovered when Franz Ferdinand  (when is Franz putting something new out?) champ Alex Kapranos (did you get that little title allusion?) was handed their demo. He liked what he heard, and soon the band were more talked about than Jesus on a sunday morning. Hello, NME album of the year and hello, hype.

Random comparisons to groups such as The Cure, Blur, Smashing Pumpkins, the Pixies and Joy Division  soon occured, just ask wikipedia. Whilst the purposefully random, artless noise making evident in many a chorus-less Bloc track does bring to mind a little bit of Transmission, I find comparisons to Britpop pretties Blur  more than a little confusing. However, I suppose both bands are British.

Anyway, they have a new single out for their upcoming and yet to be named third album, a sweet little ballad-y ode to chemistry, titled Mercury. And by that I mean a raucous, electronic ‘dancefloor anthem’ – to use a rarely true and highly irritating phrase. If this is a dancefloor anthem, we’ll all be dancing disjointed, sudden, malfunctioning-robot style moves.  But whatever. That’s probably what Bloc Party want.

The lyrics: somewhat confusing. Alright, more than somewhat. But hey, it’s electronica, right? And it’s Bloc Party, right? We begin with Kele shouting/singing ‘My mercury’s in retrograde!’ (repeat, repeat, repeat, this making up most of the song) This means that his mercury is rotating backwards around the earth. Cool. I’m down with that.

The music: In keeping with the rotation theme, bits of the track are cut and pasted and rotated around, for example when Mercury is shouted for the millionth time, it stops mid word and starts again. Fabulous. Innovative. You look to your CD player, to see if the disc is skipping, before realising thaat you don’t listen to CDs anymore, and that the effect was, apparently, intentional.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind this little foray into electronica. For example, I loved Flux, probably because it was conventional, and I can handle conventional. Although, when I say unconventional, I simply mean that it incorporates elements such as a series of sentences shouted together without any chorus, or strongly memorable tune (although, eventually, the mercury retrograde line is a bit of an earworm), lots of beats and many poetic lines which make 0.006% sense when strug together -

“Bleeding gums and v-veins protruding
You try to hate all of your clothes
The Mayor’s in L.A. and she ain’t returning
I’m sleeping with people I don’t even like”
 

…MERCURY RETROGRADE REPEAATT

You’ve got to wonder, will those 9/10 music reviews keep on coming because this band is actually genius, or will they come because they’re too confusing and pseudo intelligent to be labelled otherwise? (see Kid A, not that I thought that weas particularly pseudo intelligent, more like just plain intelligent) Or perhaps the reign of one certain uber-hyped band is as over as my interest in them is.