The Official Chart for October 4
I guess Danity Kane were kind of the American Girls Aloud, in that they were a group that came together on a reality TV show but ended up being way better than that might lead you to think. Danity Kane never had the success of Girls Aloud, either commercially or in terms of their music, which was good but not life-changing. Since the band split, Dawn Richard has been making some great records, and now two other ex-members (Aubrey O’Day and Shannon Bex) are releasing music under the name Dumblonde. They arguably aren’t quite as ambitious as Dawn Richard; their project doesn’t have Richard’s extensive mythological framing, or her genre-hopping: Dumblonde make pop-dance, but they make really fantastic pop-dance. Their songs bang extremely hard, but they also have an off-kilter or out of focus fizzing, buzzing quality that reminds me of Perfume (the perfume from Japan, not the band from Leicester).
SEXWITCH is Bat for Lashes doing drone-rock covers of 70s records mostly from Morocco and Iran (as well as one from Thailand and another from the US). I’m not sure what to say about it, except that if that sounds like something you would like, you almost certainly will like it (and you should, because it’s great).
Tanika, who released the excellent “Party till we Fight” last year, has a new song out, which is as imperiously dismissive as you would hope a song called “Fuckboy” would be.
Tinashe and Selena Gomez have both released new songs from their forthcoming albums, both of which are pretty much on the pop-house trend, and so maybe in principle not quite as interesting the songs they released a few weeks ago, but they’re both pretty good. I especially like that echoey base on the Tinashe song, which makes think of being underwater, possibly just because because it reminds me of the video to “Ready or Not.”
