The Singles Jukebox

Of course, you could also call today Songs We Should Probably Have Covered Months Ago Now Monday…

[Video][Website]
[6.40]

Anthony Easton: Sexy working class boys going aggro for no paticularly good reason, but with an edge of sentimentalism.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Not knowing much about Plan B, but loving that “End Credits” song he did with Chase & Status I don’t know what exactly I expected from this song, but it certainly wasn’t for the first 70 seconds to sound like the Commitments, nor for the same guy to switch voices so decisively into a pugnacious, raspy rap cadence. At first I wasn’t sure whether the Northern Soul bits of the song went with the Britrap bits, but after a few listens I think he pulls it off — it helps that the backing track evokes the basic mood of both genres without changing too much.
[7]

Frank Kogan: Not what I was expecting from a grime guy with singer-songwriter ambitions: Garage not of Paradise but of Rock, anyhow the 1966 organ-soul-guitar freneticism of the Raiders and Rascals. Plan B has weak gumless singing which makes him more funny than effective when he warbles, but when he raps and shouts he adds to the music’s kick, and is still funny.
[8]

Matt Cibula: This just intersects with too many other things I love for me not to love it. Don’t know what excuse you could possibly have for not dancing to this, except rigor mortis or being boring.
[9]

Chuck Eddy: Hard fight-rock in the rap parts like the Lordz of Brooklyn’s “Saturday Night” was, except more British. Hard soul-rock in the singing parts like Eric Burdon or Mitch Ryder were, except Plan B was born without much of a voice. He gets by, though; doubt the Hives have many songs so rowdy.
[8]

Doug Robertson: The rapping’s great, all lip curled aggression and powerful swaggering snaps. Five stars all round, give yourself a cookie. Just a shame that it barely covers a minute of the track, with the vast majority of the time given over to the backing track, which even VV Brown would have turned down for being a bit uninspired and derivative.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: The music has some likeable pop-rock punch, but early on the singing is rubbish, lame and thin. It gets considerably better when he switches to rapping, and he gets impressively strained and frantic towards the end. It still sounds like someone who can sort of rap trying to be a rock star without the right talents.
[5]

Kat Stevens: The BBC have been using an instrumental version of this track for their Winter Olympics coverage — the cheery ragbag hammond organ bit that is, not the belligerent swearing drunken bit at the end. Plan B is better at rapping than he is at singing, but he is a little too good at capturing the essence of a hard-partying lad who has outstayed his welcome, spoiling what had been until then a fun night out. Thus I prefer the track with neither rapping nor singing, but in their place is a jolly Hemulen teaching me the difference between a Lutz and a Salchow.
[6]

Iain Mew: A serviceable bit of classic rock with fine impassioned falsetto, this does rather suffer from starting just like The White Stripes’ “Blue Orchid”, the tightly wound focus of which Plan B could very much do with. What really finishes it off as an attractive proposition, though, is the clumsy, inarticulate shouting that takes over, trying to sound in the moment by little more than yelling “fuck” a lot.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: The first minute of this, I was ready to give it about a [1] but once the rapping overtook the “singing” it got considerably better. By the end, the progressively more aggressive shouting and rapping just about won me over even if it’s hard to shake the notion that Plan B probably thinks it sounds a bit like the White Stripes doing the INTENSE bit of “Killing in the Name” (same rising intensity, same oddly dulling effect to these ears). Jack White probably would have cut it to two minutes, which would have helped.
[6]