The Wanted – All Time Low
There’s three other members, but how was I supposed to resist this?…
[Video][Website]
[4.78]
Jonathan Bogart: The dullest parts of post-Coldplay Britpop and post-Leona bosh. What’s wrong with kids these days? Don’t they know how to do drugs anymore?
[5]
Michaelangelo Matos: Synth fizz like bottle rockets meets plainspoken lyric that’s a little too artless meets a vocal that works similarly to the lyric. The strings at the end are surprisingly effective, but that’s it.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: A couple of heavily autotuned, junior-Kevin-Rudolf soundalike guys set to orchestral phooey with knockoff David Guetta-ah-ah-ah underpinnings AND knockoff RedOne synthery. How much more damning can you get?
[2]
Kat Stevens: This shouldn’t be a debut single for a boyband. This should be the single they release after coming back from a several-year hiatus in which the daft back-flipping young boys have grown up into grizzled men on the verge of a mid-life crisis. It’s only the Tinchy-Taio synths (we have to find a better name for these, dudes) that stop the track overshooting its target market and landing plump in the Mumpop zone. A good thing too, as for some probably-hormone-related reason I really want these guys to do well.
[7]
Alfred Soto: So how come the string section wasn’t Auto-tuned either?
[2]
Martin Skidmore: Wow: the cellos on this remind me of Kate Bush’s great use of them, or even of Brainbug’s “Nightmare” mixes. There’s a pretty good song in here too. Trouble is, in the attempt to form a credible boy band, as if that were a worthwhile goal, the producers selected a bunch of people with the singing talent of your average indie band. This rather deadens what could have been a genuinely great single. The flat, rather Coldplayish vocals suck so much life from this, which disappoints me hugely, as I am so close to totally loving it. Has producer Steve Mac turned into some sort of musical genius, suddenly?
[8]
David Raposa: Why bother going through the pretense of boy-banding (especially with a tune so rice-cakey) when all the man-candy sounds like the same heart-broken Speak & Spell, and the video spends 75% focusing on the guy that the folks behind the scenes are probably trying to groom for a solo career?
[3]
Edward Okulicz: None of them are bad singers, but they sound curiously unsuited to being in a boy band on this particular single. Perhaps the polish of the production and video haven’t extended to grooming character out of them yet. This isn’t a bad thing, coupled with the fascinating cello and the rousing chorus it gives a layer of intrigue and tension to match the hooks.
[8]
Chuck Eddy: So is the video supposed to be a hilarious, ironic boy-band parody, or do these guys really look like that? Wiki describes them as a “an English/Irish pop boy band based in London,” but they sound way more Brit-pop (which is to say, emo-ish fake rock) than teenybop R&B pop to me. Or at least the singing does; don’t hear guitars. Is that how boy bands sound now? If so, too bad.
[4]
Interesting that the vocals code as Coldplay/indie to many here. I just think of Mark Owen the whole way through.
That must be why I like it. I wuvvv Mark Owen’s completely ridiculously non-boyband leads. (Seriously, his second album is full of songs that should be stolen by The Wanted, esp “Close To The Edge” and “Crush”)