Niki N. Phaser

               Marina & The Diamonds is about to release the fifth single from her debut album, Family Jewels. The track is called Shampain and it’s no wonder that it was selected for this particular honor, which places it near jewels like Hollywood or I Am Not a Robot. It was officially released on October 11.

               It is the kind of retro-pop that sounds both fresh and like something you’ve been hearing since you were a kid, but never quite bought for your own collection. And by bought I mean… Marina’s debut album did not go unnoticed, but it should have been the revelation of 2010, considering the fine balance she reached between indie and catchy pop. However, it seems 2011 will bring the follow-up and there are plenty of bands who blossomed on their sophmore effort.

Feel Celestial HERE

                 After giving I Blame Coco her blessing, Swedish pop-deluxe revivalist, Robyn, is back again on our radar. She is streaming a first taste of her new album, that will be out this June. Her last album, the eponymous release of 2005, marked a definite international breakthrough, after a few previous scattered hits. The new song is called Fembot and, as you might have guessed from the title, is about robots of the female gender. There is plenty of Auto-Tune and robotics effects in this one, but it’s catchy as hell and makes us wonder if Robyn’s next album shares the same traits: one foot in the present, the other in the future. Of pop. Being for some time exposed to the international club culture and listening to Technotronic and early The Prodigy (Experience days), Robyn is bound to get us bust a robot move this summer.

FEMBOTS have feelings HERE

Watching TV the other day and I saw this video for Alexandra Burke’s Bad Boys and I have to say that the plot as well as the coregraphy got my sick mind thinking about what could it all mean. You don’t have to watch too closely to realize that this video seems like a 4 minutes metaphor for a gang bang. The girl’s car breaks down in a shady neighbourhood at night and then she is slowly followed and surrounded by an army of thug looking fellows, who keep checking out her bod. They end up in a pool joint, where the guys make their move and she ends up dancing with all of them, while Flo Rida sits alone and sad outside contemplating “She so so addicted to them rougher fellas” or “get them more the merrier” and concluding “You’ll have them shawty don’t worry”. It all ends outside, where the bad boys circle the girl and one final face-off follows, leaving them big guys down on the ground. This is one faulty cautionary tale for girls walking alone at night…

WHAT D’YA THINK ?

And just so you wouldn’t think that I’m raging against The X Factor, because it’s the seasonal thing to do, I’ll focus my sick mind on a classic hit, a video which I actually saw the same day: Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl. The lyrics talk about, obviously, an uptown girl who is “getting tired of her high class toys” and I guess that because “she never had a back street guy”, she decides to look “for a downtown man”. In the video, the girl just so happens to have her chauffeur stop at a garage, where Billy and his gang of Merry Mechanics giver her the full treatment. As soon as she gets down from her car, the dancing starts. Two bikers and two breakdancers with weird tops join in and soon our uptown girl is dancing with 8 guys at once. Her chauffeur doesn’t interfere, which is very Once Upon a Time in America of him. This is a cautionary tale for all of you uptown boys, this is what happens when your girl gets tired of “living in her white bread world”.

Up WHAT Girl ?!