Mark Brown ft. Sarah Cracknell - 'The Journey Continues'
Adverts, eh? They're fascinating, and yet deeply confusing at the same time. I suspect I may never truly understand them - especially since, as a member to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ staff, I am of course technically allergic to advertising in all its forms. Once upon a time, though, getting your song on an advert was the Holy Grail of pop music, because it meant you had it made. I remember in my teenage years when The Song Off The Levis Ad, whichever one it was and however rubbish it may have been, always got to No.1, because the amount of exposure that accompanied it was fairly unbeatable. It doesn't seem quite such a surefire thing these days, though, otherwise the girls off the Sheila's Wheels advert would have the number one slot all year round.
Why so much discussion about adverts on a pop music blog, you may well ask? Well, because this is that song with the staccato high notes in it off that banking advert (the fact that I can't say with 100% certainly which bank it's advertising makes me wonder just how effective advertising is, generally, and I speak this as someone who once had this song stuck in his head for an entire day, but that's a discussion for another time), finally given a chance to exist in full-length form, and with Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell on vocals to boot.
The thing with songs from adverts is though, that sometimes when you hear them out of context as songs in their own right, something feels like it's missing - if the words "Babylon Zoo" just popped into your head, I doubt you're alone - and that's rather the case here.
It feels like there are the germs of two good songs here: a lovely, disassociated Saint Etienne sort of track (there's a striking similarity to 'Pale Movie' in places), and a song with the the sample from the advert in it. But together, they feel such a mismatch. The rhythm of the operatic sample feels out of synch with the dance beat of the track, and doesn't really match the overall mood either.
I admit freely that I don't know the genesis of this song: I don't know if it has always existed in this form, or whether it started off as just that bit from the advert and the rest was crafted around it. I deliberately didn't go looking for an answer on that score, because I think either a song works or it doesn't, and how it was crafted shouldn't have any effect on that.
It's not a disaster by any stretch of the imagination, because Sarah Cracknell's vocals have their usual wonderfully ethereal quality that's capable of lifting the most pedestrian material out of the doldrums, but I think in the end the sample gets in the way of the rest of the song. And given that the marketing for this is centred very much around it being "that song from that advert", it's a real shame.
Download: Out now
CD Released: February 4th
(Steve Perkins)
PS: If anyone's interested, I found out what that vocal snippet is taken from. It's 'Eliza Aria' from the 'Wild Swans' suite by Elena Kats Chernin, and it was performed by Jane Sheldon. - Fraser
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