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Sam Sparro - '21st Century Life'

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Fraser McAlpine | 09:37 UK time, Saturday, 26 July 2008

Sam SparroSo much for Sam's reputation - based on the one song, admittedly - for icy cool purr-fect synthpop. This time around he's brought in a slap-bassist with disco chops and upped the tempo, and it seems to have shocked his vocal cords into passionate life. The dark growl is still there, but there's a lot more yelping and swooping and general off-showing. The combined effect is what you'd get if Calvin Harris were 10 years older, a lot more muscley, and less prone to just bang on about what girls he would fancy, if he were not such a young and weedy fella.

Self-confidence, it's fair to say, is not Sam's weak spot. And it's his cocky demeanour which carries him through a set of lyrics which don't so much walk the fine line between stupid and clever as totter helplessly from one side to the other, in high heels...and looking amazing.

Look at these beauties:

"When I was a little boy, living in the last century
I thought about living in the future, then it occurred to me
I turned around the future was now, the future was all around me
Nothing like I imagined, it was totally confounding."

Now, clunky word use aside ("confounding"??), these are a set of words which aim at saying something profound, but do so in such a dim kind of way that it becomes cute and comical.

Here's Sam, pondering on what he thought the world would be like by now when he was a nipper, and realising that while a) things have changed a lot, b) they haven't always changed for the better and actually c) some things have got worse.

The way he makes this point is to sing about how these days his telephone is also a stereo. See what I mean? Fun-NEE!

Luckily, for a high-octane, fun-fuelled synth-disco workout like this, the lyrics don't matter at all, and even if they did, funny is always better than cliched and meaningless, so it's all good.

The more serious crime is to come up with a song which pulls at your sleeve for attention, but fails to meet the murky charms of its predecessor, which is another example of things being better in THE PAST...

Three starsDownload: Out now
CD Released: July 28th

(Fraser McAlpine)

PS: They didn't have blogs in the old days, did they? So it wasn't all good. I mean where else are you going to read someone referring to Sam as "an artist of transportation" apart from a blog called , eh? You didn't get that sort of thing with Smash Hits, y'know...

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