one word... wtf?

These are strange days indeed for pop music. Everybody seems to have almost forgotten that rock music is the new cool and instead everybody wants to be a gangster. Which can only make matters worse.

Anyway, back onto my chosen topic... It would appear Kelly Osbourne has decided to ditch her rock chick image (let's face it, with tunes like 'shut up' it never washed anway) in favour of a (drum roll please)... Some sort of eighties electro divadom. 'One Word' sounds nothing like anything you would expect from Kelly, in that it sounds kinda like it was produced by Ladytron, or even more accurately Visage's 'Fade To Grey' for the 2005 pop charts.

That said, it's not particularly amazing or anything, it just seems odd that the PR department at her label decided THIS was the way to go... What IS disappointing is the fact that Felix Da Housecat (once again, bizarrely) was on hand to remix Kelly and her dad's duet, 'Changes', yet is nowhere to be seen here. 'One Word' is much more Felix's thing and could definately do with a stripped down version that's lost some of Ms. Osbourne's vocals.

Won't get fooled again...

A few weeks ago something bad happened in the cosmos and blackplastic's external hard drive with all of blackplastic's music on got corrupted. Eight thousand songs lost.

Eight thousand.

More than a month's worth of music vanished.

Now what really riled blackplastic was not the loss. It is the arrogance of a certain online music retailer who doesn't let you re-download music you have legally purchased from them. blackplastic cannot see the sense in this at all... What harm could it cause? Apple suggest backing up music purchased from them on a regular basis. So in other words, when I pay my extortionate 79 pence for a song, as soon as I have downloaded it, if I want to be sure I don't lose it I should burn it to a CD, costing me additional money, where it will sit in a case with no artwork in case something goes wrong.

Frankly most online music stores are a blatant rip off. blackplastic will continue to use the iTunes music store to listen to clips of music that it is thinking about buying in hard copy but until it gets a lot cheaper, it won't be spending much money there.

Fancy a refreshing change? Head on over to http://www.emusic.com. blackplastic doesn't know whether it will let you re-download previous purchases since the external hard drive is still not sorted and as such blackplastic isn't buying any music. What blackplastic does know is that the music is in mp3 format (no wma files here please!) and features no drm encoding and, best of all, is cheap as chips and the site has a free trial... Can't say fairer than that can you?

New Order - Waiting For The Sirens' Call

In the first of a series of albums to be released by what blackplastic would consider the grand masters of music (The Pixies and Primal Scream being two of the others) this year New Order get happy on our asses.

Waiting For The Sirens' Call is a strange one at first. Less progressive (in the literal sense, musical genres aside) than the under-rated Get Ready and more uplifting, this album sounds more 80s in style and is more upbeat, comparable to Technique. This makes the album sound as though it sound polished, yet the most noticeable thing about this LP initially is its lack of finesse.

Which is not to say Waiting... is bad. It isn't. There are plenty of moments that really shine through as pop gems and this explains why even Heat magazine have been dishing out the 5s. Hey Now What You Doing's pleading to the disillusioned youth to take stock really feels like it could get through, not coming off as the sanctimonious insult it could have been. First single Krafty and Working Overtime are pure 'music to quit jobs by'. There are also two stand out tracks produced by 80s don Stuart Price (a.k.a. Jacques Lu Cont). These are by no means as retro or highly produced as you would expect from someone who has 'Madonna's Producer' on their CV but infectious they are.

Waiting... is not the best album of New Order's career. It feels somewhat lacking in context. It will be interesting to hear if it still feels fresh in a few years time, and whether the lack of context blackplastic currently feels will translate into the timelessness from which the rest of the New Order back catalogue benefits. In closing blackplastic stands by a quote from the late and great The Face...

"New Order are just better than everyone else"