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Irritant – Dark City / Tabby Callaghan – King of the Town
August 11th, 2007 at 18:49
Disclosure: I was sent some free CDs by the PR company to review. This is my attempt to review them.
Irritant – Dark City
Irritant are apparently a progressive-rock heavy-metal band, and they have a new single out on September 17th, called Dark City. As the name suggests, its not exactly a jaunty upbeat number full of ska chords and skanking (officially the happiest genre of music). The song does what the genre says on the tin. Its progressive as it is full of jingly-jangly guitar bits that would require quite a degree of skill from the guitarist, with some heavy metal drumming around the sides and a whiny ghostly Evanescence-esque singer spread over the top like the icing on an emo cake (it can’t cut itself but other people can).
The press release quotes the song’s producer, Vic Coppersmith-Heaven’s objective and in no way biased review of the band: “Irritant are an exciting band crafting skilled songwriting and performance towards a most promising future”.
The song is alright though.
Tabby Callaghan – King of the Town
Before listening to this song, I read the press release and involuntarily affected a natural bias against the musician. Apparently Tabby Callaghan was a former contestant on the X-Factor. Yeah, the Simon Cowell vehicle that has helped increase the rate of deterioration in the minds of an entire generation.
The strangely androgynous Tabby was apparently formerly managed by Sharon Osbourne, presumably of the family of stationers fame, although he has gone his own way with the new single, which is out on September 24th.
King of the Town is sort of generic commercial pop music with a faux-classic rock edge to it. The opening bit sounds a bit like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers – y’know, the sort of rock that is “edgy” if you’re a Daily Mail reader but bland if you’re anyone else.
Lyrics aren’t really the song’s strong point: “Walking around like you’re king of the town”, the main lyric and gist of the song apparently “portrays memories of feeling invincible as a teenager” according to the press release. He may claim to have been invincible, but I would still wager that his weakness, his kryptonite, was and probably still is bullets.
Verdict: bland.
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