Overdosing On Reality

Harry “Tastes Like Kisses” – Harry wants to be a rock star. She wants it so much and so badly that desperation practically oozes from every record she pushes onto the market by way of A&R exec ‘favours’ and slots supporting Crazy Town in 2001. I can almost imagine her as a child, wishing upon that falling star, gazing from a poetically steamed window saying, “One day, I’m going to be famous. I’ll sell millions of records and travel the world and fuck rock bands.”

One out of four ain’t bad.

Brazenly masterful in its utter irrelevance, the song snatches the underlying synth signature from Peaches ‘Set It Off’ and layers on the heavy electrics and languid wistfulness. The entire track is a peripheral orbit of laboured rhyming patterns and lyrics that are simply laughable (“We lie like lovers and break like sinners/ Hate like Hitlers”), yet combined with the sheer wanting that soars through each aching verse, and that hypnotically repetitive bridge, and oh, how I’m transfixed.

For all that, it’s the sheer desperation that compels my pity and admiration. ‘Tastes Like Kisses’ is that sluttish girl who rolls up her pleated skirt with one hand, revealing only pasty flesh and shaving cuts (the other never pauses as she stuffs over-salted crisps towards darkly-lined lips); her dark bra too-tight under the school blouse so that flesh bulges in bands across her back. It’s that look of numb desperation in the eyes of an underage girl in the 2am club, as a skin-head fifteen years too old gropes her lycra-clad buttocks in a sickening grind.

Something’s just not right, but I can’t look away because the horror and beauty of the lengths people will go to just compels me to watch with complete awe. (Click here to visit the official Harry website.)

Holly Valance “Down Boy” – Why Miss Valance, what languidly seductive offering is this? So breathlessly musing, so sensually vibrant. Oh, how you exude the smoky-kohled eyes and artfully draped posture of a true pop minx!

We British have a strange love affair with a certain breed of Australian poplets. Having spent our early evenings watching the sweet girl next door/feisty mechanic go through their first loves and losses in the perpetual ‘Neighbours’ soap sunshine, we’re only too happy to welcome them into our charts to grin inanely at tumble-dried Saturday morning hosts. But alas! Fickle are we also, and thus pretenders to the original Ms Minogue’s throne eventually recede into the murky waters of anonymity (or, in Natalie Imbruglia’s godforsaken case, dating Lenny Kravitz. Serves her right for ‘White Lily Island’.)

And so, while Holly may presently be hawking collect call services with all the style of a third runner-up Miss Skegness contestant, her brief and stunning musical forays shall forever live on in the devoted pop memory. From the opening stutter – half chord/half beat – and sinuous breathy drawl, I am enrapt. Her verse intro is coquettishly mused, as if she can barely spare the energy from all that lounging on silk sheets in a tangle of limbs. The whispered line echo builds with staccato electronics, and oh, the chorus! Devastatingly understated, hypnotically repetitive.

This girl is writhing on her pedestal with all the careful abandon of one who knows precisely the power she wields. (Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)

Abby McDonald blogs her sarcastically devoted pop musings at Poptext