Alesha’s emphatic (From Dorset Echo)

Alesha’s emphatic

8:13am Monday 8th December 2008

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ALESHA DIXON
The Alesha Show (Asylum)
WHISKYCATS
Whiskycats (Medical Records)
THE COMPUTERS
You Can’t Hide From The Computers (Fierce Panda)

I MUST be the only man in Britain who doesn’t really know who Alesha Dixon is.

I’ve never deliberately watched Strictly Come Dancing and I couldn’t name a single Mis-Teeq hit if you held a cannon against my head. I’ve done some research on the lady now, naturally; but all I knew previously was that I kept hearing this song on the radio which was the first song I’d heard in ages that I actually hated.

Most current chart fare simply passes me by: we nod civilly to each other on the way past and agree to differ. But this was something else. I am of course referring to The Boy Does Nothing, which still makes me want to claw my own face off until I reach the wispy hairs on the back of my neck.

Typically, my objections primarily revolve around a point of pronunciation. In order to fit the ghastly lyrics into the ghastly metre of the ghastly melody, Alesha has to sing ‘he never WASHS up’ and ‘he never BRUSHS up’. I have become so obsessed with the flesh-crawling horror of this that I’ve started to doubt my very sanity. It should be ‘washes’ and ‘brushes’, right? Or is Alesha providing perfectly acceptable alternatives that I’ve up until now been blissfully unaware of? This modern world discomfits me; I feel like a 19th century horse shying at its first sighting of the motorised carriage.

It comes as some relief to report that The Alesha Show (Asylum) isn’t in the main as spirit-crushing and brain-atrophying as its lead-off single. Few things could be, admittedly. Only Mambo No 5 by Lou Bega springs readily to mind, which is ironically the foetid template upon which The Boy Does Nothing is based.

Elsewhere, what you get is very expensive-sounding, slick and confident R&B-inflected pop which arches over backwards like a Czech gymnast in its fervent efforts to tick all of the commercial boxes. The best track? Try Chasing Ghosts, which isn’t too bad at all – aping the cool, minor seventh-based electric piano riffs of Steely Dan’s Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number and Beck’s Where It’s At.

Burrowing deeper into today’s pile, we come to the debut album by T4 Orange Unsigned Act anti-heroes WhiskyCats, whose self-titled debut album on Medical Records (I see what you did there) reveals them to be the ideal band for the current climate.

In short, they party like it’s 1933. One listen to the frantic, desperate, Weimar Republic minor chord decadence of Slipped Disco and you’re whirling drunk in a Berlin cabaret club while the Bad Days coalesce outside.

It’s a hugely impressive debut: spitty and a bit headachey if taken in one hit, but very persuasive in smaller chunks, and commendably devoid of obvious rock-based antecedents. In This Chair is perhaps the most immediate and charming track on the basis of two listens.

I leave you with the extraordinary tumult of You Can’t Hide From The Computers (Fierce Panda), the debut mini-album from The Computers – based in Exeter but audible from here.

In Teenage Tourette’s Camp they have bequeathed us arguably one of the song titles of the year, with extra brownie points for sounding exactly like a song called Teenage Tourette’s Camp should. Mind you, if you were expecting the remainder of the record to be sensitive piano ballads, forget it. In finest punk rock fashion, you get seven songs in 18 minutes, with a triple hernia apiece for the band members and a bonus throat haemorrhage for the lead vocalist. Love The Music, Hate The Kids is possibly the second-best song title of the year, and Please Drink Responsibly comes a very close third. Joy is unconfined.

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