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- Leona Lewis' Oasis Cover - Triumph Or Travesty?
- The NME Chart Top 40 Revealed - 9th November 2009
- 10 Tracks You Have To Hear This Week - Yeasayer, Jamie T, Lil Wayne
- Best Albums Of 2000 - Have Your Say
- Stuck On Repeat - Why 2009 Is Exactly The Same As 1983
- The Bravery's Sam Writing Songs For Shakira, And Other Weird Indie/Pop Crossovers
- The NME Chart Top 40 Revealed - 2/11/09
- 10 Tracks You Have To Hear This Week - LCD Soundsystem, Maximo Park, Field Music
- The NME Chart Top 40 Revealed - 2nd November 2009
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Posted on 11/09/09 at 05:37:22 pm
If you've heard Leona Lewis' cover of Snow Patrol's 'Run', you can already guess what her cover of Oasis' 'Stop Crying Your Heart Out' sounds like: quiet and silky-voiced to begin with, ultimately building to an immense, orchestra-backed climax complete with gospel choir and Whitney Houston-grade, multi-octave bellowing.
It's tailor-made for a moment on The X Factor where a winning contestant starts crying and a glitter-cannon goes off, and Louis Walsh goes all damp-eyed and wobbly-lipped. It's also unbelievably formulaic, and will almost certainly be a titanic international hit.
But what do you think? Has Lewis ruined Oasis' song, or redeemed it? Is it just too overblown to be enjoyable? Or do you find yourself guiltily swept along by the sheer, manipulative emotion of it?
Posted on 09/11/09 at 11:31:40 am
We're into week two of the national NME Chart, and there's a fair few movers and shakers. Calvin Harris shoots from third place to the top spot, while Julian Casablancas debuts at 16 with '11th Dimension' and Death Cab For Cutie are the highest new entry at 15 with 'Meet Me On The Equinox'. It's not such a good week for Miike Snow, who see both their tracks drop down the chart. Check out the full list below.
And as a quick reminder, the NME Chart is compiled of tracks from the NME Radio and NME TV playlists, and from NME magazine. Those are sent to the Official Charts Company who rank them in sales order according to physical and download sales. You can hear the chart revealed live on NME Radio every Monday morning from 10am to midday, see the full rundown here on NME.COM every Monday at high noon, and watch the videos on NME TV on Sky Channel 382 tomorrow and Wednesday at 9am and 6pm. Let us know who you think should be top...
Posted on 06/11/09 at 05:51:07 pm
On this week's playlist - Teengirl Fantasy's "scratchy noise and snappy beats", Clock Opera's "chop pop" (his phrase, not ours), and an indie-pop remake of Fleetwood Mac's 'Dreams' by The Bon Bon Club.
What are you listening to this week? Let us know by posting a comment below.

1. Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
Rejoice! Brooklyn’s poster boys for rainbow-clad modern world music have gone and morphed into the proper radiant pop band they always threatened to become. Triumphant and shining, warm Afropop is undercut by weird shifts into odd-funk and Fuck Buttons-ish ambience as Chris Keating urges “Stick up for yourself son, never mind what anybody else done”. Did someone say ‘anthem’?
[Free Download]
Posted on 06/11/09 at 04:11:33 pm
This week we kicked off our Decade In Music series with a look back at NME critics' 50 best albums of 2000.

If we made a fresh list now, with the gift of hindsight, it'd probably look a lot different. I doubt we'd place Coldplay's 'Parachutes' above Radiohead's 'Kid A', as the mag team did nine years ago. And I can't imagine we'd place Badly Drawn Boy so highly, or go quite so crazy for Kelis.
But hey, maybe in a decade's time people will be equally mystified by the current NME team's love of The Horrors.
Here's the full list of 50. What do you think? Any glaring omissions? Is QOTSA's 'Rated R' a weird choice for Number 1, or does it still stand up as a classic album?
Posted on 06/11/09 at 12:13:12 pm
Groundhog Day was on the other night, that existential masterpiece in which Bill Murray plays a modern-day Sisyphus, doomed to relive the same miserable day, over and over. I started watching for a bit, then I thought, 'Hang on, I've seen this before'. Since then, I've become convinced that the film is not a parable; it's a work of pitiless realism.
Let me explain. This morning, like Bill Murray's hangdog weatherman being tormented by Sonny and Cher, I was woken up by the radio. On 6 Music there was Bono at the MTV Awards, singing 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' at the Brandenburg Gate. Appalled, I flicked to Radio 4 - where Sue MacGregor was chortling about Sesame Street. That's weird, I thought. What decade are we in again?

Posted on 03/11/09 at 05:20:23 pm
I was stunned to learn in the new issue of the mag that Shakira's hit song 'She Wolf' was penned by The Bravery's Sam Endicott. It's vaguely disorientating to discover that the foppish singer - best known for singing 'An Honest Mistake' and calling Brandon Flowers "a kid in a wheelchair" before vanishing off the indie radar - has reinvented himself as a pop hitmaker-for-hire. It's a bit like finding out Dick Valentine from Electric Six is back, and is standing for election as your local Lib Dem MP.
Can that really be Sam, penning lines like, "I'm starting to feel just a little abused, like a coffee machine in an office", and vowing to "behave very bad in the arms of a boy"? Well, no, actually: he only wrote the music, not the lyrics. And you can sort of see the similarity with The Bravery, in that the song drifts by on the flimsiest of synth-borne melodies.
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