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deadcactuswalking · 1 month

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 16/03/2024 (Ariana Grande's eternal sunshine, 4batz/Drake)

For a fourth week, Beyoncé holds the throne on the UK Singles Chart with “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM”. Outside of that, it’s Ariana Grande week, so welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

Rundown

Before we get to Ari or, well, anything else, we always start with our notable dropouts, those being songs dropping out of the UK Top 75, which is what I cover, after five weeks in the region or a peak in the more prestigious top 40. This week in particular, we bid adieu to: “Overcompensate” by twenty one pilots (not a surprise there, it seems like a pretty inaccessible lead single), “Forever” by Noah Kahan, “On My Love” by Zara Larsson and David Guetta, “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman, “Perfect (Exceeder)” by Mason and Princess Superstar and finally, “Popular” by The Weeknd, Playboi Carti and Madonna.

As for our re-entries and gains, God, it was a big day for those this week, especially given not much else was going on between the top 20 and well, everything else. Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine” is back at #75, “Make You Mine” by Madison Beer is back at #53 (great!) and two well-deserved awards show boosts are present here - Jungle, the BRIT Awards’ Best British Group, re-enter at #43 with the incredible “Back on 74” and thanks to Billie Eilish getting her Oscar win for Best Original Song, the equally incredible “What Was I Made For?” zooms back at #16. It’s pretty impressive that there are four re-entries here, all in vastly different spaces of the chart, and they’re all fantastic. As for the gains, we see a lot, scouring pretty much all of the chart, so let’s any% speedrun this section: “Thank You (Not So Bad)” by FBI’s top six most wanted criminals at #68, “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift at #65, “Happier” by The Blessed Madonna and Clementine Douglas at #61 and okay, break - that song apparently samples “Du hast” by Rammstein, which I just didn’t hear last week when it debuted. Despite being a classic on rock radio all over Europe, the song never charted in the UK’s top 100, and I always preferred “Sonne”. Now back to the list: “Would You (go to bed with me?)” by Campbell and Alcemist at #60, “ONE CALL” by Rich Amiri at #59, freaking “Baby Shark” at #57, “I Remember Everything” by Zach Bryan featuring Kacey Musgraves at #55, “Green & Gold” by Rudimental and Skepsis featuring Charlotte Plank and Riko Dan at #54 (not really excited for how a trend of the 2020s is having so many artists credited), “FE!N” by Travis Scott featuring Playboi Carti at #41, “Evergreen” by Richy Mitch & the Coal Miners at #37, “Austin” by Dasha at #25, “Kitchen Stove” by Pozer at #22, and finally, thanks to the release of her album, “yes, and?” by Ariana Grande rebounds to #6, just outside the range for our next segment.

Now for our top five, starting with “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims at #5, “End of Beginning” by Djo at #4, and Ariana Grande landing her second top 10 hit in this week, the clunkily two-titled “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” at #3. Obviously, there’s more on that later. As for the rest, it’s to be expected: Beyoncé leads and the pack and Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” isn’t far behind at #2. Now for… less beautiful things, let’s dissect some of the new entries we have here.

New Entries

#71 - “if u think i’m pretty” - Artemas

Produced by Artemas and Daintree

Alright, I’ll bite: who the Hell are Artemas? Or Daintree for that matter? Well, Artemas Diamandis is a budding singer-songwriter with a questionable moustache who’s popular on social media, with this being a breakout hit from October last year, though it now of course has slowed and sped-up versions because the world is not safe from TikTok’s impact on popular music. Daintree seems to be Artemas’ go-to producer, and the two wrote this alt-pop song about a toxic relationship where to put it bluntly, he needs to pick up his standards. There’s a unique androgyny to Mr. Diamandis’ voice and it actually meshes very well - at least his falsetto does - into the vaguely eerie synth distortion and haunting elements very fitting for a song released in late October. I think the effects end up a bit overdone sometimes, attempting to make up for an underwritten song, and I really don’t like how the snare sounds, even if the constantly repeating vocal chop, and the way the lead vocal melody ends up stuck in a jam with it, is really clever, there was a lot of effort put into the song’s sound design, it just doesn’t really translate into a full song for me, especially at barely two minutes. Cool ideas are definitely here though.

#70 - “Uh Uh” - Clavish and Fredo

Produced by KP Beatz

We don’t have many other new names here: Clavish, Fredo, Nathan Dawe - they’re staples of UK chart weeks in the 2020s - and Drake and Ari are inescapable, so this’ll be a pretty familiar episode I feel, which is kind of refreshing. I mean, I’ve been listening to ratrace90210 and Yeat and Butterfly Boy, there’s something relaxing about knowing partly what you’ll have to say about something going into it. With that said, even I was surprised with how cheap and basic the piano and flute sounds in this beat were, the piano in particular really sticks out and unintentionally sounds off-beat due to just how basic the loop is. I would prefer for more layers of the RPG-sounding flute, but once the trap beat comes in, it’s easy to ignore some of the lacking melodies, it goes pretty hard and has much more of a pace than Clavish’s usual output. He’s definitely improving as a rapper too, the sheer length that he goes on for considering the wordy flow and delivery he chooses is kind of impressive and there are some interesting lines, particularly when he… denies living the life in his raps which is just surprising if anything. The way the “uh-uh” ad-lib is implemented sounds a bit tacky sometimes but given the rhyme scheme often delivers a similar sound, it can be pretty seamless sometimes as a call-and-response, it’s just a shame that Clavish doesn’t have the personality to sell it more. Fredo does though and this is an incredible verse from him. His cold rhetorical questions, much more developed rhyme schemes than Clavish, and how much more command he has of his flow despite using a similar one to his fellow rapper and even taking time to be further off of the beat… it really shows who’s been in the game for longer. “I hit any girl I want like a woman beater” is a crazy bar though, I have no idea how to feel about that, and he doesn’t really give you the time to think about it.

#66 - “We Ain’t Here for Long” - Nathan Dawe

Produced by Nathan Dawe, Neave Applebaum and Punctual

Nathan Dawe and its three ghost producers are back in the top 75 with a song I… already had liked? Yeah, this song is from early February, and I don’t know in what context I heard it but I should say that this is, for Dawe’s standard, a pretty great track. The singer is Sam Harper, a songwriter who’s worked with… BTS? Damn, well, okay, make that bank, girl, you can probably live off of that and don’t need to take credit for the heavily filtered vocals here that stand out in a mix that feels a bit barebones: it has the boiled-down essentials of a modern Eurodance jam but not much more, and that really picks up the pace in an “end-of-the-world” kind of way. She sings that she’s barely holding on and she’s got to live her life before it’s gone, with every element of this song feeling like it wants to just make way with itself and flee, and that’s definitely a compliment in this case, there’s a certain frantic sense to how the ATB-esque acoustic guitar drop is placed into staccato formation like old video game music. With how much the song wants to be done, you’d think it’d peter out by two minute, but no, we get that fizzling and striking bridge where Harper laments how much she’s doing for other people just to feel empty in return. We immediately get back to dancing of course, but after that resonant bridge, it hits way harder than it did before, with both Harper and Dawe adding little tricks into the final chorus, whether that be a change in the inflection, an added refrain of “I gotta live my life” or a flashy pre-drop glitch. It’s all very obsessed with desperately wanting to stop existing and for a trance song in an ever-increasing dystopia of how we live now, this feels particularly relevant… and it would be pretty poetic for the UK in particular to make this a hit in 2024. And please do, it’s great.

#18 - “act ii: date @ 8” - 4batz featuring Drake

Produced by Untitled Beatz and 40

Okay, firstly: Official Charts Company finally correctly recognises a remix’s popularity and credits accordingly. Nice. Secondly… sigh. So I gave a lukewarm review to Bryson Tiller’s “Whatever She Wants” on its debut week but pretty much immediately, I’m talking the day after, it clicked with me and I’ve been slightly obsessed with it. It actually has me excited for how rappers, singers, rap-singers and sing-rappers are going to implement non-Atlanta trap elements into R&B and vice versa as we get more diversive rap landscape with hyphy, Detroit trap, drill, Jersey club, dembow, Afrobeats and more competing for further influence in mainstream rap. Tiller and the beat both chug at a constant level and only stop to murmur tensely before piling right back into action. The beat sounds like if Rick Ross was on a treadmill and instead of really trying to sing, Mr. Tiller just tries to keep up, even if it leads to him doing brief harmonic riffs and pausing for sound effects. The original “act ii: date @ 8” by 4batz, which lands on its chorus by accident, has a similar appeal in its vintage shimmering keys and more organic-sounding bass, though I hadn’t heard it before the Drake remix. 4batz goes for an adolescent delivery that makes its determined, one-minute-and-done young love feel even more weightless and fluttery. I wish it didn’t go for the cop-out not-really-all-that-chopped and only-technically-screwed outro of course, but otherwise, it’s pretty decent and oh, the big-name remix essentially plays the song unchanged and then has Drake rap over that exhausted, slowed-down version. The youthful, Hell, maybe even childlike, lovestruck song empowered by its brevity is extended to a lethargic nearly four minute track, the majority of which consists of what sounds like a reject from not even For All the Dogs, more like Certified Lover Boy. There’s an oddly homoerotic passage in the middle, then he interpolates the original just to rhyme it with “I’m a stand-up guy like Dave Chappelle”. Sure. If this helps a newer and more interesting R&B artist to launch a career, it’ll be a net positive, but this version is a butchering of the original’s spirit in my opinion.

#13 - “bye” - Ariana Grande

Produced by Ariana Grande, Max Martin and ILYA

Okay, let’s get this out of the way: I liked two tracks off of Ari’s #1 album eternal sunshine: “the boy is mine” and “I wish I hated you”. Like always, her intro was pretty sweet too. I have vaguely more long-form first impressions on RateYourMusic, but I’m mostly just turned off by the nothingness the album presents: a trendy, vaguely pleasant pop-R&B album for sure, but not one that takes many risks - which Ariana can do - or makes use of its more cinematic production to help the songs get any stickier. Sometimes she sticks the landing, but mostly I did not care for it and couldn’t get myself immersed. Yet I’ve been listening to abstract cloud rap, underground plunderphonics of both the folkish ambiance nature and layered nu-disco instrumentation, and primarily, nu metal, so take all of that with a grain of salt. Like I said about 4bats, sometimes I’m not sure why I still write this show. With that said, there’s a lot less I have to say about these Ariana songs than I think I’d have wanted to. This one, strikingly, has had Ariana speak on it being too emotional and her not wanting to erase ALL of the humanity from it. Huh. That’s definitely reflected in the rote disco groove and oddly fuzzy bass which does add some texture but doesn’t make the lead vocal melody in the chorus any less… obvious. In fact, that’s really my main problem with this record: it’s obvious. The pre-chorus sounds genuinely brilliant, this is a gorgeous vocal performance from Ari and that swell is fantastic, but it ends up going for a kiss-off that’s undetailed and non-specific outside of name-dropping her friend Courtney… who the fuck is Courtney? The whole album’s vulnerable but never in a way that fully immersed me, it feels a bit closed-off not in an aggressive way but in a “the bridge over the moat has yet to be lowered kind of way”. Drake’s whole passage about his three different Jasons in “Away from Home” accurately displays my emotional connection with eternal sunshine but the difference here is that Drake very much knows that you don’t know who these people or events are and plays into that to construct his narratives. These Ariana Grande songs just feel oddly distant, and for a triumphant dance-pop song, I want to be IN the moment, not a peasant looking up at a celebration in the tower. Just saying.

#3 - “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” - Ariana Grande

Produced by Ariana Grande, Max Martin and ILYA

More than half of our debuts this week are in lowercase, I guess this really is a muted week. Speaking of muted, this was oddly a bit of a sleeper hit within the week, having its music video and SNL performance give a lukewarm first day room to breathe and a bit of a boost for the whole album but especially this… and it’s a blocky synthpop pastiche, and I MEAN blocky. One of my least favourite tracks on the album and really one of Ari’s worst ever in my opinion, this goes for the one thing I don’t think she could ever sell: a discussion of Ariana’s relationship with the media, doubling as a relationship story. You can see similar interpretations of thank u, next but even if I don’t like that record, I will give it props for its depths and honestly, its stakes and the tragedy that surrounds that album and its predecessor. This track though... what informed this? What informed the backlash-to-the-backlash towards critics in the chorus? What informed the tumultuous nature of Ariana’s pop culture ups and downs this time? What informed the grotesquely unwarranted orchestral outro? Oh, right, nothing to care about. I used to be a Kanye fan, artful self-indulgence is not something I’m opposed to - Hell, go for it and more - but when the writing is purposefully secretive and vague, the lead vocal melodies are so staccato that Ari has to push character out of them through just her inherent personality, which itself is a fragile beast and most importantly, it sounds a cloudy fuzz of parodic ass with conveyor-belt synths standing sore in the mix… I’m left questioning why I should allow myself to give it my time. Given that ending line of the second verse, it also makes me wonder if Ms. Grande even wants me to. Hard pass on this - “the boy is mine” was right there as a single, this feels like an easy cop-out for an album that had a shaky first week.

Conclusion

Yes, Ari gets Worst of the Week for “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)”, as much as I wish she didn’t, with a Dishonourable Mention to… Drake. Drake gets the Dishonourable Mention for ruining a promising song in “act ii: date @ 8” by 4batz. As for the best, it should be an obvious lock for Nathan Dawe with “We Ain’t Here for Long”, as Artemas taking an Honourable Mention for “if u think i’m pretty”, I could see some better songs coming from this guy if we give him more than one chance at a hit. I don’t envision much of intrigue in the coming week, but regardless, thank you for reading, rest in peace to Eric Carmen, and I’ll see you next week!

#pop music #song review #uk singles chart #ariana grande #eternal sunshine #4batz #drake #nathan dawe #clavish #fredo #artemas #sam harper

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