Rapper T-Pain's single 'Turn All The Lights On' has leaped to number seven on the chart. Photo / Supplied
Each week Duncan Greive performs some low grade analysis on the week’s New Zealand Singles Chart and reviews a few new release pop singles.
Evidently the 60,000 people who had bought Somebody That I Used to Know prior to this week didn't represent market saturation - there are many more unsated who read about its US triumph and dropped a couple of bucks on some bytes. The 36-week-old single has just shot up to
number two, which is fine, because it's still a very lovely song, but nothing was going to stop Carly Rae Jepsen from her fifth straight week as our chart overlord. And with a promo visit scheduled for this week, it's fair to assume she'll do a few more, making Call Me Maybe a candidate for the biggest selling single of the year. That would be a wonderful thing.
Lower down T-Pain's mad Turn All the Lights On leaps up to number seven, while Rihanna has her 115th top 10 hit with Where Have You Been?. Deeper in there's some weird shit going on, novelty sounding stuff (Wallpaper.?!), and some super pop kuduro, which was the cool underground world music like five years ago. But it's got Pitbull on it, and right now he could rap over hard house and have a hit. Oh, that's right...
RIANZ Top 10 New Zealand singles chart
1 Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe
2 Gotye ft. Kimbra - Somebody That I Used to Know
3 Fun. ft. Janelle Monae - We Are Young
4 Nicki Minaj - Starships
5 Chris Rene - Young Homie
6 Justin Bieber - Boyfriend
7 T-Pain ft. Ne-Yo - Turn All the Lights On
8 Train - Drive By
9 Havana Brown - We Run the Night
10 Rihanna - Where Have You Been?
SINGLE OF THE WEEK: CHROMATICS - Back from the Grave
VOLUME rating: 10/11
The '80s have a strange rep. Thanks to Classic Hits and The Wedding Singer and a thousand other after-the-fact totems, we see it as all big hair and silliness, when that's only part of the story, albeit a pretty fun part. The early '80s, though, saw pop music experimenting with a vigour it wouldn't approach again for years, and with a palette broader than it ever would again. Jonny Jewel's Chromatics have returned, after the Drive soundtrack stole their entire aesthetic (albeit with him complicit in the theft), and made a song which feels like it takes a lot from what is still so inviting about the best music of '79-'83. Which is to say that Back from the Grave has a bigger melody than we've ever heard from Jewel, while retaining that narcotic haze and brute simplicity that makes his songs so replayable. Ruth Radalet's vocals are magnificent too, still so soft, but she gives in to populism with some "oooh-ooh-oooh-s" that don't shatter the spell in the slightest. Jonny Jewel's endless project, now encompassing many artists, releases and years, just keeps delivering.
