Guy Sebastian: the Australian equivalent to Will Young or Kelly Clarkson. Well, perhaps not quite--though I enjoy most Kelly and Will songs, there are only a few Guy songs I like. I do own--and like--first album single "All I Need Is You," but the only version of it I have is from iTunes. As a result, I only have one good song for you all today (though I'll throw in one other). If you watch American Idol, you might have seen Guy perform or heard Carrie Underwood sing Guy's single "Angels Brought Me Here." Guy, famous for his apparently now-gone afro, won the first season of Australian Idol, and, though his first album had a lot more success than his second, he is still doing well commercially and is going to release the first single from his third album soon. In the meantime, he's appearing on It Takes Two, the Australian version of UK show Just The Two of Us (for American readers, it's apparently something like a singing version of Dancing With The Stars), in which celebrities not known for singing duet with professional singers. Wikipedia says he's also planning on releasing a gospel album in the US this year.
In exciting (?) news, all of today's songs are in mp3 format, so you can actually hear them before you decide if you want to download them (definitely a good thing, considering today's songs probably won't have wide appeal)...it's not a permanent change, since most of the songs I own are in m4a, but, when I can, I'll try to get them in mp3.
Oh Oh--from Guy's second album, Beautiful Life, "Oh Oh" is a mildly urban-influenced dance pop (though not dance pop in the sense of, say, "Call On Me") tune that gives us a "classic" pop euphemism. I don't really know what the message of Guy's song is (is he truly telling the girl to leave him alone? or is he just overwhelmed but sorta loving it?); I suppose I could bother to look up the lyrics, which I can never seem to totally understand, but every time I hear this song I'm too distracted by the grooviness of it to think about further research. I don't want to talk this song up too much--it is far from my favorite song by an Idol finalist. It is dancey (just listening to it stationarily makes it not feel quite right), but it's not totally club-friendly, so it makes sense that it would be remixed. Unfortunately...
Oh Oh (Cutfather & Joe Remix)--this may be the weirdest remix I've heard. It takes a sort of dancey song and makes it less dancey. The guitar is played up a bit, the song's slowed down a bit, and the random effects seem more prevalent; it's like someone tried to make the song funkier and add a hint of some sort of "flavor" (maybe a bit of Latin flair?), but didn't really know what funky meant. It's the sort of remix I picture playing in some dusty, dirty, off-the-road cantina, where maybe some of the clientele decide to dance, and maybe one couple knows what they're doing and can turn in a nice Spanish-influenced slowish dance, but the rest of the dancers just end up looking awkward.
You can buy either of Guy's albums, Just As I Am or Beautiful Life, here, but I'd probably recommend buying singles instead (available from the same place), though I don't own the albums, so I can't say for sure.
Next up: staying in Australia, we have a post with only one song, but it's a good one.
guy sebastian australian idol
2 comments:
i have invariably ignored the australian idols as i only have enough time in my life for so many idols and britain takes up a lot of that (david sneddon i miss you) but this song is pretty nice :) I Look forward to australians other offering - i LOVED scandal'us and bardot btw :)
Britain needs to take a cue from the US and stop making so many singing reality TV shows; here in the US, we've only ever had American Idol, but we make up for it with classy shows about who can grate cheese using a car the fastest or whether shooting a arrow with your feet is more impressive than doing backflips on stilts. Top-quality entertainment, that is.
Confession: I've never actually listened to Bardot. Scandal'us is great, though.
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