Tuesday, February 06, 2007

I wanna be on stage, I wanna feel like a star

Romanian dance-pop group Akcent competed to represent Romania at Eurovision 2006, but, though they won the public vote, the jury's vote was enough to send Mihai Traistariu to Athens instead (which, given Mihai's placing, seems to have been the right decision). Akcent have still gone on to have a series of hits in Romania (some outside Romania, and they did have hits before trying to go to Eurovision). The song they're probably most famous for is "Kylie" (which I wrote about back here), their ode to Kylie Minogue. Their music seems to be perpetually silly, always cheesy, but also a lot of fun.

King Of Disco--the lead single from their upcoming album. In some ways, there's not very much surprising about this song; as with their previous material, it's complete dance-pop, though possibly more on the dance side than "Kylie" was. Don't worry about that change, though; despite the move closer to dance, it's still hooky and melodic, and manages to avoid seeming repetitive (the fact that it actually has verses and a chorus might help). "San Francisco" still conveniently, for all dance-pop artists, rhymes with "disco," and Akcent themselves seem incapable of giving up their gimmick of in-song references to queens of the dancefloor, though this time they've swapped Kylie for Madonna. "King Of Disco" is catchy, though, and fun in a slightly ridiculous way; though their last album as a whole had a lot of disposable songs, Akcent seem to be able to pull out a great single when they want to. And really, how many dance songs about being an ex-communist are you going to get?

I do recommend listening to some more of their songs, though from what I've heard, the singles are really all you need; still, those looking to fill a hole in their hearts left by a certain Moldovan boy band who don't mind something a little more dance-influenced could do worse than look at some of the groups coming out of Romania. I'm not sure where or if you can buy the single "King Of Disco," but you can buy their most recent album, French Kiss With Kylie, here (physical) or here (digital).

Next up: Belgian bubblegum pop about bees.

5 comments:

Paul said...

I always avoided akcent because the kylie song seemed so gimmicky, but this i REALLY like a lot. It's tres bon, no? In fact I may even put it in my singles reviews next week (don't worry you can just copy and paste ;) ) Plus they are looking somewhat more attractive now....

PS - how is the paper going?

Anonymous said...

Hey gurl - I can't deal with all this boy candy you been posting lately...it's very distracting from my real job - LOL.

You do realise you have me wanting more Magnus. More Magnus cuz I'm too lazy to do a post on him. LOL.

I don't know if you've seen Magnus in person, but is so beautiful. Like in 'perfect' beautiful. Oh how I wish Alcazar would get back together....sigh Raj in fantasyland now.

Poster Girl said...

Oh, good! I'm glad you like it. I managed to finish the first draft of that paper, but now I have to work on a 40 page group paper about the educational system of Mozambique, of all things...

Good, then I'm doing my job! :) No, I've never been lucky enough to see most of the popstars I follow, sadly...but I'll take your word for it ;) I so wish they would get back together, too...though I think if they did, it would probably be without Magnus. Robpop says Magnus has an English album coming out later this year (his Melodifestivalen entry is in English, at least, judging by the title), which should be nice!

Anonymous said...

I'd buy his English album f'sho. If you look really hard in the Alcazar video to 'Physical' you can see me! Don't actually do that - that's silly...but I swear to god I am there.

Raj

Paul said...

true story - i'm in belinda carlisle runaway horses video. or whichever one from that album has live footage in,,,