NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL MUSIC! 98
ANNUAL MUSIC REVIEW 


So, last year I thought it would be interesting to review 'Now That's What I Call Music 95' and, far from encouraging me to keep my finger on the pulse of pop culture, it made me more determined than ever to avoid the dreadful, dreadful horse-shit that people seem happy to have sluiced directly into their stupid heads these days. 
It was, without exception, the biggest load of bollocks I've ever heard in my entire life and it took me several months to get over it. It was like if someone had found a way to extract 'liquid Alzheimers' and have it melted down onto CD. It was like hearing 1000 dogs screaming and then opening your eyes to realise that you're underwater with your leg chained to a washing machine and you're being bummed by a cuttlefish. Actually it wasn't really that much like that.
In the first few weeks after listening to it I was essentially catatonic, staggering around parks drinking Kestrel Super Strength, only pausing every so often to vomit black blood into the undergrowth every time I recalled the song 'Do You Know Love?' by Olly Murrs.
After that I started to come to my senses and after a bit of exercise, rest and some time rebuilding my cognitive skills with the use of a new drug called 'Dr Apokalypses Gorilla Rampage Tonic' that I bought off my mate Jonty Panpipes, I started to feel a lot more like myself, but with more killings.
The other day I lost a game of 'wink at the van' against Cwis Packham and my mate Jason Hoofbite and they dared me to fucking do it again.
So here we go...

1 - CAMILO CABELLO, YOUNG THUG - Havana
It sounds like Rhianna learning to play piano in a church hall whilst a priest (with hiccups) hits an abacus with a badminton racket, and, to be fair, I think that's a pretty fair description of the entire music industry for the past decade. 
As I recall, last year's 'Now...' compilation was bursting with so many faux-Carribean tropes, it was like having your bollocks held in a vice-like grip by Sebastian the crab from 'The Little Mermaid' whilst the cast of 'Cool Runnings' luzzed cans of Lilt at your fucking head from a coconut tree. With this song however, some clever dick has remembered that, though still in the Caribbean, Cuba has a unique musical style that's overdue being ripped off by some talentless, bland cunt in America. I'm now bracing myself for the possibility that I might have to listen to some warbling bender jabber over the top of someone playing an Antiguan Nose flute or something.
Fuck this.

2 - POST MALONE, 21 SAVAGE - Rockstar
Quite a lot of swearing in this which I hate.
Never heard of this cunt so I just Googled him. He looks ridiculous. He looks like a Jewish Rabbi who's accidentally got himself extremely addicted to all known drugs. At best he looks like an Amish simpleton who's been fired into Topshop with an enormous catapult. 
The actual music is too boring to deserve a mention.

3 - SAM SMITH - Too Good At Goodbyes
Not good enough at goodbyes if anything. Must try harder. 
Is this what the kids are listening to? Have they never heard of Pantera?
This is as tedious as an old cow. Whilst I was listening to it I started looking at one of my claws and thinking about how weird it would be if my claw was full of tiny little penises and then when I came round I realised I'd eaten my paw off and pushed it down a drain and all the ducks were laughing at me. That doesn't happen when you listen to 'Rock You Like A Hurricane' by Scorpions does it?

4 - P!NK - What About Us
It's like Europop. This sound should have been consigned to the annals of history back in about 1995. It sounds a bit like the sort of music you'd expect to hear faintly pulsing out of a Lithuanian nightclub somewhere in the distance whilst you get buried alive on the side of a hill by a gang of sex traffickers in leather jackets. 
I wonder if that was what P!nk was going for.


5 - DUA LIPA - New Rules
I just listened to this track about 4 times to see if I could find anything interesting to say about it. Like the last one it's basically a synth sound that was briefly popular about 20 years ago accompanied by some girl warbling over the top with the unwelcome addition of what sounds like a van reversing throughout the entire chorus. After about 4 listens I started to quite enjoy it which means that it must contain some sort of subliminal, hypnotic, algorithms that brainwash people into liking it because there is absolutely no way that it isn't 100% fucking crap.


6 ED SHEERAN - Galway Girl
It doesn't sound like all the other stuff so far, and that's to its credit. However it does sound like a B*Witched B-Side. As far as Irish music goes, this is the worst 'Irish Song' that's ever been written. It makes 'My Lovely Horse' sound like 'Fairytale of New York'.


7- CHARLIE PUTH - How Long
The album artwork is ridiculous. He's sat on a bed sort of looking like he's just had an argument with his keyboard and now the pair of them are just laying there sulking. If I was his keyboard I'd probably have called him a useless cunt as well. Don't know who he is but his voice winds me up and I genuinely hope his head burts into flames. I genuinely mean that.


8 - CNCO, LITTLE MIX - Reggaeton Lento
It's like a really bad pop song that's been made worse by having Spanish guitars poured all over it like gravy made out of gonorrhoea  It basically sounds like leather trousers, it's the audio equivalent of the concept of leather trousers. From what I can gather it's basically Little Mix taking it in turns to choose which pair of leather trousers to be rohypnoled by in a bar in Malaga that's got bras hanging from the ceiling. After I listened to this I started getting a little rash in the corner of my mouth,


9-  J BAVLIN, WILLY WILLIAM - Mi Gente
There is no music in this one. It's just the looped sound of a gibbon that's had his fingers trapped in a Black and Decker Workmate with the two Spanish barmen from the club I mentioned above, talking bollocks over the top. It's properly unlistenable. I think someone should send it to Langley, Virginia, so that the C.I.A can use to extract intel from terrorists. If you played it to someone more than twice then they'd sing like a fucking canary. Probably a far more effective tool than extracting fingernails or attaching knackers to car batteries. I honestly reckon if you listened to this song four times in a row your head would just fucking burst like an egg in a microwave.


10-  JUSTIN BEIBER, BLOODPOP - Friends
This song sets the bar pretty fucking low for drum technicality and sounds like someone monotonously firing a nail gun into a damp mattress from start to finish. The lyrics are so clunky they sound like they've been written by someone who's still in shock after crashing into the back of a van on a motorbike.

11 -  ZAYN, SIA - Dusk till Dawn
Pretty much the same as the last song. Fucking boring. You might as well plug your headphones into a bag of crabs and listen to that instead. Once I got to the end of listening to this song I felt really dizzy and did a fart and blood came out.


12-  DEMI LOVATO - Sorry Not Sorry
This song is so boring that if you started a rumour that it didn't exist then everyone, including Demi Lovato, would believe you after a couple of days.


13-  STEFFLON DON - Hurtin' Me
Sort of a 90's, R&B thing with Caribbean vibes like all the other songs. The only way anyone could think this is good is if this was the first song ever. If she'd sort of invented the entire concept of singing over music then some people might consider this quite interesting but even then I think most people would think it was utter dogshit and should be a lot better than it even is.

14-  LOUIS TOMLINSON, BEBE REXHA, DIGITAL FARM ANIMALS - Back to You
I don't know what a Digital Farm Animals is but it reminds me of the time my mate Yarnold Pentecost strapped about 40 digital watches to a cow's legs, all with the alarm set to go off every 10 or 15 minutes.  The cow got so angry that after about 4 hours his head floated off into the sky and loads of tiny mice with parachutes on floated out of his anus.
I wasn't really listening to the song. It sounded less good than Crohn's disease.


15- KHALID  - Young, dumb & broke
This is sort of a bit like reggae but made by someone who's never actually heard any reggae and only had it explained to them by a dog.


16- MAROON 5, SZA  - What Lovers Do
Didn't these cunts used to be a real band about 20 years ago? I'm sure they were an absolute shit tornado back then as well but I'm sure they didn't used to sound like a 16 year old impersonating Just Bieber in their mum's bedroom. 
These benders have obviously got about as much integrity as the girders that held up the twin towers.
I'd rather listen to 'Moves like Jagger' than this which is strange because 'Moves Like Jagger' did for music what Dr Harold Shipman did for people's trust in medical professionals.
If it was up to me I'd have Maroon 5 put directly onto the sex offenders register for this song.


17- JASON DERULO  - If I'm Lucky
Couldn't lock onto this one long enough to have an opinion. It was like someone holding a hedge strimmer up to your head and asking you if you like the tune whilst it occasionally tears little chunks out of your lobes and sends bits of your ear flying across the room like bumblebees made out of pork. Boring and painful in equal measures. Like being constricted and devoured by a python that's telling you which roads it used to drive from Doncaster to Bishops Stortford.
The fact that someone bothered hiring a studio and going through all the rigmarole that it takes to record, produce and release a song for this is frankly mind bending.

18- CLEAN BANDIT  - I Miss You

Don't know what's wrong with young people. It seems like the threat of being blasted into ribbons by an incendiary ball of nuclear light has taken its toll on their fucking world view. All the music's so slow and downbeat. They've got less energy than a AAA battery in a flood damaged Poundstretcher.
I think Marks and Spencer used one of these guys' songs one of their adverts for about 2 years. The only way M&S will be using this song in an advert  is if they start selling trips to Dignitas. 

19- ALMA  - Chasing Highs

I've done 17 songs now and I'm starting to feel really poorly again. I wasn't concentrating and I just slit one of my hind legs open and started pushing snails into it and now my leg is sort of burning and also feels really cold at the same time. My Mate Sexy Chris just came over to ask why I'd been listening to so much tod for the last 3 hours and I made him sit through this song and he just started crying and then flew off and smashed into the side of a bus shelter and now he's just lying on the ground in a puddle with loads of sort of black treacle firing out of his tits. It's quite a scene. I might have to take a little break.

20- ZEDD, LIAM PAYNE  - Get Low

We used to take the piss out of countries like Moldova and Former Yugoslavian Repulic of Macedonia in the Eurovision Song Contest because their pop music was just pumping electronic drums sampled from a gay sauna with some cheesy little cunt singing bobbins over the top. That's what Britain does now. That's the entire pop music output. I would say that sounding like an Eastern block country from 1993 might go some way to help the United Kingdom's Eurovision campaign, but after Brexit the Rolling Stones could enter and we'd still get fuck all so we might as well just feed a pig loads of Pop Tarts and Haribo Starmix and then walk it on stage and hold a microphone to its quivering, fluttering arsehole. Or we could submit this song which is only slightly less good than that but far less interesting to watch.

21- CHARLI XCX  - Boys

This sounds like a woman having sex with Super Mario while magic coins fall out of her bum.
If you think of a good song, this is like the opposite of that.

22- RITA ORA  - Anywhere
Can't stand doing this anymore. This one's causing by brain to bleed. It's so boring that I genuinely considered killing myself just to make it stop but then I remembered I can just press the 'off' button.


23- MARSHMELLO, KHALID  - Silence
Got excited when I saw the song title was 'silence'. Was hoping it was going to be heavily influenced by John Cage's 1952 composition '4'33' in which the performers are instructed to just sit there and do nothing for four and a half minutes. I wish Marshmello and Khalid had been instructed to do that because that would have saved me from smashing my fist through a window and squeezing the blood into my ears so that I didn't have to hear it as much.

24- AVICCI, RITA ORA  - Lonely Together

If someone had told me this song was written by a shoe then I'd have asked "What kind of shoe?"
At no point would I have actually doubted whether it had been written by a shoe or not

25- JAMES HYPE, KELLI-LEIGH  - More Than Friends

This song apparently "samples" the song 'More Than Friends' by En Vogue. If sampling is just dragging a song into Garageband and playing it 50% faster then that shoe I just mentioned above could actually be as successful as David Guetta and get flown around the world in a fucking Learjet. Being a musician these days takes all the skill and musical dexterity of a dildo that's had a face crudely drawn onto the side of it with dog baff. 

26- YUNGEN, YXNG - Bestie

If you own a keyboard with at least 2 working keys and know how to make that high-pitched warbling sound using autotune that's in every single song so far, then that's pretty much the equivalent of knowing what next week's lottery numbers are as far of making a quick buck in the music industry these days. 
People keep talking about all the plastic waste at the moment, I reckon Casio and the others could definitely cut it down to two keys. Synthesizers might as well start looking more like a deer's hoof than a piano.
This song's fucking terrible by the way.

27- CHRIS BROWN - Questions

If you've ever broken into a hospital under cover of darkness, found the bins that hold all the medical waste awaiting incineration and clambered in and found a syringe and just gone mental and started injecting blood and drugs and soiled laundry and shimmering, yellowy fluids into your fucking head...then this is the song for you.


28- CRAIG DAVID -Heartline
Don't know who's responsible for letting Craig David back into the music industry but I suspect it was dark lord of the underworld, Satan. Craig David must have been gargling Satan's balls so deep they'd have been cooking in his stomach acid like a couple of boiled eggs in a saucepan.
This song's used the tune of children's favourite playground taunt and possibly most annoying song ever - 'I'm the king of the castle and you're a dirty rascal'. As far as 'musical influences' go it's hardly fucking Beethoven. Because of this it's absolutely unlistenable. 

Right I can't handle doing Disk 2. I'm only going to do disk 2 by popular demand so fuck it.