I've been waiting for this for a long time

Months and months after its debut, the best American boy band song properly released in years--only fighting for that title against New Kids on the Block's "Twisted," which was never a single--has a music video. V Factory's "Love Struck" is helped in no small part by the fact that it's co-written by Darin and one of his collaborators for his last album, sounds like a Darin song, and still has Darin on backing vocals, but as Swedish as the song's credentials may be, it's exactly the sound American boy bands should be making (and the American boy band singing Swedish-penned songs combination is one that gave us some of the best songs of the last boy band boom).



Edit: people outside the U.S. can watch the video in lower quality here.

Seeing an American boy band in a music video doing bits of a dance routine while performing a song that I can actually legitimately stand up for as great is an experience that triggers all the right nostalgia parts of the brain, but "Love Struck" is still modern. I keep hoping the song, which has struggled up towards the bottom end of the chart, will fully take off: with more of a promotional push, it has the potential to become a mid-size hit, even if my dreams of a smash are probably pie-in-the-sky. For a while, I hoped that the release of Fame (yes, it's a movie remake of what you're thinking of) might provide a boost, with one of the group's members having a significant role in the movie from what I understand. With Fame's release not until the end of September, though, that seems too far away to be helpful.

To some extent, though, even cracking the top forty of mainstream radio airplay, as they've done for the past three weeks ("Love Struck" currently sits at #37), is an achievement in this environment. The long time it's taken other songs to take off, though, means that despite it slipping in radio plays this week, I can't stop myself from thinking there's still a chance for this song to do even better.

In short: best effort at doing the boy band thing--speaking of technical, traditional boy bands--that the U.S. has had for quite some time.

V Factory's debut single "Love Struck" is for sale now at major U.S. digital stores.

Like a puppet on a string

(As predicted, here I am a few weeks after initially writing up this post, still not satisfied with it but posting it anyway. The key here is just that the song is good, with a great catchy chorus, great middle 8, and great half-epicness-creating backing vocals near the end. I actually am glad it's sung by a boy band--and not just Darin--now, too.)

I do love boy bands, it has to be said, but, contrary to what you might guess from some of the songs I've liked over the years, just any boy band won't automatically win me over. The music is the most important thing, of course, but there's also been some awful try-hard styling over the last few years.

I can't vouch for this American boy band's styling, but I have to say I think I've been won over by their debut single, "Love Struck." I've mentioned it before because it was written/co-written by Darin (and David Jassy), who I'm still positive you can hear on the track. At the very least, it's pretty easy to imagine him singing it, with those elongated "oo"s in words like "you" and "fool" and some of the high bits. Like most semi-urban-pop boy band-esque songs, it would quite possibly be better sung (fully) by him, but he's chosen to give it to these boys and I'm more than willing to accept that fact.

As mentioned, "Love Struck" does come from the school of urban-influenced pop, but either it doesn't delve so deeply into the urban side to seem ridiculous coming from these boys or the song is just flat-out great enough that you buy the whole thing. It's a bit dramatic, up tempo, catchy, and full-sounding. I think, for me, that last point is actually really important. I can almost imagine 'N Sync singing that middle 8, but I think there's a chance "Love Struck" is more appealingly pop than the music that group might still be making today if they were around. That's not to say that "Love Struck" is some pure-pop throwback to late '90's boy band sounds; it isn't. It does, though, eschew the skittery, more minimalist sound with odd rhythms that I think might have been played up more and more if 'N Sync had survived to today. I guess, since that didn't happen, the best we can do is look at Justin's solo material. At times, he does make songs where a strong melody is key and there are times where his more...almost experimental or avant-garde tendencies (or rather, his tendency to want to give his songs the sound of being more experimental) work really well. Other times, though, I can't help feeling like he's being deliberately distancing and deliberately...restrained in some way. This is getting hopelessly dense and I'm not communicating anything clearly--let me just leave it at the fact that many of his songs, in addition to have a few other elements I find off-putting, often feel more like a collection of elements than a song to me.

In contrast, "Love Struck," to me, feels more filled out and less concerned with sounding experimental (there is a difference between experimentation that brings life and excitement to the pop scene and experimentation that's meant to sound experimental, though the two sometimes overlap) is a full-on pop attack which, yes, is something you could say about the songs of late '90's, but with a sound, an electronic-sounding backing (somewhere between an updated second album Darin sound and "Breathing Your Love"), that also acknowledges changes since then, though not in a try-hard sort of way.

Being in a boy band still isn't cool enough that I can imagine American radio picking up on this song, but I really think it's genuinely great, and not just "for a boy band song" or compared to some of the other boy band songs we've had to deal with over the years.

This song isn't, as far as I know, available for purchase yet, but you can buy an EP of their music on iTunes here if you live in the U.S.

Next up: maybe a British pop-rock song.