Promoting releases is hard unless you pay a PR company. So if you’ve paid a PR company to promote your product…sorry…music, then you would be hoping that every penny of that money would be spent judiciously, nay ? So what must Bev Lee Harling think to see her single being reviewed on a site run by an auteur and an amateur ? A site that deals in “underground culture” (ie: noisy, messy, rubbish stuff) and which hosts the internets best selling music podcast “Behind Closed Doors”. I imagine she would think “That doesn’t really look like an appropriate place for my music to be reviewed”. A single glance would tell her this. So, I imagine when she finds out that some fuckwit PR company somewhere blindly sent us a blanket press release, without paying the slightest bit of attention to who they were sending it to, she might be a bit miffed.
Unlike many other sites we don’t have a pompous, lengthy submission procedure. That’s because we don’t mind getting sent music and stuff for free. What a chore it must be to get all that free stuff day in day out. We assume that people will be able to tell whether or not they are of our oeuvre by the other shit on the site. What we do object to is being sent stuff that is so far outside our comfort zone that it may as well be in the twilight zone…which leads me to the actual single.
Bev Lee Harling (written in faux-fifties script and with Fifties styling in the photos). I was expecting some kind of “I’m a white chick who desperately wants to be a black chick” shit (hello Adele, goodbye Amy Winehouse), but to Bev’s credit she has a nice voice that suits her age and ethnicity. I think she might be American because she sings in an Americanised fashion, but I don’t know. The song is surprisingly good. Not in a challenging and intellectual way, but it would provide a nice soundtrack to eating a biscuit or something. It has beat-boxing (of a pretty basic standard) for bass and drum parts, a Django Rhinehart-esque guitar part and even a shimmer of vocal processing on some of the background vocals. It’s basically an open letter to the listener to buy her single and get it on the radio, which is fair enough. It’s what everyone wants except G.G Allin and he’s dead.
So what am I getting upset about ? Would you like to know ? I presume that’s why you’re still reading, greedily drinking my bile traces all the way down here at the bottom of the page. You might think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown and just write “Bev Lee Harling is a musical grated cheese sandwich on white bread” over and over again. No. I’m upset because the B side is a cover of the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does”. I’m upset because I didn’t notice that and while having a happy afternoon listening to music I like, all of a sudden I was confronted with a turd in my aural swimming pool. A sonic fly in my sound soup, if you will.
I don’t like the Police. I don’t like Sting. I don’t like ukelele’s and twee cover versions. So giving me this to review was like giving a kitten to Gary Glitter. Inappropriate.
Kim Monaghan
