Singling Out 2008: Michelle Williams, Keri Hilson, Heidi Montag & more

Last week, my friend Frank Kogan, whose pop-music tastes I have often seen eye-to-eye with, posted a list of his 42 favorite 2008 singles so far on his livejournal blog. He included many songs I was entirely oblivious to -- several of them apparently actual hits. So, I decided to do some investigating. Here are a few results, with more likely to come:

Heidi Montag, "No More"
Her Wiki page suggests that Heidi is a famous designer, model, singer and "personality" on TV shows I've never watched. Which might explain why I never heard of her before now. Here, after a spare keyboard opening, her blond nondescript singing enters at Point A then stays there for four very long minutes, without accumulating any obsessiveness I can detect. A guy treated her bad, and she's better off without him; she's learned some serious lessons, but that doesn't make me care about it. Framed by, say, lonely '80s Italodisco or Latin freestyle production touches, the blank melody and vocals might feel suitably desperate and desolate. As is, they just feel blank.

September, "Cry For You"
Sad, pretty synth-line; reminiscent of Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy." I hear a little Peter Gabriel "Games Without Frontiers" in there, too, and ... something else I can't place. Pet Shop Boys, maybe? Apparently, September is a dance-pop star in Sweden; this song was a hit all over Europe. She's got an attractive burr in her voice, and gets intense in appropriate places. Doesn't devastate me. (Weirdly, I might like this more if a frail, frightened boy sang it.) But I do trust when she promises never to see me again.

Michelle Williams, "We Break the Dawn"
A song about nighttime, maybe disco's greatest subject -- she even talks about "disco lights breaking through the clouds." Lots of breaking going on. Michelle used to be in Destiny's Child, and she wants to keep us going to the break of dawn; the sun can take its time coming out. So, how come she sounds bored about it? A mood piece. And not bad, though unfortunately also not moody enough to imagine driving home to at 4 a.m. Which leaves it neither here nor there.

Booka Shade, "Control Me"
Two Germans, supposedly "electro-housing." Though I don't get what's so house about this. It gurgles okay, and improves when the depressive and masochistic Teutonic whispering fellow comes in. Actually, given his vocals, I'd guess this was "darkwave"; I wish the synths were more darkwavey. There's a funereal melody that enters a couple minutes in, though, and kinda reminds me of Depeche Mode in a good way. Melody does the start-at-point-A-and-stay-there thing better than Heidi Montag's song above, to my ears, but it's still too unflamboyant (or un-something) to draw me in.

Keri Hilson, "Energy"
More beauty than energy here, as far as I can tell. At first I figured the singing would be your usual boring '00s R&B-woman detached coolness, but actually it warms up quicker than expected. But halfway through, this Timbaland protégé switches gears, tries hard to sound more "emotional," falls flat doing it, and can't compensate for not giving us much in the way of a song. Maybe she should have stayed at Point A.