Pining, Griming, Sliming, Signing

This is the corporate moving mood board for the plagiarised "Check Up On It", watered down "Halo", and tepid ''What's My Name" that is Cher (not even the best Cher) Lloyd's "With Ur Love". As befits the super sanitized career masterminded for ex-talent show contestants, this is a carefully inoffensive and sentimental visual accompaniment meant to be as generic and universally appealing as the song itself. The way this has been achieved is by revivifying Kylie's "All the Lovers" key concept, popping some hearts on it and moulding it together with some stock footage from some old Halifax adverts and the latest Homebase campaign where people decide to inconvenience the general public by painting train stations puce and filling them with overpriced, under-inspired lamps, perspex chandeliers and forests of lumpen settees.

It all goes swimmingly for a while, as Cher (keep wishing it was the other Cher, in full Bob Mackie regalia, throwing permed shade at this overlit sap siesta) gambols about with an aspiring Ellie Goulding lookalike and Marina from nearly two years back (before greige-hair-gate), leaving her Furniture Village set bedroom to prance about the city wiggling her eyebrows and looking hungry. She looks a bit like a Polly Pocket that has been enlarged in some sort of badly written, PG, summer release-fodder sci-fi film about a doll Godzilla terrorising a city with her doe-slender legs and lustrous eyelashes, accompanied with a gaggle of painstakingly selected, high-fiving younglings in double denim she's never met before. There are also some close-ups where she looks pretty, and at times seems to be concentrating so hard on sustaining her prettiness that her jaw veers into angler-fish territory and her eyebrows sink to the bottom of the ocean (just like the quality of this 'article'). She also seems to be wearing three tubes of Cover The Blemish as lipgloss. I mean that as an observation, not as some sort of snide jibe of snideness. She looks very nice in this LV insurance infomercial.

And then, swimming into focus, like some sort of garish, dodgily-sketched caricature that you didn't really want but begrudgingly paid for at an overpriced and disappointing funfair, come to life, is Mike Posner (apologies for that unnecessarily long sentence). Wearing a jacket made by The Officer's Club (when it still existed) that was inspired by a high school student from the early nineties whose hobbies included sexism, cow tipping and premature ejaculation, he mutters, sibilantly, about apparently managing to get to bases with people. Naïvely hoping he is talking about day trips to airbases to learn about the rich and compelling history of aerial warfare, because it looks like the only bases he's ever gotten to were secretly filmed on To Catch A (Douche-Frat) Predator. Apparently he's meant to be cute and endearing, but he looks like the twisted individual in horror films that likes to crochet ponchos out of the muscles and pubic hairs of his victims, and is so lacking in social prowess that he can only gurn like a poor Terry Gilliam impressionist and mutter to himself. If only he had been so preoccupied with his gurning he could have taken a few steps further back to save everyone the fits of intense squirming they suffer when he smugly mentions 'yummy' middles.

Then the whole of American Apparel joins the parade and everyone releases doves, lanterns, farts and weather balloons into the ether to symbolize the sickness of love. Mark Posner is not the only aspect of this that terrifies me; what really chills me is the total failure of language in this song. Have I been in a (Diet Coke) coma for too long? Have I been desensitised by years of sustained Sugababes abuse to not notice the woeful lack of verbal innovation, cliché avoidance or even appreciation of language in the modern pop song? Do people really fly, shine and ride with love, or is Cher Lloyd secretly Mildred Hubble from The Worst Witch trying to indoctrinate us with her witcherly agenda?