Stunning

2011 has NOT been a banner year for mainstream pop. It's been a great year for Grand Dames of Popular Music Innovation to stage a comeback (Kate Bush, Björk, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey) but it hasn't been a great year for mainstream pop. It's been the year that Lady GaGa decided that maybe she was established enough to start shifting (extremely slowly, we might add) left of centre. The year that Beyoncé decided creating a sonically cohesive and mildly odd (by her standards anyway) album was more important than number 1 hits. The year Rihanna has (so far, at any rate) neglected to release a new album (thus far). The year Robyn and P!nk took much needed hiatuses. A year free of any new Madonna music.

So, it falls, bizarrely, to pop/rock American sweetheart Kelly Clarkson to release one of the best pop-in-the-classic-sense singles of the year. It doesn't sound quite like anything else in the chart. It doesn't have the horrid, scrapey syncopated synths that have characterised ravey, post-dubstep, horrid chart lolpop. But neither is it a po-faced, overly-sincere club member of The New Boring (two movements outlined in Peter Robinson's excellent Guardian article).

It has a traditional Mournful Verse, Big Chorus. It is catchy. Its production doesn't particularly rip anything off (except maybe the xx a little bit). It is a little phial of pure euphoria. Thank you Kelly.



Btw there are lots more of these where this came from on her new album, Stronger, out now (in all good branches of ASDA). Do not be fooled by the dull, simpering, country-ish lead single.