JLS - Proud

With One Direction and The Wanted battling it out for the attention of seemingly ever-present screaming hordes of girls, it falls to JLS to continue to prove their relevance on their third LP as the band that in many ways really fuelled the fire of the full-on boyband resurgence. You'd have thought they'd up their game to the max, screw on their thinking caps and bring their very best to the table - but in Proud, what they deliver instead is a hankies-at-the-ready instance of dry commercial sheen.

Proud is an unwarranted step-backwards for JLS, seeing the group regressing back to boy-band balladry of X Factor proportions. The lyrics are bog standard up-and-at-em faux-inspirational stuff and ultimately fall flat: 'When my strength was gone... In my darkest place you are my guide... When you fall down get back up and fight'.

For a group that burst onto the scene as a kind of anti-Westlife, delivering up-tempo pop gems like Beat Again, Proud sees the band straight-jacketed into suits and welded onto stools. Within the context of an album, a song like Proud is just about forgivable - even the greatest of all recent pop acts, Girls Aloud, had their token ballad inclusions - but released as a single, it feels like a waste of the band's potential.

Of course, because the track is for Sport Relief, there's a begrudging allowance that 'oh, it's only for charity' and that the band must play it safe for a good cause - but even compared to other charity singles, this ranks pretty low on the scale.

Proud is released on the 19th March.

Adele - Someone Like You (The Thin Red Men Remix)

Sometimes you just want a big fat dance mix of your favourite pop ballad. Remember how good the High Contrast remix of Adele's Hometown Glory was? Well, now you get to dance away to her current Number 1 single Someone Like You too, courtesy of Thin Red Men (who've done a load of Cheryl Cole mixes in the past).

Cheryl Cole - The Flood

Last year, Parachute gave fans a taste of the kind of love-drenched pop Cheryl Cole was capable of producing – but whereas that was a mid-tempo workout with a suitably dance-focused video, The Flood represents the all out epic ballad, the perfect outpouring for all those emotions and feelings. It’s interesting to remember that Girls Aloud themselves hadn’t really brought out a ‘traditional’ ballad since their Chemistry album so the gentle touches of Cheryl’s new single make for a refreshing change. And by God is it good!

What I love so much about The Flood is that in essence it has two choruses, both as equally catchy as each-other. The poetic beauty hits you first, ‘You can’t hold onto water, it fills you up but never stays’, before the song its crescendo, rolling over you like a wave, sweeping you up into its depths. You can lose yourself completely in the layers of this song, each listen bringing something new. Those strings swelling in the background, the lazy tropical sounds of the beat, the sunny strumming of the guitar. This song transports you away to a magical fantasy world where it’s just you, Cheryl and the music – and it’s amazing. Her ad-libs are damn impressive too.

There’s a tenderness to the song, something the beautiful, picturesque – and the brilliant video only serves to further emphasise this. Set on the coast, all arty and windswept, it presents a more candid view of Cheryl than the hyper-stylised likes of the Fight for this Love and Promise This do. It’s all impossibly cute, like the song itself, picking you up on a buoyant swirl of love and emotion. This is Cheryl at her most natural, the acoustic flavours really suiting her voice. There’s a lush organic vibe to the whole thing, a sense of ‘rightness’, and as Cheryl sings ‘sitting on the shore all day, waiting for the tide to come’, we can think of fate and how we’re all waiting for that perfect moment.

The Flood is out to download on iTunes now.

The video can be seen on YouTube here.