So, what do we make of the new Cheryl Cole single? We were all looking forward to it with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for Christmas and Birthdays when we were a kid. We also knew that Calvin Harris was involved in general production/knob twiddling type duties, and perhaps the biggest surprise is just how much it sounds definitively like a Calvin Harris track.
In a radio climate populated to the brim with We Found Love, Let's Go and other dancey work-outs like the new Tulisa and Saturdays singles (actually, let's just make that pretty much almost everything in the charts right now), Call My Name slips effortlessly in. It's got 'Summer Anthem!' all over it, from the tightly packed chorus hook right down to the 'oh oh oh oh oh' outro bit (our personal highlight).
In that fizzing synth bassline and the sensuous, teasing slip and flow of Cheryl's vocals, it's possessed from the start with one of those all-powerful grooves that glues itself to your feet, no, every single cell of your body. It wants you to dance, it actively gets up and pushes you till you make a move, react to it, anything. Call My Name feels profoundly 'alive'. There's those lovely little bits of electronic blippery between the verses and choruses too that just *make* the track, the icing to top the cake as it were. And what a cake it is - packed full of jam and cream and all round sugar-rush goodness. For the insatiable appetite of the pop fanatic, this resolutely hits the spot.
Just like Promise This before it, Call My Name demands instant repeat-play precisely because it works to such a simple formula - it is after all, the epitome of commercial dance pop. You want to glean more from its snappy 3.30 duration, you want to squeeze and pump it for every bit of its pop energy. But beneath that machine-tooled exterior, there's a beating heart of artistic confidence that speaks of a forthcoming third album which could very well be a bit of a revelation. If we had a Cheryl shaped crystal ball right now, we imagine it'd be telling us very good things indeed about it.
Call My Name is released on the 10th June.
