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.
