This year, I've challenged myself to write a review of every song that manages to get to No. 1 in the Britain charts. Hither's the latest i:

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This year is a good one for flick soundtracks: get-go we had a February dominated in the charts byFifty Shades of Grey (with the soundtrack outclassing the film in a manner only previously seen bySpace Jam), and at present nosotros've got a No. 1 which comes from The Fast and the Furious 7*:Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth'southwardSee Yous Once more.

It's too a practiced year to be Sam Smith: you can always tell a singer's doing well when people showtime trying to sound like them, and the chorus ofSee You Again is Charlie Puth trying to audio exactly similar Sam Smith. The only trouble for Charlie Puth is that he isn't as good as Sam Smith. Sam Smith is a wild thing who careens over an immense range of notes in order to sound as confused and out-of-control as possible; Charlie Puth tries to mimick this but never goes as far to either end of the scale as Sam does. The result is a performance which is like Smith'south but bottom. It's an junior copy. If you lot desire to heed to a Sam Smith song, listen to one by Sam Smith.

Information technology does make sense for the song to rip off Sam Smith though. It'southward a tribute to Paul Walker, an actor who died in 2013 and whose last picture functioning is as 1 of the leads ofThe Fast and the Furious 7:"Damn, who knew? All the planes nosotros flew / Good things nosotros've been through […] I know we loved to hit the road and laugh / But something told me that it wouldn't last […] Those were the days / Hard work forever pays / Now I come across you in a better place". It's a sad song. There'due south a lot of emotion there. Sam Smith songs are emotional, sad diplomacy. It all fits.

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Which can't be said for Wiz Khalifa's performance in this vocal which is nearly personality-less. This comes through about in the noises he makes during the later choruses – he does the standard "Woah" and "Aye" stuff merely delivers them in a apartment monotone with no effort put into them at all. If I was lenient, I'd call his functioning low key and bleak, but actually what I hear in his voice is boredom. He walks into the vocal, delivers his lines with fiddling to no embellishment, does a few half hearted chants during the chorus and then walks out. He's never seems truly invested in it. If he does truly fees sadness and loss at the passing of Paul Walker, it doesn't come through.

Indeed, there doesn't seem to have been much endeavor put in this vocal at all. A slow pianoforte riff is used in the chorus because ho-hum piano bits are what pop music uses when information technology wants to sad present. The rap bits use the same drums and synths that very rap song employ. There's no truthful try to connect the choruses and the verses together, turning them into two separate pieces on the same subject which the song flicks between. The lyrics are quite good just nothing else has had the barest of thought become into them. Again, I can't aid just think that no-one making this song truly cared.

The result is that this isn't a song that gets an emotional reaction from the work itself simply instead gets information technology from the context it's in, which is a roundabout fashion of saying that this wouldn't be a No. 1 if it hadn't been attached to aFast and the Furious motion picture. And in many ways, that'south actually quite insulting: that a song sung in the memory of a expressionless role player was partly sung by someone trying to be someone else, partly sung by someone who sounds bored, and then attached to the advertisement for a major film considering the end event couldn't stand on it's own. It's a heartfelt tribute without the middle. I tin can't truly telephone call it bad – information technology's offense is ultimately beingness banal equally opposed to ineffective – merely I tin can't truly say I like it. Information technology could've been better and frankly deserved to be.

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* Even though the motion-picture show calls itself Furious 7, I'm calling itThe Fast and the Furious 7, if just becauseFurious 7 sounds similar information technology could exist anything andThe Fast and the Furious 7sounds like the 7th moving-picture show inThe Fast and the Furiousseries. Seriously,Furious 7 is merely an terrible championship.