If someone had said to me that in 2009 you would be reviewing a new single from Blazin’ Squad then quite frankly I would have looked at them blankly and asked them what they had been drinking. For the uninitiated Blazin’ Squad were a UK boy band that landed in the charts with some noise and fanfare about five years ago. They were at the time the youngest act of this kind, they were also pretty shit and they didn’t hang around too long before they fizzled out and they vanished from the public consciousness. Although one of them was a fixture in one of the “Celebrity” Big Brother shows although it’s hard to say whether that enhanced a career that wasn’t so much waving but drowning at that point.

Still this is the year of the comeback and while I wait to see dead relatives pushing their fingers through the soil in search of a return deal Blazin’ Squad join the trailing masses of has beens who stagger zombie like back towards the fleeting light of fame.

Their new release ‘Let’s Start Again’ (how apt) comes to the fore absolutely drenched…and I mean fucking soaked…in big production. Expect giant melancholy piano riffs and tortured pseudo US boy band white bread soul vocals. This clearly hasn’t been tacked together on the off chance that something good might happen. In fact as if to cement their credentials the band (or should I say the label) have drafted in two very “now” rappers Bashy & Chipmunk to give the track a bit of a work over. The end result is pretty much what you would expect. Scrunchy faced soul delivery and some daarn saaarf styled rapping with the obligatory pitch shifting for the guest artistes. It’s a cash in of course, but I’ll confess I’ve heard worse. The kids will love it. Any adults however will doubtless see it for what it is.

Next up is the new single from The Saturdays entitled “Work”, I think a more apt title would have replacing the O and the R with an A and a K. Leaden, by the numbers third rate pop, but you cant give this lot anything too ambitious for one reason…they show little evidence of being able to sing. No doubt the autotuner in the studio was running hot when this was being recorded. It’s touted as a bit of a dancefloor burner but the only moves you can imagine being offered up to this are akin to watching Wayne Rooney’s family coming out of the sea (bear with me on that one, go looking for the picture). It’s out on june 29th.

A brief moment of salvation comes up next in the form of Cherri V and her new single ‘Til The Sun Comes Up’. sweetly cooed soul vocals framed over a proper drunken stagger of a beat. It takes you a few seconds to realize that your CD player isn’t broken but once you get your head around the oddball percussion it is a fairly useful bit of work. The obligatory club mixes come courtesy of T2 and Don Haffer the former being a bit on the pedestrian side but Haffer beefs things up a little at the bottom end and maintains the busy percussive stance, not a patch on the original though. Keep your ears peeled for this one, bit of a grower. Out 6th July.

Finally we swap sugar coated beats for indie kid offerings with our final outing of the day which is the new single from The Blizzards entitled “Buy It, Sell It”. Expect one of those semi brutal intros with plenty of nocturnal thrash, angst and jangle, mingle that with the usual dollop of slightly fey vocalization (not to mention some fairly interesting backing vocals that were a touch…erm…ELO) and you’re pretty much in the right ball park. It had all the potential to be annoying but for some reason that never happened. In fact quite the opposite, very respectable indeed. The skinny legged sods at the indie disco will have a tough time dancing to this though. And how I will laugh from my rocking chair…er..right…that’s me done. See you later.