Available on: Virgin/Relentless

Isn’t it sad in when a song as a whole is less than the sum of its parts? In theory this should be great. Wiley’s on it, doing his rapping, we all like that. The hook is just pure Cascada, kings of the fizzy-surge-of-euphoria chorus. It’s about fun, we’re all big fans of that. But ‘Good Times’ is just a vapid, uninspired record. Wiley starts off talking about late night shopping, which on earlier Roll Deep songs would have been just idiosyncratically amusing, but here it juts out awkwardly, and yet is probably the lyrical highpoint of the song. Brazen repeats the same good-time-go-for-it-think-positive sentiments as Wiley. But then Breeze comes in and does something totally different! Nah, just kidding, he does exactly the same thing as the others. Scratchy finishes it, usually the funniest Roll Deep member, but he sounds almost suicidally humourless and forced. It’s like a Black Eyed Peas song or something.

It’s not even a question of a cumbersome clash between Roll Deep’s grime roots and their chart ambitions. The group’s previous pop efforts, ‘The Avenue’ and ‘Shake A Leg’, were amazing, yet total departures from Roll Deep’s comfort zone; new, exciting personalities and voices whizzing off into the pop world, making small dents but big impressions. This’ll impress no one and will be resigned to twenty-second bursts of life as a ringtone, buzzing in pockets before being silenced by the ongoing higher priority of people’s lives.

To be concise, ‘Good Times’ is the kind of song that Fearne Cotton “really likes”, to whatever extent it is that Fearne can feel human emotion/understand music.

James Hampson