Popjustice: Like various other mid-ranking pop writers, I have been listening to the Adam Lambert 'LP'. ppj.st/Avxrvj
www.popjustice.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5975&Itemid=206Adam Lambert album thing 
Right you lot settle down, we heard a load of Adam Lambert album tracks yesteday. We heard the whole album a few months ago when he played it to us but we were going down with quite a bad cold at the time and also needed the toilet for a lot of the session so our mind was elsewhere.
The picture above is of the iPod Nano that we were allowed to play the album off yesterday morning. We are quite pleased with how this photograph turned out. It looks pretty cool don't you think? We sharpened it a bit in Photoshop but other than that it's pretty much exactly like we took it. Well we made it smaller of course - it was originally 3624x1824 pixels, and now its width is just 450 pixels.
This is how a bit of it looks full size.
So anyway Adam's second album campaign is underway now. The first single's out in America already, and it's coming out here in March. Maybe it's that thing you get when you spend too much time online like we do (and you probably do too), but it feels like by the time it comes out here in the UK we'll already be onto the next one. Also, the song - a big and pretty impressive balladular sort of affair - doesn't really feel like the sort of song you'd launch your second album campaign with. Well not if your second album was anything like Adam's, anyway. The song sets the album up to be boring and moody, but it's not really boring. It is quite moody though.
'Cuckoo' is the big song on this album. First time we heard it we thought it sounded like a streamlined version of Justice or Daft Punk. It's certainly a chart-friendly dance track that comes from a different, more sophisticated place to most of that other UTTER SHIT that seems to be passing for pop music at the moment.Did you see all those reports the other week about 'pop overtaking rock as the biggest genre' and feel quite excited, only to feel a bit upset and angry a few moments later when you realised that a lot of the stuff that was boosting the 'pop' side of things was lowest common denominator bollocks? Well we did. That wasn't a happy morning at all. But we got over it.
'Cuckoo' is a song is about going mad, or maybe it's about going sane and everyone else being mad.
Cuckoo' has a big chorus that goes "I wanna LOSE MY MIND like a maniac, and CROSS THE LINE never looking back we're ON THE LOOSE getting crazy and we've gone cuckoo, gonna party til they take us away". It looks a bit like one of those crap LMFAO party jams written down like that but the song as a whole feels a bit more like an outsidery burst of defiance than an insidery eruption of LOL. It is a really confident song and could make sense of Adam for UK fans-to-be in a way that his first album didn't quite manage to.
It features one of those abstract borderline dubstep breakdown bits that everyone's doing at the moment.
Elsewhere on the album there are a couple of songs he's done with Pharrell. We heard one of them again yesterday - it's an 'Another One Bites The Dust' / 'Last Night A DJ Saved My Life' sort of thing with handclaps and footstomping and all that stuff. It feels like the sort of song that might 'cross him over' and 'open him up to a different market' and all that sort of thing record labels spend their time wanking over when all they should really be asking themselves is "DOES THIS ACTUALLY HAVE A GOOD TUNE OR NOT".
(It's got a good tune.)
It is certainly "a toe tapper".
There is a line that sounds a bit like "no trespassers up my arse".
We thought the first chorus should have probably come in a bit earlier.
It is probably important to state at this point that we don't think Queen are very good. Well a few of their songs were pretty great but they're not a band we ever felt that bothered by. It all seemed a bit joyless.
'Outlaws Of Love' is an interesting song on the Lambo album. It's about everyone going "OOHH WE DON'T LIKE THOSE GAYS VERY MUCH" but Adam going "UP YOURS YOU LOT WE'LL DO WHAT WE PLEASE". The chorus goes "everywhere we go we're looking for the sun" and then it goes "nowhere to grow old we're always on the run" and then it goes "you say we'll rot in hell but I don't think we will" and then it goes "they've branded us enough, outlaws of love". It's a pretty special song. While it was on we had a discussion in the office about the whole burning in hell business. We thought it was quite interesting that he goes "I don't think we will", as if he is not quite certain that he won't. That felt like one of the most powerful bits to us, because there is an element of doubt despite Adam's outward confidence. We suppose it is quite complex isn't it, that sort of thing. Especially if you bring religion into it.
And then David who was at Popjustice HQ helping out with some stuff said that maybe Adam wasn't sure about the burning because of hell's famously fiery nature. David's logic was that hell, due to the fire, would not be very humid, meaning that something wouldn't really rot. So the lyric might be one that ponders the science of decomposition more than it does the nature of oppression.
Maybe Adam would be able to clear this up for us during the course of the album's promotion.
There is quite a lot of Sam Sparro action on this album. There is a song called 'Broken English' and a song called 'Shady'. 'Shady' also has Nile Rodgers on it which is quite a coup. Well we assume it is, we've never tried to get him to appear on a record. He might just say yes to everyone who asks, and it might just be the case that people don't ask him very often because they assume he will say no.
We reckon the singles should go like this:
1. 'Better Than I Know Myself' (this is the one that's out in America already and we reckon they should just bin off the UK release and instead start again with...)
1. 'Cuckoo'. This is a properly brilliant single. It feels a bit unfair to say "it doesn't even sound like Adam" but we suppose if people are either not fussed by what they've heard so far of Adam's work, or simply didn't like it very much, that's probably a good thing. The lyrics are fairly Adamish though, or what we think Adamish means. WHO IS THE REAL ADAM LAMBERT? (That was a rhetorical question, please don't email or phone the office.)
2. 'Trespassing'. Well the album is called this so we assume it will be a single at some point and it's pretty great so that would make sense.
3. This should be where the ballad comes in. FUCK THE BALLAD. Let's go straight back in with that ravey 'Never Close Our Eyes' one. That's a hit single however you look at it, so if people haven't been very into the whole Queen-esque Pharrell business this will help sell some albums. We seem to recall Adam saying that Bruno Mars had something to do with this one but he might have been talking about something else.
4. Now you can do the ballad. We'd go for 'Outlaws Of Love' here. It feels like a better expression of what it might be like to be gay in America than anything else we've heard recently, and it's got a fantastic tune.
Read more:
www.popjustice.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5975&Itemid=206#ixzz1jzaS3x4t
* AL Nov. 5th, 2011
Man, it must have been scary for Sauli to be sitting all comfortable and anonymous in the audience, and suddenly have a giant camera pointing directly at him and a microphone shoved toward his face! 
