Girls Aloud – I'll Stand By You

I never realised this was a fundraiser song until I have this release in front of me right now. But I'm not going to treat it as one, and if you want to hear my thoughts on fundraiser songs check out my review of Perfect Day '97. I do this song, I even knew what I was going to hear before play testing it. This is pure pop, before pop got all messed up by the EDM genre like it is now. This is so inoffensive and twee, you can play it anywhere and it just works - funerals, weddings, birthday parties. Your mum loves it, your nan loves it, your little sister loves it - everyone is OK with it.

Strange how a song like this no longer gets any air time, yet I still know the melody and lyrics - definitely some conspiracy theory kind of stuff!

Title track and tin-foil hat accusations aside, the remix on this is complete GARBAGE. Fuck me, what was Tony Lamezma isn't a real human! Just generic crap remixes made in about 5 minutes to provide filler on these singles. For a remix it doesn't go anywhere, or do anything - it sounds like something a 10 year old made in e-Jay with all the presets.

Lastly in the audio arena we get a medley, a mini-mix, of tracks from the girls sophomore record, Girls Aloud - What Will The Neighbours Say?. It's ok, I honestly have less of an opinion on this track than the title. It's just like an advert for your ears, but it doesn't make me want to buy the album - then again I don't think I'm the target audience.

The design of the sleeve is pretty naff, and feels rather dated and tacky in hindsight but then again the design choices for all releases from this album were (the headshots of the girls look, frightening - something to do with the makeup, the more I look at them the more I fear). You get a ASOS promotional card, a pretty big name now in the UK - I'm surprised that they started as far back as this.

You also get some enhanced bonus goodies! This is 2004 of course, so you best get a low-res copy of the music video with every single! You get a flash player game (it works even on my futuristic Windows 10 machine, thank god for flash?) which is a complete waste of time. You choose one of the band , and then move them around a screen while some audio clips play and then you fall down a hole and thats it? It also includes two Quicktime movie files, one is silent with no audio, so you get to look at the pretty girls without the annoying music (jokes aside I think this is the proposed "karaoke" version), and the other one is the music video. The music video is fine, I watching this a lot as a young boy - odd how these things stick with you, but it has a jerky motion to it because it has been encoded at BLOODY 12 FRAMES A SECOND.

Just buy the greatest hits if you've got a strange Girls Aloud itch you need to scratch.