Best of the Year Lists Alert!

If you're into that sort of thing (AND WHO ISN'T) then make sure you catch my Top 10 Albums and Top 40 Pop Singles of 2012 lists over on GCN.ie this week. Quite a bit of work to get lined up but very enjoyable all the same!

The singles post also includes a helpful playlist of all 40 songs should you need an office / Christmas party soundtrack. Feel free to suggest your faves in the comments below!

Girls Aloud Release New Video, It Is A Bit Boring.

Obviously, it is a very good thing that Girls Aloud are properly back together even if it's only for a greatest hits album and tour and not a proper full length album etc etc. Something New was such a perfect return, it was exhilarating to see how they could take on the current chart sound and still sound like them after a few years break. The new tracks on Ten, that new compilation, are mainly amazing, upbeat, fizzy pop with the kind of quirky twists that are their hallmark.

Sadly, current single Beautiful Cause You Love Me is a rare misstep. By the time Call the Shots rolled around, we saw that a Girls Aloud ballad didn't have to mean an unbearable 4 minutes. But this track is a huge disappointment, a mawkish slowie that feels like a girl band spin on the kind of "My man will love me despite how I look" ridiculousness Ed Sheerhan and One Direction have been peddling through popular song in the last 12 months.

The video has just arrived and it's hard to deny they look gorgeous and they all swan around beautifully. And in terms of music video product placement, wielding a new Nikon camera to take self empowering selfies of yourself is pretty damn hilarious. But, it's so BORING. It's like a timewarp to the early 2000s when every dreary pop act had to pout moodily in an abandoned house amidst some leaves in order to telegraph that it was nearly Christmas (what is it about empty houses and leaves that screams elegance to music video directors?)

In short, Girls Aloud can and should do better. The video is worth a look once just to gawk at how pretty they are, but the rest of us will just wish they'd done a clip for On the Metro instead. Sigh.