Cher Lloyd featuring Mike Posner “With Ur Love”
An eighteen year old pop star wannabe who just so happened to pay more attention to the hip hop mixtape blogs than spend her days practicing old Mariah/ Whitney ballads in the mirror with a hairbrush?
That was the pretty girl swag Cher Lloyd was serving during her viral-huge run as a contestant on last year’s UK X-Factor, and while we couldn’t completely co-sign all the hyperbole parade cries that seemed to tag her as the Most Original Artist That Ever Lived simply because she brought Swizz Beatz’ “Vida La Vida” flip and Keri Hilson’s semi-cover of “Turn My Swag On” to mainstream ears, parts of her “hood”-pop shtick were interesting enough to leave us at least mildly intrigued by what things she would be producing when the time came for her crossover into “real” pop star territory.
Following the awkwardly patched together business of her polarizing official career debut “Swagger Jagger”, a Black Eyed Peas-knockoff that hinted of her record label being a little unsure of how to best package their new signee, Lloyd and her handlers steer her career back to the status of “promising” with follow-up “With Ur Love”, a charming hunk of Minaj-ian fluff that brings a welcome dose of summertime sunniness to the beginnings of what’s looking to be a dreary winter.
Not all of the song’s attempts to inject a hip hop-informed spin on its comfortingly familiar “teen crush” storyline are home-runs (“Used to always think I was bullet proof/ But you got an AK and your blowing through”; “I ain’t even here, I’m in outer space/ Like I’m Venus your Mars in the milky way”), but that can be easily overlooked when so much of everything else happening here (the moments when Cher actually sings, the precious “da-da-da-dum-dum” book-enders, the “Paper Planes”-indebted floatiness of it all) registers as some pretty strong sugary pop goodness. Plus, we remain impressed at Mike Posner‘s ability to make his still-strange alien-whisper voice work on things music-related.
Lloyd’s debut, Sticks + Stones, drops November 7th in the UK.
“With Ur Love” (featuring Mike Posner) (iTunes):
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