Cheryl Cole premieres comeback single ‘Crazy Stupid Love’
Things have been rather quiet around Cheryl Cole for a while, but finally she is ready for a big comeback. Earlier this year, she already announced she would make a return in the jury of X Factor UK and now it is clear that she also wants to add a new chapter to her career as a pop star. Her most recent effort was released in spring 2012, when she launched the successful lead single ‘Call My Name’ which preceded the album A Million Lights. Now she is back with ‘Crazy Stupid Love’, the first single of her fourth album that will be released later this year.
When it comes to Cheryl, I tend to have big expectations for her first singles. She did this to herself with the flawless lead single trinity ‘Fight For This Love’, ‘Promise This’ and ‘Call My Name’. Those tracks all had great choruses, interesting productions and a fresh and cool attitude to it. I imagined it would be quite hard for her to keep to this standard and sadly she did not succeed. ‘Crazy Stupid Love’, that features a rap by Tinie Tempah as well, does not really come close to the poptastic quality of the other mentioned lead singles.
This does not mean that ‘Crazy Stupid Love’ is completely awful though. It actually is a quite decent and nice song, but one would expect that little bit more from Cheryl’s comeback single after two years. The verses have a great melody and Cheryl’s voice sounds quite good and when the song builds up to a sort of chorus, all seems to go in the right direction. But then, when you expect an explosion in the production of the track, all you get is a rather flat and uninspired sounding saxophone. This could have been quite a nice moment in the track, but production wise it is executed pretty poorly which drags the whole vibe of the song down. Also, Tinie’s rap is alright, but quite a non-event in the track. It seems like Cheryl and her team were chasing a trend with saxophones and horns in (urban) pop songs, like ‘Talk Dirty’ (Jason Derulo), ‘Problem’ (Ariana Grande) and ‘Thrift Shop’ (Macklemore & Ryan Lewis).
Based on the lyrics and melody, Cheryl’s track could become a big hit as well, but because of the poor production, I do not think this will set the charts on fire internationally. Still, a hit in the UK should not be a problem at all. It is good to have the pop star in Cheryl Cole back and let’s hope her album will have something more to offer than this slightly disappointing comeback single.