Koopa - 'Blag, Steal & Borrow' (Juxtaposition) Released 08/01/07

Easily the second most important song to enter the charts this millennium (behind Gnarls Barkley‘s ‘Crazy’ of course), with the much publicised ‘Blag, Steal & Borrow’ Koopa are the first unsigned act to grace our humble top 40. Well done chaps. Of course, the congratulations would be much more sincere if the track itself wasn’t such a horrendous abomination. It sounds like three teenage lads rehearsing in their garage desperate to parody Green Day in every possible sense. Okay, they may hail from Essex, but this doesn’t stop them singing in a nasally American drawl and serve up the kind of musical dirge that only a thirteen year-old kid with no concept or grasp of decent music would buy into. Worse still, the half-arsed call to arms and schoolboy rhyme schemes only confound this misery: “While the English scene’s a dump, it keeps on trying to ruin punk and the fact is it’s slacked, so it’s time to take it back.” If this is indicative of  the kind of unsigned artists that may be charting in future, God help us.