24 February 2001
I had remembered the catchy R&B-pop chorus of ‘Always Come Back To Your Love’. However, I had forgotten its rotten key change, like a carbon monoxide alarm going off mid-record. Maybe the lesson here is: never go back.
Prior to that dampening of my enthusiasm, I was quite enjoying my reacquaintance with this single. Yes, it sticks to ‘…Baby One More Time’ like the proverbial Dunnes Stores underwear, most notably with Samantha Mumba’s Britney-style vocal-fry growl embellishments, but coming after the vapidity of ‘Whole Again’ that’s a good thing. Scandinavian-designed US R&B-pop was now the baseline sound of the ’00s chart. The crew behind ‘Always Come Back To Your Love’ were Stargate, a Cheiron-style writer-producer trio working out of Trondheim in Norway who had already made UK hits for S Club 7 and Hear’Say. (I like to think of record companies in 1999 and 2000 responding to Cheiron’s ascendancy by scouring the Norse fjords and Swedish snow-plains for the next big Scandi writer-producer team, the way record companies in 1963-64 at one point scouted for the next Beatles in other UK port cities similar to Liverpool, as if the proximity of sailors and sea air was the X factor.) This track has the requisite early-’00s Scandinavian sleekness and US smarts, plus Mumba is clearly good at this sort of thing.
And then there’s that key change, which reminds me that for all Mumba’s energy and Stargate’s creativity, this is ultimately a Louis Walsh sign-off, so larger and crappier forces are at play here. I suppose we should just be glad he didn’t ruin it completely.
