27 August 2009
Donal Skehan completists coming to ‘Burn’ will find it thin gruel indeed – their man just gets a few cute-one pouts and some backing vocals. The other three do all the main singing here. Even more noticeably than with their previous chart-topper, ‘My Baby’s Waiting’, the group never appear together in this video. First time may be a quirk of storyboarding or editing; second time just looks bad.
‘Burn’ sounds bad too. Its clumsy, wordy verses and negligible tune are simply the hallmarks of a poor song, a flat-pack R&B-lite ballad for whatever undiscerning boy-girl group walks into the shop first. The triple-rhyme urgency of the chorus is too little to redeem this. The Irish record-buying public thought so too: their response to ‘Burn’ at number one was an extreme case of buyer’s remorse in putting ‘I Gotta Feeling’ back to the top spot for another six weeks. ‘Burn’ spent a second week in the charts before disappearing completely, as did Industry. I suppose we can muster a wry smile that Donal Skehan went from a single called ‘Burn’ to becoming a TV chef.
