Fifth Harmony is a girl group from Texas who finished third in Fox's second season of the imported British talent show The X Factor. All five people in the girl group are pretty in a still-relatable sort of way, and all five people in the girl group do the wavy arm gestures expected of our pop stars today (including the emotional fist bundle and that hand-fan thing that Mariah Carey does all the time). They can all clearly sing and some of them have upsetting back-stories, which, frankly, makes them an X Factor dream come true.
If you're browsing for easily dissectible summer jams, look elsewhere. Each of this week's selections is a veritable cherry bomb of textures and statements. Be prepared for songs to end in completely different places from where they began, and to be pulled along for the ride. Don't let this feeling scare you off, though. It's how you know you've actually gotten somewhere.
Porches -- "Franklin the Flirt"
What threatens to start as a sardonic slow jam quickly blooms into something beautiful, pained and unexpectedly intricate. Don't for a second think that the song's coating of morose grime has anything to do with a lack of upkeep. On the contrary, singer Aaron Maine's wordplay, atop the instrumentation's plod, carries all the stark elegance of a ballerina pirouetting on an oil barge. To wit: "The purple eyelids sag/There are diamonds in the weed sack/And love's a purple drag/I always go back." A band to be watched, ideally through the saline smudge of breakup tears.
