As may have become apparent by now, Staten Islander Eamon Doyle is an enterprisingly crude young man. "F*ck It (I Don't Want You Back)" might be one of the most cynical Number One records in recent memory, a slow jam spiced up with a torrent of expletives. But it's also, curiously, one of the most moving Number Ones in years, too. However calculated "F*ck It" may be, it still manages to perfectly capture semi-articulate adolescent male hurt, setting Eamon's sullen whine to a skeletal tune happily reminiscent of "Nothing Compares 2 U". It's a tremendous single, though only slightly scary optimists will expect much from his accompanying debut album.
In fact, "I Don't Want You Back" isn't quite as thin as you'd fear. "F*ck It" is the best track here by a stretch – though it'd be the best track by a stretch on the vast majority of albums released in the past year. But there are still a few more gems to be found on this ridiculous, predictably overlong, intermittently offensive album. Eamon's personal twist on R&B is something he calls ho-wop; a mixture of hip-hop and the doo-wop practised by his father, fixated on the gender he charmingly terms "hos". The opening track, "I Love Them Hos", is actually terrific, a swinging sing-song that locates Eamon as closer to Frankie Valli than Justin Timberlake. "I Want You So Bad" is good, too, ostensibly a swaggering doo-wop croon set to some basic DJ loops. For a gimmicky hybrid, ho-wop is a surprisingly satisfying genre.
What's more problematic is that, for a man who professes to love girls so much, Eamon has scant good things to say about them. Even the ones he's involved with are habitually "sluts" and "bitches", and dismissed so vituperatively it's hard to excuse his language as mere slang. At times, it's so pathetic as to be funny: Eamon frequently sounds like a teenage virgin who knows he's attracted to girls, but is still morbidly terrified of them, and overcompensates accordingly. But there are moments on "I Don't Want You Back" when juvenile ignorance flourishes into grim misogyny, chiefly the foul "Somethin' Strange", a mixture of abuse, vague threats of violence and general idiocy inspired by a woman who has the audacity to "f*ck on the first night".
There's an argument that this sort of rubbish is a far more plausible reflection of street culture than that peddled by most of Eamon's contemporaries. And it's a fascinating album that takes soppy musical genres – swingbeat and doo-wop – historically marketed at women, then sells them to boys. Still, you can't help concluding that Eamon should get over being scared of girls and grow up, however detrimental that may be to his career. To paraphrase Frankee's fairly shabby answer record to 'F*ck It': f*ck him right back.
