The Singles Jukebox

Sorry Alexis, but we might care more about 2 Chainz today…

[Video][Website]
[6.12]

Anthony Easton: More of a conceptual deconstruction of what sexy dance music sounds like than actual sexy dance music, but it’s spring, and I’d fuck the knot in a tree at this point, so it will do. Extra point for making the phrase “If I could be inside you, darling” about relationships and not about happy fun times. Another point for those disco lasers.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Getta load of that wobbly sequencer.  So what though? Hot Chip always knows what to do with them. At their best (“Ready For the Floor”) they also know how to make dinkiness signify on its own; occasionally they break through into real feeling (most of The Warning). This track, however, takes its cue from the arch I-like-Zapp-not-Zappa bit. Great — another act applauding dinkiness for its own sake (although Zappa isn’t much better).
[5]

Iain Forrester: A great return for Hot Chip to releasing songs which sound totally throwaway but have infectious beats that months of hard graft couldn’t better. The only complaint is that the jokes don’t match up this time.
[8]

Brad Shoup: The dark disco is back! And I still don’t care! The funky synth descents are great, a much better backdrop than that pussyfooting bassline. Points for big-upping Zapp, yeah, but why did it have to be sandwiched in such a goofy purpose statement? 
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Too many ideas and personae: the pitch-shifting, the basso buffo; the oily sleaze bound to sneak out of bed between night and day; the oilier synth strut; the rock douche caught in the sequencer gridlock: ”I don’t like gabba / so please quit your jibber-jabber / do I look like a rapper?” On the upside, this does make you feel drunk and confused even while sober. If that’s the effect Hot Chip wants, phenomenal work. It should come with coffee.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: Hot Chip are my own personal uncanny valley of dance music. All the pieces are technically there, and it’s not unpleasant to listen to, but the fact that a song can resemble dance music this closely (hell, they’re constantly nearly quoting Off the Wall-era MJ here) without ever creating an irrepressible urge to dance is deeply unsettling. Hundreds of epic space disco lasers don’t make a whit of difference if irony and archness have replaced abandon. [N.B.: The above sentence does not apply if you are the Pet Shop Boys.]
[4]

Edward Okulicz: As ever, Hot Chip make dance-like music without dance’s usual pleasures but ”Over and Over” and “Ready For the Floor” suggested that at their best they are capable of pleasures that are all their own, and “Night and Day” succeeds in the same way; its groove is unusual but infectious and if it’s stolen, it’s stolen from a good source — the mutated-disco of the early 80s when Michael Jackson might have used the bass and Prince might have yowled the tune. It’s both pastiche-y and innovative at the same time.
[7]

Zach Lyon: This is sort of like if you took a Hot Chip song and removed the hook. Actually…
[5]

no blergs » Thursday, May 17th, 2012 2:59 pm

That’s the punchline.

[Video][Website]
[3.00]

Iain Forrester: This is going to have one of those videos where it’s really obvious that the two people were never actually even in the same state, right?
[3]

Brad Shoup: “The song has so far been acclaimed by critics especially Swift’s part with some calling the country-rap collaboration as a sweet and melodious catchy song.[citation needed]“
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: When this limp wad of tissue leaked, I couldn’t imagine who or what it was for. Eventually I managed twelve languid occasions it might soundtrack, but now that it’s charting, I guess the world’s outdone me. So here’s suggestion No. 13: weeping listlessly in careful slo-mo while smearing the snot and tears all over fancy studio gadgetry and endorsement contracts. That one’s for B.o.B.
[1]

Anthony Easton: The juxtaposition of the placid female yearning and the rugged masculine anger has been done, and even if it were novel, the gender politics sort of negate the explicit politics of the stated lyrics.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Swift is strong enough for both of them but she could use more help than B.o.B. provides. Who thought this unholy grafting of styles would work? 
[4]

Ramzi Awn: I can already see the BEP-tinged glare of my transistor radio in the summer sun. And who wouldn’t understand wanting to be strong enough for both the people in a relationship?  Unfortunately, as dependable as her delivery is, Swift isn’t quite strong enough to lift “Both Of Us” out of Disneyland mediocrity. 
[5]

Alex Ostroff: Taylor’s fragile inspirational finger-picking and B.o.B’s rapping meld surprisingly well, but never really take flight the way they need to for me to fall for this post-”Sing for the Moment” vaguely-morose-persistence-rap ft. A Pretty Girl Who Does Not Traditionally Do Hip Hop. The most important question is whether that shockingly functional buzz during B.o.B’s verses is a guitar or the whir of dubstep, and which, in my heart of hearts, I would prefer it to be.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: “Both Of Us” is, first and foremost, a failure to understand the appeal of Taylor Swift. Bobby Ray parachutes a (perfectly serviceable) hook from the country singer into his song as if the wispy prettiness of her melody were an incantation capable of activating her fanbase and delivering one more demographic for B.o.B to triangulate with. It’s the same approach he took with Weezer fans and the execrable “Magic,” but Rivers Cuomo has been creatively moribund for so long that the song seemed merely awful rather than cynical. It’s not that B.o.B’s hybrids are intrinsically bad: it’s that he approaches them without any understanding of the musical forms he wants to incorporate, and that he abandons anything pleasurable about rap music in the process of his assimilation. “Both of Us” has none of Swift’s careful details and universal specificity, and neither has it any of hip-hop’s careful details and universal specificity. It neither swells nor swings. Even Swift’s T-Swizzle sketch was more organic, but, the thing is, Taylor has long understood how to marry her sound with hip-hop. She’s performed “Lose Yourself” live for at least half a decade. This collaboration isn’t as transgressive as B.o.B thinks and there’s no reason it should be this awkward.
[2]

3 blergs » Thursday, May 17th, 2012 11:00 am

Sorry, Katherine: this song has rapping, which means it won’t touch the top 10…

[Video][Website]
[7.46]

Jamieson Cox: “Beez in the Trap” is maybe the most convincing argument for Nicki’s star power yet, more than the immortal “Monster” verse or any of the megahits or the bonkers Grammy performance. It’s not a triumph of her technical ability or way with a punchline or five (“Monster,” “Dance (A$$)”) and it’s not sugary-sweet like “Your Love” or “Super Bass”. But it’s a testament to the transformative power of swagger, confidence, attitude: whatever you want to call that intangible quality, this is it. It’s tough to describe how thoroughly she owns the beat, how she makes every word memorable unto itself. The song I’m most reminded of is “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” only one of my favourite singles of the past 10 years and a guaranteed crowd-pleaser from 2004 to 2064. Time will tell if “beez in the trap” becomes a similarly immortal line; I wouldn’t be disappointed if it did. Beez in the trap, beez beez in the trap. She’s shittin’ on your whole life. Pick your own favourite lines and repeat ad nauseum.
[9]

Michelle Myers: There is nothing innovative about “Beez In The Trap.” The beat is stark; its dark simplicity feels current in our year of “Rack City,” but also familiar, like a stripped down Neptunes track. The hook is memorable. She manages to make the trap seem cute. She appropriates “bitches ain’t shit.” 2 Chainz is just good enough that he does not detract from the quality of the song, but not so good that he outshines Nicki. I smile when he says “doohickey,” but I never forget whose show it is. Minaj herself is toned down. She never gets fully weird. She is tough, and then she is adorable. She raps competently about shitting on your life. This is the Nicki Minaj song we all asked for. She delivered exactly what the people wanted, and she did it well. The great triumph of “Beez in the Trap” is not that it’s well-crafted, but that something so safe could still feel genuinely fun.
[8]

Iain Forrester: “Beez in the Trap” has an ice-sculpture of a beat that’s cold, precise and immaculate. Nicki’s percussive performance initially fits her right in as an imposing part of that sculpture, before 2 Chainz takes an entertaining blowtorch to the whole thing. Then she returns, newly powered up, anger starting to shine through the contempt, as the ice cracks up and crumbles behind her. It’s a formidable show.
[8]

Ramzi Awn: I love hearing her say “Hoboken,” but Nicki’s attempt at jump-rope rap in this chorus makes me want to take a meat cleaver to my speakers. It’s just too… easy. And uninspired. A shame, too, because the bridge is hot as hell.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Ah, Nicki, trying to expand her honey business when so many people look at her pop success as steps backwards. “Beez in the Trap” was the standard for a lot of album reviewers, evidence that she’s not settling for skewering pop tropes or whatever. But the offerings on display are as spare as the (great, admittedly) echolocation beat from Kenoe. Minaj gives us one real verse (cross-country shout-outs almost never count), if 2 Chainz weren’t pimping, he’d be trolling, and ending the bridge on a non-rhyme is probably the coolest thing about the whole enterprise. At some point, pop and hip-hop seem to’ve become riven again, and rather than putting Nicki’s work on a spectrum that goes from, say, “Starships” to “Beez” (like I think we do for, say, Jay-Z — “Young Forever” was awful, but not a reason to stress), we’ve given her sides to pick.
[4]

Anthony Easton: I was going to mention that I would like this kind of work more as an instrumental — the bubbling up, the pops, the rattling chains, the abstract noise that ratchet up something between sex and tension — which is really the case. But seriously, the lyrics are as close to Tzara as anything, so in situ, the words add a layer of abstraction, and it becomes an instrumentation.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: The beat is fantastic, an auditory pun; the title‘s not about bees, but the track really does sound crafted from a thousand little stings. The rest isn’t so fantastic. Nicki never quite expands on that great chorus, 2 Chainz is a stowaway, and it’s yet another fuck-the-haters song, one that doubles as a too-convenient defense of Roman Reloaded’s Rihanna leftovers and ”Starships.” But it’s proof that Nicki can cross over without being inane, so it bloody well better go No. 1.
[7]

Zach Lyon: “Biscuit”/”Whole life” might be pop’s best non-rhyming couplet in years. I’m a sucker for city shout-out verses, especially because Nicki here is positioning herself as the supreme ruler (or perhaps Godzilla) of, yes, even YOUR hometown. 2 Chainz is the most radio-ready rap feature in months. The beat needs no defending. This needs to at least become as big as “Look At Me Now” was last year or I will not leave my room for a week.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: Having looked at either her label or her purse and dropped the Nicki-for-jocks inanity of “Starships” and its awful chorus, this one’s a gift to the hip-hop heads, music nerds, and those of us who were waiting for Nicki’s very own “Hollaback.” “Beez” hangs in the air as a fog of deep squelches and pops, and Nicki doesn’t just fuck the haters, she does it with a stupid great grin on her face. Someone should make another Bring it On sequel just so this song can be in it.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Amid the wreckage of Roman Reloaded a handful of tracks avoid compromises with a pop market she has helped shape. “Beez in the Trap” isn’t as furious as “Come on a Cone” but with bubblebeats this infectious and a Nicki rap that hangs back like Charlie Watts behind his kit it creates its own standards of judgment.
[7]

Andy Hutchins: Unfairly shit-on by a New York rap writer class that decided Funkmaster Flex’s umpteenth bit of air-filling shit-talking was more interesting than a blippy, low-key banger, “Beez” features perhaps the most entertaining beginning to a 2 Chainz verse during his spectacular recent run (begging “Okay, now Nicki, Nicki, Nicki, put it in your kitty!” and immediately switching to “Got a new LS 450, ain’t no keys in this doohickey!” has made me laugh almost every time) and Nicki dismissing Hoboken-based princes of the South. If that hasn’t sold you, consider checking your fun switch; no one has a more winsome sneer than Nicki in queen bee mode.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: The beat, with its cavernous pings and sub-strata bass, seems built to drop jaws, but the best thing it does is get out of the way. This is an MC’s song, and the exciting part about Minaj returning to her core business of rapping is not that her pop detours are anything short of excellent, but that she’s just so damn good at spitting. The lazy condescension of the verses is an exception to her usual elasticity, but it neatly sets up the sinuous, ingratiating hook. Nicki’s chant creates liminal space between rugged blackmarket commerce and girlish sing-song in the same way she permits the word “beez” to hang in a hazy syntactic state between verb and noun. Her chorus feints at Wu-Tang (as in Killa Beez) and jump rope without settling on either. As for the song’s simpler pleasures: 2 Chainz says “doohickey” (and “trousers”). That alone makes him superb value for money.
[9]

Alex Ostroff: The lazy drawl that rhymes no jokin’, Hulk Hogan and Hoboken is one of my favourite Nickis yet, and the chorus – which at first seemed plodding and rote to my ears – has over time transformed into a mantra of understated confidence. In 2012, Nicki doesn’t need to grandstand; all she needs to do is calmly shit on your whole life. 2 Chainz is merely competent, though, and spending an entire verse on city shoutouts without an ‘Area Codes‘-style conceit is a frustrating waste of a great beat. Honestly, I’m just so psyched to have a bona fide rap crossover hit that the kids can infectiously rap along with that I’m willing to forgive a lot. 
[7]

2 blergs » Thursday, May 17th, 2012 7:00 am

Minutes from the Jukebox Selectors Committee Meeting: “It’s Shakira, so why not?”

[Video][Website]
[6.75]

Sabina Tang: Latin piano house sans left turns, or indeed any quirks apart from those inherent to Shakira’s voice. A flawless house party starter, though, and contender for summer 2012′s official kick-off. Is it really only 2:26?
[8]

Ramzi Awn: Shakira’s voice is as sexy as ever, and the shift from Spanish to English suits her. The adult contempo vibe might even play to her strengths. I wouldn’t mind listening to this while getting my hair done, hanging out at home, or – anytime, really. Shakira is never a hard sell, and “Addicted To You” breezily complies.
[7]

Brad Shoup: It’s fine but not the Shakira I should have been losing my mind over at the turn of the century. There’s the body celebration, but not the syllable-macerating yawps she does so well (the processed, wordless melody lines are particularly distressing.) The electric-merengue thing is fine for the DJ mix, but I wouldn’t slot it on the first greatest-hits set.
[5]

Kat Stevens: Man, that is one expensive drum sound.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Ballroom dancing rhythms and onomatopoeic choruses, along with Shakira’s usually excellent vocals, make me happy. The track is a little samey, could stand more ambition, but we’ll let that slide.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Sale el Sol was Shakira’s first self-consciously “Latin” record, the first one where she didn’t try (many) weirdo art-rock experiments or scavenge for novel pop sounds around the globe. It was, essentially, the first record that sounded like what people who had never heard any Shakira but “Hips Don’t Lie” would imagine a Shakira record to sound like. Don’t get me wrong, “Hips Don’t Lie” is a great record, a [10] of [10s], but its reggaetón is not the merengue of “Addicted to You,” and the fact that Shaki could be understood as “retreating” into a somewhat more classic, somewhat more traditional template for what people expect Latin music to be after the relative dance-rock experimentalism of She Wolf failed to set the world on fire is hugely bothersome. But though she’d never really made an entirely tropical record before, she’s got the moves down cold, and Sale el Sol is a great tropical record, maybe the best of the young decade. Within the record, “Addicted to You” is slight, a merengue workout that keeps to her frequent theme of love pushing beyond healthiness; but in the wild, it’s a great pop song, many times sharper and sexier than the vast majority of what people are choosing to listen to instead. More fool they.
[8]

Alfred Soto: As a man of Cuban descent I’ve been immune to her moxie, but the language switch  makes it easier, to quote one of her admonitions, to love her. The bass and piano help too. 
[6]

Andy Hutchins: Shakira’s tremendous at coming at a melody or a line at the exact right (well, acute, usually) angle, and handles all sorts of rhythms well, but she’s a lot better at that in Spanish than English; the weirdly hollow a-lingual part of “Addicted to You” is not so good, but there’s a lot of fun in the production.
[7]

no blergs » Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 7:01 pm

Future remixes will feature verses from the other three The Voice judges…

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Brad Shoup: The name scans like horrorcore, which is funny cos these guys haven’t scared anyone since G-Unit was a functioning concern. But I’m happy for them! Crooked I in particular sounds relieved to be in a good spot. It was wise to slot him first, as the quality drops off on ’til Royce. “Gettin’ wild in the field with your spouse in Brazil” is the line that sticks for me — it’s strangely generous despite its superspecificity — but his overall flow is so effective they just had to excerpt him for the chorus. Cee-Lo’s chorus is just about as angry as its Corona antecedent, so yay. I’m assuming those are his piano arpeggios in the verses; even if they’re not, the dread choir on the bridge earns him extra credit. Welcome to pop, guys; hip-hop hasn’t had this specific matrix of skills and hooks on the charts since Three 6.
[8]

Iain Forrester: I like their good-natured revelling in success and in the sound of the word “conglomerate,” but the played-out gag of the hook just keeps popping up and spoiling the mood.
[5]

Anthony Easton: I usually like the trick of combining funk singing with rapping, and I usually like when there is more information in a text, and I usually like artifice, and this has all of these things, plus I am usually fond of Cee-lo, and he is good here; but mostly this sounds like a case of diminishing returns.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Goodness, is it 2008 again already? Wait, don’t cross the streams — !
[6]

Alfred Soto: With Cee-Lo squawking a refrain evoking a 1993 house hit and retracting landing gear in the second half so he can soar, the burden shifts to the men getting top billing. Yes, it is their motherfucking lives. Pedestrian too.  
[5]

Andy Hutchins: The gambit of Slaughterhouse, in both its Koch and Shady iterations — I am the exact sort of rap fan who spent enough time on blogs in 2007 to have been incredibly excited about Crooked, Joell, Royce, and Joe forming Slaughterhouse in ’08, and actually wrote a college paper on the group at one point — is that consumers will actually consume dense lyricism without cracking their teeth on the multis when the beats are poppier. If it worked for Royce and Eminem Bad Meets Evil on “Lighters,” which had the benefit of an airy Bruno Mars hook and a Smeezingtons track, it should theoretically work on Slaughterhouse tracks; Budden and Crooked’s perma-fret flows prevent that, though, and the far too busy track overwhelms them. And then there’s Cee-Lo purloining the “Rhythm of the Night” melody. It’s a shame StreetRunner couldn’t come up with something better for these guys: he’s done it before.
[2]

2 blergs » Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 11:00 am

First song to legitimately rep for the ’90s babies out there?

[Video][Website]
[7.12]

Erick Bieritz: This is how a pop band should enter the big room at the club – what “Starships” might have been if it sounded like something one would hear at a party rather than something one would hear in a commercial set in a party. Songwriter Charli XCX, well-received in these pages on two previous occasions, gives Icona Pop a killer chorus conceit that works better with their style than it would have with hers. And they don’t waste it, pumping fists over a pneumatic drill with buzzsaw accompaniment, a power beat that is not dated but does sound ’90s (bitch).
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: All this time I’d thought of Icona Pop as an inferior Swedish indiepop act. They still are, but this is closer to Shampoo or Oh My’s bratting-hard exuberance. That’s a niche that’s yet to be crowded.
[8]

Iain Forrester: I’ve enjoyed but not loved the Icona Pop songs we’d done up to this point, but this one is impossible not to fall for. It has a perfect progression of increasing audaciousness, repeatedly throwing things at you that would be the highlight of any normal song only to reveal that they were just the first escalation of many. There’s the shouting of the vocals in itself, there’s “I crashed my car into the bridge”, “I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs”, the bridge line again with added “I DON’T CARE!”. Then the massive beat and added hook coming in for a second go round the rollercoaster but twice as intense, bass synth sounds zooming like cars heading for their own bridges. After that, the track takes a bigger lurch and the initial peaks looks tiny as we head up into space and newly manic beats. Finally, we have reached the total zenith of joy in brattiness in “I’m a ’90s bitch!” and can rush back down for a victory lap. And breathe.
[9]

Anthony Easton: “You’re from the 70s/But I’m a 90′s bitch” is pure nonsense, but the rest sounds like a coked-up attempt to rework the girl power of the Spice Girls, so I will absorb all nonsense they are giving us.
[5]

Brad Shoup: I don’t think Ry-Ry got his interview, but shall we keep trying? The 70s/90s thing is neat insofar as it’s making explicit all this Hipstagram/grunge-pop revival hoo-hah, but in practice it sits flat on the screen. Thank goodness for the breathless action-tasklist. No time for harmonies, countermelodies, any of that: it’s droog raz! I dunno where this shouty electro will take them, but it’s a great detour.
[8]

Alfred Soto: “I crashed my car into the bridge” — yup. “I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs” — right on. Their brattiness suggests Poly Styrene covering early Missy Elliott. When the chorus thumps towards me the first time it’s bliss to hear euphoria so undiluted. But then it comes around again. And again.
[4]

Ramzi Awn: The electro drum stabs in these verses are endearingly imperfect – you can practically see the hazy jam session at the keyboard hammering them out. Bitcrushed like a Britney song and not quite negligible, “I Love It” does a good job of sounding like something you would put on after Martin Solveig & Dragonette’s “Hello.” A little light on the pop though. I’m not too anxious to play it for my boyfriend.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Bananarama in excelsis.
[8]

6 blergs » Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 6:59 am

Ronettey!

[Video][Website]
[4.57]

Jonathan Bogart: In which the girls who were so much fun shit-talking and ball-busting are far less convincing in seriousface Winehouse drag. They have pipes, sure, but absent the colorful personalities and irreverent nose-thumbing at the very idea of pop, they’re swallowed up by their own solemn production. Even the gorgeously saturated video walks through a rote cheating-man, lady-solidarity script, and remains depressingly dignified throughout.
[5]

Kat Stevens: All credit to the girls who are singing seven shades of crap out of this, but the plodding Shangri-Lite backing is so uninspired that I can’t mark this higher. E.g. those gaps at the end of every phrase where nothing happens — that is where you put, oh I dunno, handclaps or a rave horn or something.
[3]

Anthony Easton: This is so recursive it must be camp, but I am terrified it isn’t.
[2]

Jer Fairall: A beyond-obvious pastiche done with a reasonable amount of craft and sincerity, but do such conversations really represent the tensions between parents and children anymore? The disconnect leaves the song feeling regressive rather than innocent, like a Mitt Romney vision of a world that no longer exists. When the singer takes the opportunity to bust out with a fierce spoken word bit at the very end, I take the would-be homage as an encouraging last ditch act of transgression.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Even after listening to this a bunch, I can’t sort if they’re sending up the girl-group ballad, trying to cut the usual I-choose-the-bad-boy defiance with a little terror, or just mailing in a jumble for the sensitive second single. There’s a bit of their snap in the ad-libs, but I’ve talked myself into oblivion and out of a higher score.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: I hesitate to say this, as it resembles the commentary that’s put Stooshe half in a filthy pigeonhole, but though their schtick works when it’s dirty girl-group music, it doesn’t work when it’s merely edgy. For all their quailing, cooing emotion, Stooshe’s only imitating music whose heart was already thoroughly dark. The only monster that’s new is the ghost of Mark Ronson.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Why would the Pipettes invite Adele to join them?
[3]

no blergs » Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 3:00 pm

Wainwrighty!

[Video][Website]
[5.38]

Jer Fairall: Put Your Back N 2 It felt like a bit too much gay angst to me after the singularly searing narratives of Learning, but its most discouraging development remains Mike Hadreas’ strides towards learning how to write proper songs, transforming what was once something alien and shakily constructed into something conventional and even maudlin. “Dark Parts” represents both the best and worst of his impulses, opening with a typically portentous and cryptic Hadreas lyric (“The hands of God are bigger than Grandpa’s eyes / but still he broke the elastic on your waist”) before making an immediate turn for the general and the sentimental. The unnerving fragility in both his voice and piano playing carries it all further than it might have gone in other hands, but I’m still left mourning a time when the parts Hadreas took us to would have truly been dark.
[6]

Alfred Soto: As I pointed out a couple months ago, I’m impressed by the deepening of this man’s craft yet repulsed by its being put to such disgusting use. He needs, all the time, and the suffocating production not just complements but insulates him from other people.
[4]

Brad Shoup: The comparisons I want to make are Sufjan, Half-Handed Cloud… all those Asthmatic Kitties that try to put word to nigh-unspeakable deeds. Hadreas’ treatment is a sight less cloying, more like a friend limning the damage and applying a congruent love. Classicist piano waverolls and earthy kickdrum and quavery, expressively-limited high tenor are not normally my bag, and I’m responding more to the text, but it’s a gesture kind enough to merit respect.
[7]

Iain Forrester: “I will take the dark part of your heart into my heart” is a wonderful sentiment. It works as a moment of truth and triumph because it comes at the end of a song that offers so much struggle to get to that point. I’m OK with that.
[7]

Ramzi Awn: The uber-poignant chorus has less impact than one of Thom Yorke’s wails, and overall, Perfume Genius’ “genuine” delivery in “Dark Parts” offers about as much profundity to his insipid lyrics as Dr. Phil offers to his patients.  The darkness of shame can be a part of music, but there is little art to this embarrassment.       
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: Paul Simon collapsed halfway through “The Sound of Silence.” No one could find a hologram in time, so one of the stage techs had to fill in from a mic backstage. He really related to the song, see. He once bawled and scrawled this drivel onto the subway walls.
[3]

Anthony Easton: I genuinely worry that it is an essential and unchecked cultural misogyny that allows me to love profoundly the melancholy decadence of work done by men that sounds like this — especially the scraping that occurs before the piano — and have little or no energy for work that sounds like this coming from Newsom or Apple. I don’t know what that means. The line “I will take  the dark part of your heart into my heart” sung before the woos is just soul-crashingly lovely though.
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: Mike Hadreas makes Seattle music that sounds like Seattle, and he’s hardly the first Puget Sound area artist to reflect the city’s gray skies with instrumentation as soft and warm as wool sweaters and damp as drizzle. Perfume Genius fits neatly into a long lineage that includes the early work of Death Cab for Cutie and the Microphones as well as local lights such as Grand Hallway, or Some By Sea, or Damien Jurado. But while the weather west of the Cascades may seem unremittingly middling, the landscape isn’t. Similarly, the best examples of this sound suggest majesty lies beyond humdrum modesty: that human drama can be found in quiet bedsits. “Dark Parts” handwaves, maybe, at death or fidelity, but then again, it might not even do that. It’s too dreary to be sure. It’s like sitting in traffic on I-5, in March.
[5]

2 blergs » Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 11:00 am

Schaffely! (Not Schlafly.)

[Video][Website]
[6.62]

Brad Shoup: I was keeping a Glitterbeat list for awhile; I’m sure I’ve got it in Google Docs somewhere. Maybe this is more of a Goldfrappbeat, I dunno. Anyway, Haines ticks shit off her bucket list behind some poor church; the firemen show up and everyone does riddles to the sick groove. It’s more louche than something that namechecks Rubber Soul has a right to be.
[7]

Iain Forrester: A glam-dance stomp which reminds me of Muse’s lead-off single formula, done with less flair. I could imagine them playing Double Dutch with a hand grenade too, although they would actually make it sound like a matter of life and death. The annoying noise throughout the song that sits at the midpoint of kettle whistle and dial-up modem is just there to try to distract from how little else is going on, right?
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: I love slinky nihilism! It could be one of my iTunes genres. I love Emily Haines’ voice, too, particularly when slicked with arsenic. It’s like this is deliberate bait.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Like Tanya Donnelly hiring Glyn Johns and rocking out in 4/4 time on King, Emily Haines seizes the song by the lapels and gives it a good shaking. Since I know little to nothing about Metric besides what I’ve heard and forgotten a couple years ago, the swagger on evidence here impresses. It’s as if the title alluded to a situation she recognizes: she’s so much older when she’s writing about a youth she missed.
[7]

Jamieson Cox: Metric have been superstars in their native Canada since 2005′s Live it Out, pulling off the difficult balancing act of releasing platinum records and earning plenty of airtime while still maintaining a sense of indie cachet, courtesy of the band’s Broken Social Scene connections and stylish alternative vibe. “Youth Without Youth” is the next entry in a long line of glammy, vaguely astral singles — their last record, Fantasies, had three or four such tracks — but there isn’t anything here that makes the song pop or stand out from its predecessors. The band is successful and tenured enough to allow me to call this “Metric by numbers.” Of course, I’ll be hearing it from nearby cars and bars all summer anyway.
[5]

Jer Fairall: The best thing Metric ever did was to drop the coy indie-pop act and go full-out rawk on Fantasies, finally delivering the 21st century’s answer to Veruca Salt that we didn’t know we needed until we had it. “Youth Without Youth” represents far more suit-following than progress — stomping and monolithic yet eerie and sinister, with Haines’ vocal buzz-sawing its way through a convoluted lyric that conflates some bizarre strain of violent menace with the band’s loving tradition of pop reverence — but it feels like exactly where they should be. I would have liked a chorus, though.
[7]

Anthony Easton: There is something delightful about Emily Haines’ efforts at making childhood games into full  adult menace — backed up by guitars that grind like thumbscrews into flesh. The instrumental coda at the end makes everything paranoid for its own sake.
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: I had begun to assume that the reason Metric is widely beloved of a certain stripe of music fan is that they were one of the few new-wave revivalists maintaining a baseline of pop competence, just Real Music enough for those who grow faint at the vulgarity of the charts, just melodic enough for those who get pissy about indie’s muffled obscurantism. But hey, swinging shall set you free.
[7]

no blergs » Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 7:01 am

Who’s providing the career boost to whom, we wonder…

[Video][Website]
[6.17]

Kat Stevens: Smashing flute sample combined with the DO YOU SEE of the song actually Slowing Down! It’s got the same lazy momentum of “Concrete Schoolyard,” and I like it a great deal.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The whistle sample and bass are eeriness commensurate with the sounds Master Ace and Doom would hear after getting walloped with a brick, not to mention how addled logic would reassemble his narrative. 
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: After about a decade of diligently listening to every highly praised MF Doom record and collaboration, I am no closer to figuring out what makes him so beloved. Is it really all just anti-chart sentiment?
[5]

Brad Shoup: The bass/flute breakdowns remind me of Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Seasons,” which is an automatic reblog, as the kids say. “Slow Down” is simultaneously disarming and prickly — the scheming groupie is nothing new, even if the aural recreation of the mickey is a sweet touch. 
[6]

Zach Lyon: The flutey bit sounds like vintage Def Jux production (sorry, Doom), which is actually quite nice behind a non-Def Jux rapper. And I’m easily won over by storytelling in hip hop, but the stipulation, I guess, is that the story has to go somewhere. Instead we get a verse of story, a verse of recap, and a verse of reflection, all of which convinces me they just wanted an excuse to overuse the silly Slowing Down Trick. But still, that first verse plus the first flashback interlude (chorus?) is good work.
[6]

Iain Forrester: I love the clever “bang your brains out” gag at the end and the way that he seems to be fighting against the sleepy instrumental passages all the way through, drifting in and out of conciousness. I don’t understand why we hear the same story twice, both as it is happening and in retelling, though. Perhaps a concession too far to drugged logic.
[6]

no blergs » Monday, May 14th, 2012 2:59 pm