The Singles Jukebox

But falling asleep in public? It just doesn’t get any better than that…

[Video][Myspace]
[5.50]

Chuck Eddy: Opening part needs a jump start. Surprises me when it gets louder in the middle. Lasts way too long. Serves no purpose I can fathom. Worse than the stupid novelty the title had me expecting.
[2]

Alfred Soto: I expected homoerotic country, and got consistent post-techno.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: The music itself is all right, a conventional whoosh and stutter, but the title is unforgivable.
[2]

David Raposa: I enjoyed this little techno bauble OK, and am looking forward to its sequels: “Holy Shit Dude You Iced Me,” “Hug It Out Bitch,” and last but most definitely not least, “Balls In Your Mouth While You Sleep (Ha Ha Ha).”
[6]

Martin Skidmore: I have only heard the titular word used in Scrubs. I know nothing of Berg, but this is modern Ibizaish trancey house, with huge chords and a lively rhythm. It’s kind of irresistible, its melody sucking you in and the music pulsing and swooping up and down, building and slowing. I’m not the hugest fan of this kind of big room house, but this is an impressive construction, maybe even magnificent.
[9]

Anthony Easton: Sweet, gentle, tender, and suprisingly romantic –like a theme for a summer place for the post-disco set.
[9]

Michaelangelo Matos: God, is this what passes for an anthem these days? All it needs is a distorted deep male voice telling us about the ineffable power of house music.
[4]

Frank Kogan: Nature scenes, Canadian plains in late fall, migrating birds, waves across the harbor in longshot. Then city bustle, lights flashing in the night, warehouse, narrow hallway, pulsating dance floor. Land of contrasts.
[7]

4 blergs » Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 4:30 am

Playing the piano, that’s tremendous too…

[Video][Website]
[3.11]

Rebecca Toennessen: When did ‘alternative rock’ stop meaning anything at all? This isn’t rock and I don’t know what it’s being an alternative to, but according to the internet, that’s what The Script are. This song is as bland and inoffensive as the charting bands in the early nineties that my brain’s definition of alternative rock wasn’t.
[3]

David Raposa: I guess these lads have already realized their CW teen drama dream (courtesy of a 90210 guest spot), so what’s left except to further refine their fat-free Keane / Maroon 5 blend in preparation for unavoidable ubiquity and total world domination?
[5]

Iain Forrester: A regurgitated “The Scientist” makes the appropriate half-hearted sad faces behind The Script’s singer, who sings things like “We don’t know how we got into this mess/Is it God’s test?” I guess it’s meant to be about the recession or something. Still, compared to the overbearing creepiness of their previous work, everything about this is so deliberately, painstakingly grey that they’re not even that irritating anymore. The “Ooh-ooh-oohs” echoing into the distance are even kind of pretty.
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: This is the most patently phony shit I’ve ever heard. It makes “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” sound like “God Save the Queen” and “Hey, Soul Sister” sound like “Ain’t No Way”. The note is struck right at the top: “I’m drinking Jack all alone in my local bar”. Notwithstanding the fact that anyone who says “my local bar” without naming it is a tourist at life, Danny O’Donoghue sounds at all turns like he’s trying to sell you a new cellular plan while slipping your girlfriend his number. Looking the song up on iTunes to divine the track’s label, the only thing that came up was Episode 007 of the eBusinessMap Podcast. You be the judge.
[0]

Martin Skidmore: The vocal wants to be soulful, but he’s a really weak singer, struggling with the tune and the rhythm at times. I suspect they would like to be a cross between Van Morrison and maybe U2, but they end up sounding more like a less well-produced Coldplay, which is a tragic outcome.
[1]

Jonathan Bogart: When Coldplay’s “Yellow” first came out, I liked it a lot for the suspended-in-air quality of the repetitive chord structure, a breath of fresh air in a radio-rock wasteland of mall-punk and nu-metal. Little did I suspect that it would become the template for all future radio-rock anthems. The Script’s version of Coldplay tries for some post-recession working-class bona fides, but they’re just pounding the same chord again and again like every other “inspirational” band.
[5]

Doug Robertson: It’d be quite lazy and unoriginal to review this by saying “This script needs a re-write”, but…
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I’m still pissed that we get to import one new Irish group now, when the country teems with talent, and we squandered the pick on this: rock the consistency of wilted spinach, with mildly interesting lyrics but no joy. When you’re talking about your cheap-booze-soaked second first time with your girlfriend, shouldn’t you sound happy about it?
[4]

Mallory O’Donnell: Bullshit like this always staggers me, but then I believe that if you are going to bother with writing, performing, recording and releasing a song you should have at least one original idea somewhere in the mix. There are so many lyrical and musical cliches and redundant stylistic touches here that I wonder if this isn’t in fact Christian rock. Turns out to be Irish, which makes about as much sense. My people have long churned out this kind of sentimental corn, but no matter how long and how hard you mash it will never become whiskey. Not that we need any more of that, but at least it could get you drunk.
[2]

7 blergs » Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 12:30 am

Having friends is tremendous…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

W.B. Swygart: Rappers: STOP HANGING OUT WITH PEOPLE WHO SOUND LIKE STING.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: Big Boi is on excellent form, inventive and lively, referential and punchy, flowing with the music or hitting the beats, and the funky music is excellent. I wish I didn’t hate the chorus.
[7]

Al Shipley: It feels a little too easy to hate every time a random nasal indie guy drops a hook on a rap track, but do they all have to suck so goddamn bad?
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Not even Big Boi, apparently, is immune to the schlocky charms of having whiny white dudes sing his chorus (see also: Lupe Fiasco ft. Matthew Santos, Jay-Z ft. Mr. Hudson, B.o.B. ft. Rivers Cuomo). Big Boi being Big Boi, he very nearly pulls it off thanks to his quick wit, charm, and Salaam Remi’s sharp-as-a-tack production. But still: whiny white dudes.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The superbly named Vonnegutt does his best Rob Thomas imitation while Big Boi slings self-empowerment rhymes over a guitar lick that shakes like a Polaroid picture. This is neither album nor single material but it doesn’t linger a second longer than necessary.
[6]

David Raposa: Thought the rinky-dink backing track was something Pharrell scraped up off the floor (and given how long this album was in the works, I wouldn’t be surprised if Salaam Remi’s work on this “Made Ya Look”), and god bless Big Boi for giving local boys Vonnegutt a leg up, but letting these dudes pistol-whip this track with some weak hook work is ATL pride run amok. BB sounds fantastic, of course, but he can only do so much. Tho I just saw the clip of Big Boi performing this on David Letterman, and it sounds 100x better — must be the horns?
[5]

Anthony Easton: This is enjoyable, if (maybe because) it’s a bit prickly.
[5]

Mallory O’Donnell: At this point, Big Boi should be resting on his laurels. And if he were another man, perhaps another man named Andre, he would. Instead, we get this weird little scatter-beat shot in the future funk canon. The Vonnegut vocal gives it a 90’s hip-hop/rock crossover feel that I can’t quite get behind, but the remainder is totally beyond any aesthetic reproach. The Wendy/Walter Carlos fugue that underpins this beat serves as well as anything else to illustrate Big Boi’s admirable perversity–OutKast were never interested in how current anything sounded, just how good. This, whether it translates perfectly as a single or not, sounds really, really good right now.
[8]

Michaelangelo Matos: I like pretty much everything about this except hearing it in isolation — it’s an album track that works on the radio, rather than a single. I realize this is poppycock coming from someone who fetishizes tracks no one else cares about, but that’s how it strikes me.
[7]

2 blergs » Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 8:30 pm

If I’d planned ahead, we could have had an All-Hat Wednesday. Ah well…

[Video][Myspace]
[6.33]

David Raposa: I don’t want to sound like the sort of bandwagoneer that’s going to jump off the love train when “all-knowing ” pop-cult dinks like ESPN’s Bill Simmons claim Mr. Gibbs is “the savior of gangsta rap,” but by the sound of this stiffy, it’s like Gibbs started to believe the hype before the hype even really hit. This is big-balls Scarface (as in Pacino) swagger for a guy that, from the mixtape tracks I heard prior, sounds his best when he’s keeping things real and a little more modest. Or maybe I just was never hearing his shit right.
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: The devotion this guy has inspired is impressive. But as someone who hasn’t and isn’t going to download everything to separate the wheat from the chaff (I loved “County Bounce” a while back, was bored stiff by some hotly tipped .zip comp of freestyles, and haven’t had much of an impression beyond them), I’m glad to hear this. It’s serviceable-plus, which seems about right; the workaday is his theme, right? He sounds hungry, another plus. And if the hook isn’t championship, it lodges in my brain pretty well. Of course I want more. But when someone’s plainly talented, it’s OK to settle.
[7]

Martin Skidmore: This is terrific: Southern hip hop from someone with a rather Tupacish delivery and two very different paces, and he sounds completely right at both speeds. He’s a consistently interesting lyricist too, with strong and intelligent lines and some of the best internal rhyming I’ve heard in a while. The production is moody, strings and beats, just right. I hope he’s going to be big.
[9]

Chuck Eddy: Convincingly downtrodden and depressed opening, no less drab for it. Then he raps fast over slow music, Bone Thugs-style (always a potentially interesting concept on paper, but an ultimately boring one in real life). Doesn’t sound like much else I’ve heard lately, and I have to admit, “We screaming ‘fuck the world’” makes for a halfway inspirational cheer, in its own dumb nihilistic way. And the background orchestrations have some beauty in them. Doesn’t mean I’ll want to hear him rhyme vegetables with testicles again, though.
[6]

Al Shipley: You shouldn’t use a title like that unless the chorus is massive, and the chorus is the exact moment when the song sinks from promising to middling.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Not quite the nihilistic epic the title suggests, it turns out to be more of a smooth-riding chant with uneasy trap percussion. Gibbs shows a real mastery of flow here, with dense verses that don’t quite have the anger I was hoping for, and is let down by a chorus that could be swapped out for any other sentimental upping. Solid enough to demand returning to, and I’ll bellow along happily with “fuck the world,” but it could have been more.
[7]

no blergs » Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 9:30 pm

In case you’re wondering, this isn’t Katy Red of “Melpamene Block Party” New Orleans sissy bounce fame…

[Video][Myspace]
[7.57]

Chuck Eddy: I was confused and thinking this was going to be Katy Red, of “Melpamene Block Party” New Orleans sissy bounce fame. But nope. Just some vague down-the-drain dance chick of no notable distinction. Don’t mind the dubby parts, but it sure doesn’t sound like she’s on much of a “mission” to me.
[4]

David Raposa: Giving herself a shout-out in the song title might be a bit much for a lass that’s just two years removed from being able to legally drink in the clubs she’s now prepped to rule, but the way Katy B just latches onto this beat and casually glides across its grime-y facade, I’ll gladly forgive this prideful indiscretion. And if (as her Wiki page claims) she is working on Ms. Dynamite’s next album, then she can big-up herself until she’s hoarse.
[8]

Cecily Nowell-Smith: Club night as hall of mirrors: Katy B’s crystalline voice trailing bright echoes behind, dark doubles below. She sings about being trapped by music, taken over, fighting to keep yourself lost in the sound, and moulds herself so neatly against Benga’s instrumental it’s like it couldn’t have existed without her. The whole song’s like that shake in the air in front of a speaker, like a heat haze, a moment you can just feel but can’t hold in your hands. Near perfection.
[9]

Anthony Easton: What is the vocal effect that she uses on those double oo sounds? It’s new and exciting, and makes me shake my ass a little bit.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: I like dubstep producer Benga, and this is interestingly jagged. The awkward rhythms perhaps do Katy no favours, meaning her vocal is often rather stilted. Oddly if I think of it as Benga ft. Katy B, I rather like it, but as a Katy B single I am far less keen. I think she’s a talented singer, but she doesn’t often get to make a line flow here, let alone to really open up.
[6]

Alex Macpherson: The mutual suspicion with which the British underground and mainstream regard each other means that landmark pop moments such as this are a lot rarer than they should be, but feel all the more special when they do come along. It’s notable for many reasons — the first release on newly-legit former pirate station Rinse FM, the launch of a female singer’s career from a scene that has traditionally emphasised the auteurship of producers and MCs, the first dubstep single to crash the top 5 in its own right. It’s also important that Katy B has cut her teeth on some of the finest UK funky cuts of recent years, such as DJ NG’s “Tell Me”, Rinse FM boss Geeneus’ “As I”: she can represent the UK underground because she’s been immersed in it. That said, “Katy on a Mission” transcends any particular scene: it slots neatly into a lineage of dance classics whose greatness lies in their startlingly accurate depiction of the clubbing experience, a lifestyle you feel Katy B knows well and loves. She captures that out-of-body detachment you feel moving around a venue; those brief, momentary encounters with other ravers that you’re never sure are hostile or flirtatious; the jouissance of the drop; the odd feeling of security that comes with being perfectly at home in a situation; the dread of the night ending you try to push to the back of your mind. Every second line is an evocative flash of recognition — “elevating higher as my body’s moving lower”, “when we erupt into the room”. Those nights stick with you even a few days later, when you’re ostensibly going about your quotidian life — which is where the excellent B-side “Louder” comes in — and hearing them documented with such precision is the next best thing to actually being there.
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: At first I misheard her as a sort of halfway point between the Lily Allen wing of “quirky” female singer-songwriters and the Sophie Ellis-Bextor wing of “icy” electro divas, and I still like that pop (not pop) reading. But apparently this is UK funky; if so, I guess I like UK funky. Because I definitely like this.
[8]

8 blergs » Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 2:00 pm

He’s not number one anymore…

[Video][Website]
[5.67]

Kat Stevens: Tinchy is scratching his head and trying to remember how drunk he must have been when he gave his girlfriend the spare set of keys; then after a while he realises he doesn’t actually mind having her hanging around a bit more after all. It’s a rather sweet subplot to the main attraction, i.e. the best acid house pastiche I’ve heard this summer. S-Express’s lazy hi-hat sound, hands-in-the-air piano riff, EXTRA SNARE DRUMS and squiggling 303 underneath. I sincerely hope that the rest of Tinchy’s UK R&B chums jump on this particular sonic bandwagon.
[9]

David Raposa: Love the shut-the-fuck-up-and-STROBE backdrop so much that I wish to holy hell Tinchy wasn’t trying to pitch some awkward and frighteningly emo “can’t live without you” game (& inna “Wearing My Rolex” style, no less). Some dude (or lady dude; I’m a hep cat) with some actual swagger should jack this beat & the girl and make this banger really bang.
[6]

Martin Skidmore: Another Fraser T. Smith production, dance-pop with a nice enough female vocal hook and Tinchy rapping on it. He has nothing interesting to say, or any exciting ways to say it, so it’s dependent on the music, and this works well enough. It’s punchy and energetic, with enough going on that Tinchy’s undistinguished part is all but irrelevant.
[6]

Chuck Eddy: Still getting the idea that, the closer grime inches toward American r&b, the duller and more monotonal it sounds. I could be totally missing the direction it’s taking, of course. But this is still pretty one-note, beyond the glitchy parts.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Heretofore I’ve only known Tinchy’s name as a groan the UK contingent makes about modern pop; on this showing he’s another JaySean DeRulyaz with an East London accent. The female vocals make me think of cooler, more mysterious electro from the 90s, but it’s not enough to push past the galloping washes of undifferentiated sound.
[5]

Additional Scores

Michael Waters: [4]

3 blergs » Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 9:00 am

And this seems as good a place to end the week as any…

[Video][Website]
[6.31]

Kat Stevens: Why is the sky blue? Because of the way light reflects on bits of dust in the atmosphere. Why are there bits of dust in the atmosphere? Because there just are. Why? Because! But WHY? Stop tugging on my sleeve or you won’t get any pudding. Whyyyy? Because I hate you. Why? Because you keep saying ‘why’. Oh.
[3]

Al Shipley: If you told me this was from Justin Bieber’s ‘difficult’ second album, I’d believe you.
[5]

Iain Forrester: This is one of the most unexpectedly amazing things I’ve ever heard on mainstream radio. Never mind your puny lyrical robot metaphors (whose meta use here is cutely incidental to the appeal), Sky is actually totally subsumed into the machine music, used just as one more icily beautiful sound effect to be deployed precisely for maximum pleasure. There’s something weirdly, hugely comforting as well as emotional about the intricate, disconnected reverie that results. I can’t get enough of the song and I’m used to having to go to J-Pop for anything like it!
[9]

Alex Macpherson: In the light of pop’s multi-directional spiral down into a vortex of suck over the past few years, aided enthusiastically by the likes of Katy Perry, La Roux and Ke$ha, one feels almost pathetically grateful to be greeted by a new major label female pop starlet who isn’t immediately actively hateful. Sadly, that’s about the extent of Sky Ferreira’s impact here: not necessarily a final judgment, given that “One” is a total non-song entirely lacking in anything for even the most gifted performer to latch on to, but getting so comprehensively outshone by those tinkling pizzicato synths isn’t promising.
[4]

Mallory O’Donnell: If this had been released in 1985, it would have been ahead of its time. But only by a year. Its lack of identity makes it pliable as anything, though, and it gets floppier still the more you play with it. For once, that’s a good thing. And besides, anything more rugged than this in her synth-pop would probably turn Sky into a fly on a windscreen.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Less individuated than I’d hoped; it’s a solid song, constructed well and with reasonable emotions, but she’s too bland to give me a reason to care. Further listens may reveal a personality, in which case tack on a couple of points.
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: “I’m not a robot but I feel like one”, through Auto-tune and with the one repeating-pulsating a predetermined number of times, should push my enough-fucking-robots-already button pretty hard, but this doesn’t. I think it’s because it opts for soft focus rather than robot bash. (Everyone in pop wants to be Daft Punk; unfortunately, it’s the Daft Punk of Human After All.) This is defined but it’s also gauzy, like a less affected “Together in Electric Dreams”.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Finally a robot as a metaphor of failure and decay, with that skipped CD repeating that is just on the edge of being technolust for failed pasts.
[8]

Hillary Brown: Sure, it’s a bit empty, but that’s the point, isn’t it? There’s an intelligent melancholy at work in the melody here, shades of the Smiths, and that adds some depth.
[6]

Martin Skidmore: This is co-written with the excellent Marit Bergman. It’s endearingly clumsy electropop, her vocal bright and bouncy but inelegant and sort of distant, the music clumping along perkily, the whole thing sounding kind of amateurish, which is odd from such experienced producers.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: This has so many elements I love: vocals pureed to the consistency of milk (certainly a better treatment than the Procrustean autotune licks that are more standard), quacky synthesized guys echoing the chorus, frippery in the background and Marit Bergman, whose involvement I never would have guessed until I looked it up and everything made sense. I’m sure, too, that a lot of you will appreciate her saying she’s not a robot.
[7]

David Raposa: No doubt some of the girl-as-robot / Robyn haters in the land of TSJ will rip this track a new one, especially since the track’s skint narrative reads like Robyn For Dummies. But even the torch and pitchfork crowd should give Bloodshy & Avant due props — they might be cribbing their moves from their Swedish brethren (and sistren), but no one can say that they don’t have those moves down pat. Not only do B&A infect Sky Ferreira’s pleasantly airy voice with a convincing case of ones and zeroes, but they also construct a backing track robust enough to switch from the insistent neon throb of the verses to a brief-yet-glorious ethereal bridge that’s the stuff of the most lurid electric dreams.
[8]

Alfred Soto: As semaphore from a digitized adolescent world, this is unexpectedly gorgeous. If goth boys show allegiance to the likes of Interpol and Sleigh Bells, who want to sound like insufficiently petulant machines, let’s hear it for Sky, who convincingly sounds like one. How normal — you hate your body and the responses you think it inspires in others, so why not wish you could shed corporeal forms by becoming a Twitter signal or text transmission? Take that, Robyn.
[7]

2 blergs » Friday, August 27th, 2010 5:00 pm

SARRRUHSUN!!!…

[Video][Website]
[4.75]

David Raposa: Before I get to agushin’, there’s plenty about this song that bugs the shit out me; for instance, while I’m all for locker room camaraderie, that “back against the wall” stuff is taking things a bit too far. And those moments when I can envision a shot of Chesney righteously strumming his guitar against a sunset background transitioning to slo-mo scrimmage footage are just too much. Still, there’s something charming about this tune’s unapologetic corniness that makes me wish I was on those sidelines, smacking some kid upside his helmet as he ran out to the huddle with the next play. I’ll put the over/under for TSJ Friday Night Lights shout-outs at 4 (not counting mine), but this quaint slice of the simple sports life reminds me more of Hoosiers.
[6]

Chuck Eddy: Friday Night Lights country, revolving around high school football (a subgenre I’d have no problem at all hearing more of), like Brooks & Dunn’s “Indian Summer” and Lee Brice’s “Sumter County Friday Night”. Also, a better would-be Don Henley update than Jessie James’s “Boys In The Summer.” It’s also six and a half minutes long — unheard of for a country single. And, this being Chesney, bittersweet, of course. Effectively so.
[7]

Frank Kogan: Chesney is lightly pleasant, as always, but the brown autumnal arrangement saturates this track so thoroughly it’s as inert as a photograph – feels like an old scrapbook, not like football.
[4]

Alex Ostroff: The texture is nice and his voice is warm, but he fails to give us anything to connect with. There’s a frustrating lack of specific moments, people or memories that would elevate “The Boys of Fall” from general nostalgia to something personal and real.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: Oddly its lyric is often defiant and heroic, but the mood is wistful and sombre: I kept expecting something in the words to suggest the thrill of playing for the school is illusory or transient or the narrator’s life has fallen into some Angstromesque search for that former greatness, but it’s not there. Still, this disconnect is at least interesting, which Kenny often isn’t.
[5]

Michaelangelo Matos: Why people think country music is full of simple-minded nostalgia.
[3]

Anthony Easton: Being focused on tomorrow, and the corrective of a toxic nostalgia which reduces the cult of American homosociality into a autoerotic obsession of what would never be is one of Chesney’s major themes,and this obviously does not change in this track, though it’s more about sports than rock and roll. That said, there is something so tender and sweet about his desire to be 17 again that I find myself caught up. I wanna be a boy like that, and I wanna be a man who remembers what it means to be a boy like that. Which means there is an effectiveness to this.
[5]

Alfred Soto: American men are more given to autumnal kitsch than the sweethearts who supposedly pine for the boys of fall, so I don’t expect Chesney’s voice to slice through this corn like Miranda Lambert or Lee Ann Womack’s; in fact, Chesney celebrates being famous in the kind of small town that Lambert found so repellent. So allow this hunky Anglo-Saxon lout his pretty acoustic mythos — one more time, and no worse than the dozen others he’s proffered.
[4]

3 blergs » Friday, August 27th, 2010 1:00 pm

See, we were meant to have an all-country Wednesday, but then our editor happened…

[Video][Website]
[4.44]

Martin Skidmore: I loved Big & Rich, so I was looking forward to this, but there’s something wrong. Maybe it’s too straightforward country rocking, maybe it’s missing their extraordinary genrefucking flair, maybe it’s lacking any detectable irony or humour, maybe it’s just that I miss the great vocal combination. It’s reasonably catchy and energetic, but it feels routine and flat.
[5]

Hillary Brown: Oh, lord. John Rich checks off the boxes on the “country-music” form but adds no self-awareness to compensate for the perfunctory manner of the exercise. With a strong vocal performance, it’s possible the song could have overcome the “country music that makes hipsters’ ears bleed” lyrics, but, sadly, that’s not to be found.
[3]

Anthony Easton: I love how badly behaved John Rich is — genuinely in the sense of drunken fist fights and too much cocaine badly behaved — and I keep hoping that the stories that get told with a tut-tut in blogs like 9513 and Nashville Gab will translate to a kind of musical break through. I have partied with cowboys and I don’t doubt that Mr Rich is capable of the debauchery they are capable of, but why can’t I hear the whiskey and pig grease dripping all over this lame ass attempt at pleasure?
[6]

Alfred Soto: Since I haven’t thought about Big & Rich since 2006, I expected more from John than a reclamation of the genre for the likes of frat guys much younger than him, especially when Luke Bryan’s doing more for whiskey-and-frisky. “Highfalutin’ clubs” don’t need mustachioed assholes like John showing patrons how to have a hellraisin’ time. Formally, though, this is interesting: the stop-start dynamics, John’s non-asshole vocal, and taut soloing are the good time they promise. In an age when Brad Paisley’s made this sort of thing unnecessary, let’s hear it for rowdiness.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: Rich’s country-and-proud-of-it persona always verged on cartoonish, and it seems he’s finally embraced it. “Country Done Come to Town” is all signifiers and precious little substance — twang, Hank, and Howdy’s. His days as a horse of a different colour are behind him; still, he can’t help but write songs that swing, even when he’s playing it safe.
[6]

Chuck Eddy: Has a ZZ Top riff. Has some semblance of a ZZ Top groove. Doesn’t have much else. Maybe Big Kenny will hook up with Jerrod Niemann.
[6]

Frank Kogan: Country comes to town with a funky metal riff, but the track plods anyway, and Rich isn’t just short the harmonies that he and Big Kenny once created, he’s missing Kenny’s expansive heart, too. Big & Rich were a traveling carnival and interplanetary roadshow, stuffing everything they could into the parade. Now John’s just another chip-on-his-shoulder country boy who’s gonna show the city slickers a thing or two, and learn nothing in return.
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: This is about as soft-pedaled as it gets. Just cliché upon cliché, the occasional semi-clever line only making the verve his old duo had on their first album seem further away.
[3]

David Raposa: When Rich tries to put some actual boot scoot into this boot scuff of a song with an all-together-now “hell yeah,” all I done got to offer in return is a resounding “heck no.” And when Rich namedrops Hank, which is a roundabout and half-ass way to invoke the sort of shit-kicking sass this song sorely lacks, all I can think about is Hank Jr. shilling for the NFL as if he wishes he were rolling over in his grave. PS — I really hope that any folks glomming onto some sorta class-centric “fuck Gucci & that namebrand bullshit” message here (which Rich is and isn’t hinting at) actually try and shop for some Lucchese boots. (Caveat emptor: you’re gonna need that 5% discount.)
[2]

no blergs » Friday, August 27th, 2010 9:00 am

Fair to say we have some issues with these boys…

[Video][Website]
[3.75]

Hillary Brown: More than a decade on, they haven’t gotten any less boring.
[4]

David Raposa: “Estuary / won’t you take me” — they still got it! I’m resigned to the fact that these dudes (RIP Carlos D) are perfectly happy to sit in their little mid-tempo post-punk niche, forever adjusting that one picture frame that may or may not be crooked. This is one of their better takes on reinventing that particular go-nowhere wheel (as my score suggests), but I’m the sort of business-casual faux-Goth that actually gives their 3rd album an on-purpose listen from time to time, so adjust your expectations accordingly.
[7]

Alfred Soto: For their fourth album Notorious, Duran Duran hired Nile Rodgers and the Borneo Horns to enliven half-written tracks. The lead single boasted the line “Don’t monkey with my business.” For their fourth album Interpol didn’t call Nile Rodgers, and there isn’t a horn in sight. The lead single boasts the lines, “Please police me/I want you to PO-lice me but keep it clean.” If slower and longer signifies maturity, I wonder what they’ll call their work when one or more of them joins Alcoholics Anonymous.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: If you took the bassline from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” and gave it to a band in thrall to Joy Division, this is roughly what you would get. I liked Joy Division, but I don’t think they’re a good template at all, and Interpol have none of their sinister power, however much they ramp up the volume as this goes on.
[2]

Michael Waters: It starts out resembling someone doing David Bowie on Stars in Their Eyes, until it gets dragged through a car wash into the 21st Century by sterile drums and guitars so inoffensive and nondescript I almost forgot to write about how inoffensive and nondescript they are.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Joy Division comparisons have long since outlived their usefulness. The Church comparisons, on the other hand…
[5]

Mallory O’Donnell: Interpol will always know how to manage an atmosphere well enough that they can afford to do silly things. Like try their hardest at an Ozzy-style whiskey & weed vocal intro. Like stress a corny reference to their name (“police me / I want you to po-lice me / but keep it clean”) so obviously it almost becomes cute. Like make a tactically adequate R.E.M. song that pops out of the middle (~3:25) of a what is outwardly nothing more than a really long bridge. Like serve as a handy reminder that The Moody Blues will always be more important and influential than Pink Floyd.
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: People are so fucking dumb.
[1]

3 blergs » Thursday, August 26th, 2010 9:30 pm