The Singles Jukebox

“Speyside is not a place; speyside is a person that you get stuck with; speyside is a pain that you cannot erase.” – /r/boniver

[Video]
[4.77]

Tim de Reuse: For Emma, forever and ever, ad infinitum. A tedious spiral of Emma, on and on, rhyming “good” with “could” with “stood”, rhyming “me” with “sor-Ry,” wallowing in unspecific folksy grayness, cashing in on his own bubble fifteen years too late. For Emma, an ourobouros.
[2]

Taylor Alatorre: Leaning into it, playing to type, giving the people what they want — there’s something about hitting age 40 that brings out public displays of commitment to an inescapable bit. As with Vampire Weekend’s latest offering, “S P E Y S I D E” is built on the idea that what has been deconstructed can be reconstructed again, using the master’s postmodernism to bring Ithaka back to its pre-violated state, or something like it. The title and artwork are fake-outs, as is the producer credit for Jim-E Stack, whose role is to engineer the kind of quarantined sparseness that’s traditionally cast as the arch-enemy of artifice. It never was, but it’s still fun to pretend, and Vernon’s lyrics retain their power even when interpreted as a self-conscious bid for authenticity. If you’ve ever sent a decade-late apology letter to someone, you know that honesty is a fool’s game there, that every attempt to avoid trickery will lead to it popping up in some other sentence. “I hope you look” is not a good enough reason on its own to hit “send,” but if you can turn a good phrase and do a good falsetto, it sometimes can be.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Satisfied with their 2023 Pitchfork Music Festival appearance after years of mockery, I sat down, linen napkin folded on my lap, awaiting tastier goodies. “Tasty” is right, or, rather, “tasteful”: acoustic guitar and strings! This isn’t for me, but I’ll note that “What is wrong with me/I’m so sorry” shows a humility absent from his passive-aggressive peers.
[6]

Andrew Karpan: Described by Mr. Iver as “an apology to a couple of people he loved and hurt,” the idea conceptually brings to mind the indy rock generation’s version of Em’s Recovery. 
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: smh I can’t believe another white electronic pop artist is pivoting to mid acoustic folk music in his late career. what happened to integrity? this Justin Vernon guy is such a culture vulture. 
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Bon Iver’s plaintive, taut guitar playing seems at first to provide wrenching emotional bloodletting, but the lyrics quietly cloak it behind metaphor: “as I fill my book, what a waste of wood,” “I can’t rest on no dynasty, yeah, what is wrong with me?”. The gentle string arrangements from Rob Moose weep where his words are not allowed to. The 4/4 line verses feel more and more apologetic as they go on, but the apology is still cloaked, hidden despite the light, frail feeling of the music. The deeper you dig into the words, the more they scarper, the more they obfuscate, until you throw up your hands. It is a message for someone, but that might only be you if you were offered a parley at a quay with someone who just kept retreating from you the closer they got.
[6]

Jel Bugle: I have to admit that I got chills when the guy started singing — not good chills, to be fair. I just can’t get into this country music that isn’t country music, I’d rather listen to Brad Paisley or Zac Brown, someone who could sing this kind of thing with a bit of pep, a bit of sparkle. The wail of modernity is just not for me, the new shoegaze, staring inconsolably at your shoes and airing your most miserable of thoughts.
[2]

Mark Sinker: Bon feeling sorry for himself, me not feeling even a bit sorry for him. Yes I do interpret “Speyside Quay” to mean he was on a whiskey-fuelled bender and did something unacceptable. The words are bad, and so is the treatment on his voice.
[2]

Aaron Bergstrom: If Justin Vernon has a little dial that goes from “Haunting” to “Haunted,” this may be the furthest into the red that he’s ever pushed it.
[6]

Dave Moore: Docking a point for the annoying stylized spaces between each letter. Not as bad as “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” in title formatting or sound — inoffensive somber busker shit — but not much to recommend it, either. 
[4]

Ian Mathers: Hi, it’s me! I’m the guy who didn’t pay much attention to Bon Iver until something made me check out 22, A Million, and it kind of blew me away. I’m a real person, and I exist! Then “Hey, Ma” had none of that record’s weird power, and I stopped paying attention again. Is this what he sounds like these days? It’s pretty, and the lyrics are decently moving, but it’s kind of boring.
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Instrumentally direct like For Emma, Forever Ago, lyrically direct in a way Justin Vernon almost never is. Perhaps not distinctively Bon Iver, but still well-crafted.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: 2:00. That’s when you realize that this surprisingly stately grown-folks folk was Bon Iver all along.
[5]

no blergs » Tuesday, October 8th, 2024 12:45 am

So confusing sometimes to be girling…

[Video]
[6.15]

Mark Sinker: You wonder sometimes when time is going to get called on K-pop’s vast factory of choreographed prettiness: when the sugar-spun cornices, colonnades, spandrels and turrets on the Hansel-and-Gretel house finally fall away to reveal the same-old-same-old beneath, the ancient shrivelled industry rooted as ever in who gets to devour whom. With an anagram as a cryptic band-name and hyper-choreographed blankness as a attitude branding (of course they dimple up and giggle sometimes, but you could never call it unscripted), Le SSerafim often make fun gestures at refusal — “I wish for what’s forbidden!” in a 2023 song called “Eve, Psyche and the Bluebeard’s Wife.” But as Solomon taught us, the rivers all flow into the sea, yet the sea can always swallow more. You want to refuse too! You want to follow the logic: to imagine the cyborg psychosis unleashed by the machine, the robo-gogo pleasure dancers advancing in your direction, Westworld-android style, insanely beautiful cyberpunk sex-cuties Terminator-trained and complete with in-brain targeting overlay, with crosshairs and scheming calibration figures up the side, until no one even grasps any longer who ordered what. “All the girls are girling girling all the girly girls” (first of all in a Southern accent, as “gals”, and afterwards in posh English diction). You want to read clues into the teen-goth Kraftwerk-style threat that’s kept out of the translated lines: “renew the neuron system / I broke out of the prison in my head.” Revolution of the Relentless Mannequins, as they break the glass and swarm through the city. And yes, I love this amping up of the menace; I love the promise that all can be overturned and changed in a moment; in our programming is your doom — to me this is a heartening fiction. So good at what they do! What if they did… something else? Who gets to devour whom? Who gets to dethrone whom? But it’s just pop, and its tremors are painted on air.
[10]

Kayla Beardslee: [A whiteboard with “Le Sserafim voguing????” written on it and nothing else.]
[4]

Jessica Doyle: With Blackpink seemingly done as a group, it makes sense to try and take the trendy-dancing-model-dols slot while it’s open. I just wish HYBE hadn’t thrown out their previous approach to song selection when they made the pivot. Songs like “Antifragile” and “Eve, Psyche, and the Bluebeard’s Wife” had verve and fun to go with the required pose-striking; “Crazy” consists solely of poses. (And this isn’t about their vocal performances; a good deal of the charm of “Antifragile” lay in Eunchae’s not having to sing “??? ?? like a lion ? ??? ? ??? desire ?“.) We don’t even get “Where the heck is Saki? / She’s waiting down in the lobby.”
[4]

Andrew Karpan: A sort of loose fabric of a song, more a dreamscape of crossfaded bounce symbology than a statement about anything in particular (non-derogatory)    
[8]

Alfred Soto: The synths wander in from early ’10s grime, the beats are in place, the vocals are adequate, but it doesn’t stick.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A [10] in terms of grist for the fancam mill (“girls are girling” alone!) but unremarkable in all other regards — tips my scales for a shockingly well-executed reference to Galileo’s trial.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: The girls are girling, the funk is funking, the pace is racing. Learned from “Meet Me at the Loveparade” the power of slightly sinister synth riffs and from Lil Jon the power of dropping in a “WHAT?”.
[8]

Dave Moore: Love the house music 5th synths against the dah-dah-dah hook, but the whole thing is a bit stagnant. They should stick to what they do best — arty alt rock.  
[5]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: The sublime and the ridiculous would coexist here peacefully, were it not for a meme being beaten to death to punctuate every eight count or thereabouts. Still, it makes more sense than most of the 4th/5th(?) generation non-sequitur clamorousness, though that is faint praise indeed. 
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: That the song’s signature line has the reedy, metallic tone of a computer status update is appropriate, given the dependable K-pop release schedule of a new project every six months. The girls are all girling now, and they require additional supply depots. It hardly matters that the “craziest” deviation from the house-pop formula is found in the rising-pitch imitation of a mechanical overload, a fearlessly campy sci-fi take on the buildup/drop sequence. Such literalizations are welcome in a single with perhaps the most overused title in pop music; if you’re gonna grab the low-hanging fruit, you might as well squeeze it for all it’s worth.
[7]

Jel Bugle: The beats are good, a robotic voice informs us that “all the girls are girling,” and this is a good thing! But Le Sserafim are not good as my fave K-pop Trinity – (G)I-DLE; Itzy and Asepa – and this song lacks a certain sense of dynamism and excitement. It is cold and robotic and not that crazy.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I mean, it’s not a great sign when the best parts of the song are the ones where the vocals feel like they’re samples dropped into an EDM track and the verses kind of drag. But still, fun!
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Having a nuanced take or going “da.” Going “da.”
[5]

1 blerg » Monday, October 7th, 2024 11:19 pm

Now rank “Dancing in the Sheets”!

[Video]
[5.23]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Dancing in the Dark > Dancing in the Street > Dancing in the Flames > Dancing in the Moonlight.
[4]

Alfred Soto: An OK example of Abel Tesfaye’s rattling electro-pop, though I get no hint from the singing and the arrangement that he has any acquaintance with flames except what he sees at the end of a lit joint.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Juddery synthpop that’s peppy and soulless and fine. The challenge with music that evokes actual danger — e.g., the Weeknd’s offerings until “Can’t Feel My Face” — is that it requires constant, believable escalation to work; Abel fumbled those stakes sometime around Kiss Land. Music that evokes fake simulacra of danger, though, can stay the same forever and be just fine.
[6]

Dave Moore: You know, the Weeknd turned into Spotify playlist wallpaper so gradually I didn’t even notice.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: You have to listen a second time to recognize that Abel has just given us a bimbofied reskin of “Understanding in a Car Crash,” and you have to listen a third time to recognize that no, of course he hasn’t; whatever highfalutin’ concept this ends up buttressing on the album, the shattered glass imagery is really only there to cover his candy apple melodies in the thinnest latex coating of Old Weeknd edge. “Love,” “beautiful,” “radio,” “switching lanes”: those are the words that stand out amid the streaks of passing tail lights and the rush of oncoming wind. They are footholds of pop familiarity, mental permission slips for the listener to kick back and let the jet-propulsion synths carry them to the next highway mile marker. Any loss of control is only nominal — this is cruise control working as the good Ralph Nader intended. The Weeknd puts in studio hours to dutifully turn out yet another “Blinding Lights” variation, and we forgive him because the almighty driving song (much like the teenage tragedy song) is not a thing to be reasoned with, only turned off or fully locked into. Which side of the windshield are you on?
[7]

Ian Mathers: He should have pivoted (pivoted back to?) full-on synthpop sooner, honestly — this feels like his best chorus since, what, “Blinding Lights”? So many of the last [x] number of Weeknd songs and appearances have felt tedious or fraught in various ways; it’s a surprising relief to hear one where I mainly just want to hum along.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: The last line of this chorus is a meme in a Discord server I’m in (god I feel so “how do you do fellow kids” saying that, I’m 27!), but even after hearing this multiple times, when someone says “it’s unremarkableeee” I still can’t piece together what they’re referencing. As someone who was teased for liking Coldplay in high school while other kids were getting into the Weeknd, it’s incredibly funny that the two have converged: with its oohs and kitschy synths “Flames” could have fit on Moon Music. 
[3]

Will Adams: Close enough: welcome back CHVRCHES.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The Weeknd is a lithe, agile vocalist who comfortably floats atop the tenor range, but the song he gave producers Max Martin and Oscar Holter needs to soar into the heady, vacant stare of the hypnotized, then fly into the focused, intense glare of the excited. They needed to cast a glowing spotlight upon his voice that doesn’t expose its lack of depth or power, but also doesn’t isolate it in a way that makes it clear the music accompanying is meant to be incidental. So they settled for a simple kick/snare/kick pattern and a bland bassline that lurks beneath the heavy cloud of synthesizers, which seize the bridge to make their play for attention. They do their job. Unfortunately, the lyrics The Weeknd wrote are so vapid that their careful work is completely wasted — at least, if you are paying real attention. If you in fact heard this while crashing, my condolences: you will survive, thus hearing “Out of Time” instead when you get driven home.
[3]

Mark Sinker: There’s a rhythm shape that seems to be all over the place at the moment: two measures, one of two long syllables, the second of four short syllables. Poetry nerds would calls this a “spondee” followed by a “tetrabrach,” and I’m getting technical only because I had to hunt around for “tetrabrach,” which makes me think it’s rare (or anyway used to be). This is what gives the chorus its push-push-push feel: I – CAN’T – WAIT (to-see-your) FACE – CRASH – WHEN (we’re-switching), etc. I associate it with Taylor Swift — which may not be fair, I don’t suppose she invented it. Even more unfair, maybe, is me associating it with childishly sulky foot-stamping, but that’s what it sounds like to me. It adds a curious and not very likeable flavour to the perky beat of this already quite anxious song.  
[5]

Andrew Karpan: I’ve long stopped liking using iPhones, or even many of Apple’s products generally, but I remain attracted to the faint nostalgia for a time when that felt like the future. The same can be said of the Weeknd, whose latest piece of heartpounding softpop kitsch doubles as an advertisement for the iPhone 16 Pro. But that’s okay, I’ll still keep drinking that garbage.
[7]

Jel Bugle: Coming on like a latter-day Cher, like a popstar from the algorithm. A very easy-listening modern pop tune, and I did enjoy it. We still need things that are safe and sound like now, the past and forever.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Dazzling — the legendary showman and pop icon unveils himself, shedding layers of artifice and mystique. He is free now, untethered to the personas of the past. He is revealed anew, fresh in the light of dawn, as his final form: the most boring man alive. 
[3]

no blergs » Monday, October 7th, 2024 10:43 pm

That’s a wrap on September! But don’t fear, the wait until we return in October will be short (and… sweet? This sounded better in my head)…

[Video]
[7.47]Julian Axelrod: Sabrina Carpenter must have been a pro wrestler in another life. How else did she learn how to pivot personas this quickly and effectively? After spending years clawing her way out of the Disney trenches, she’s perfected a puerile pop princess pose at the unholy intersection of Madonna, Mae West and Michael Myers. Upon first listen, “Taste” checks all the newly minted boxes of a Sabrina song: sun-baked synths, big vocals in a small body, and production choices commenting on lyrics commenting on her public persona. Upon second, fifth and tenth listen, you pick up on the inside jokes you missed the first time: the height jokes, the “la la las,” the tone that lands somewhere between sapphic and homicidal. Upon hundredth listen, you remember the ultimate Sabrina Carpenter signifier: Underestimate her at your own risk.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: Carpenter releases another Haim-esque conglomeration of pop-rock hits past: Sheryl Crow (sunny clapalongs), Gwen Stefani (safe shiny tude and various vocal intonations, like on “exact”), and frenemy Olivia Rodrigo (subject matter and vibe). On her album, she has better.
[6]

Alfred Soto: I can hear the money: the guitars on “Taste” twang with more color than on any pop single since Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U.” This time her single entendres eschew the affectedly sultry for the self-aware gadfly.
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A retconned version of “Deja Vu” — wow, that feels like a lifetime ago? — where instead of feeling pain in the boy’s propensity for repetition, you’re content with rubbing in the other girl’s face how you got there first. It pulls off a funny trick: I can marvel at the music video and metanarrative in group chats, and have the clever lyrical conceit stuck in my head, without remembering what it sounds like at all, save for the heavenly “la-la-la-la-la-la”s. It’s actually really difficult to make songs as clever as “Taste” sound so dumb and simple.
[8]

Ian Mathers: It’s not a problem that the video is more fun than the song, but it does increasingly feel like “Espresso” was a fluke.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Toddstradamus called it. For once, he was right, and thank God he was. Also, Julian Bunetta with another hit. Is he a good luck charm?
[8]

Mark Sinker: A strong way to understand pop music in the UK right now is via the medium of sonorous Victorian poetry about ancient classical Rome, in which the forces arrayed against all that is noble can be held off by a courageous few at the head of just one slender bridge: “In yon strait path a thousand / may well be stopped by three!”  In this reading Noel (or Liam) is “Lars Porsena of Clusium” and “False Sextus” is Liam (or Noel, look it doesn’t matter, no one cares); the bridge is of course the Top of the Charts, and the “dauntless three” are Sabina’s singles since “Espresso” in April, right now clustered there, battling away. “The Great House of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more!” Let’s hope it shall, though! Or must the Republic of Pop fall?
[9]

TA Inskeep: Sharp songwriting — that lyric in the chorus is so smart, so very Heathers — paired with just the right touch on Carpenter’s vocals. I’d normally say “+2 for the superb Death Becomes Her tribute video,” but the song is so good it doesn’t need it.
[8]

Will Adams: On Short ‘n Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter comes up with a hundred ways to call her lover a fuckin’ dumbass, but on “Taste”, she takes aim at her ex’s rebound. This time, the daggers are dipped in honey; she tells the new girl that she’ll just have to taste her on his lips, but the subtext is that Sabrina kinda hopes she enjoys it. It’s wonderfully bratty (NB: not brat, but bratty), and the gleaming, if slightly generic, pop-rock arrangement helps make it her punchiest single to date.
[7]

Jackie Powell: “Taste” has what’s best about “Please Please Please” and “Espresso” wrapped up in one 2:37 minute song. The melody and rhythm are addictive and combine disco (thanks, Ian Kirkpatrick!), a bit of country twang and “slacker rock,” which I guess is the title given to any song that sounds chill, sunny and easy-breezy. But in classic Sabrina Carpenter fashion, what sounds relaxed and light really isn’t, and the combination of seemingly frivolous surface and deeper lyrical meaning that she has mastered is on full display. Case in point are the laughs that she recorded right after she sings the final line in the bridge, “I’ve been known to share.” With the help of Julia Michaels — another songwriter known for more complex lyrics — Carpenter takes the narrative that Olivia Rodrigo played with on “Obsessed” and alters the conversation, talking directly to the other woman rather than about her. Sure, there’s been a lot of speculation about truly how fruity Carpenter is — the fact that she had women on the walls of her room growing up is a whole other story — but I leave each listen of “Taste” thinking about the mystery behind her intent. Why does she want the other woman to know how truly great she is? Is it platonic? Is it more? That confusion is what makes “Taste” as relatable as it is realistic.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: I wasn’t sure before, but OK: I’m on board with the Sabrina Carpenter character. She’s a fantastically campy high femme train wreck: neurotic but assertive; condescending but kinda dumb herself; uptight, but doing her best to be flirty. As an introduction to an album and a persona, “I leave quite an impression/five feet to be exact” is an all-timer, up there with “Teenage angst has paid off well/now I’m bored and old” or “Been through the ringer a couple times/I came out callous and cruel.” On “Taste,” Carpenter is sunny and mean, like a great soap opera villain, and she accentuates her ’70s adult-contempo arrangement with some great melodramatic touches: the Greek chorus appending “la-la-la-la-la” to the description of cunnilingus, say, or the sudden appearance of a girl gang to turn “know I was already there” into a shouted accusation. (It tries for the gleeful kitsch of Chappell Roan, but it’s really bratty in an Olivia Rodrigo sense, which is delightfully unbecoming for a 25-year-old.) The theme of possession so intense it takes sensory form, as Britney Spears demonstrated on “Perfume” can be serious emotional territory, but Carpenter is happy to be frivolous with it. It’s fun to be bad, and pop’s Julie Cooper is ready to do her worst.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Diminishing returns for her schtick continues — this is a sturdier song than “Please Please Please” but Carpenter’s charisma as a writer and interpreter has waned  (the la-la-las behind “makes painting with his tongue” are dire.) She’s a star — there’s nothing here that doesn’t move through her — but heliocentrism does not guarantee success; hacky short jokes and come ons cannot be sustained as a model for pop excellence.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: Sabrina Carpenter has seen the Google metrics for “sabrina carpenter height,” among other less Jukebox-safe search terms, and begins her album by graciously giving her audience, actual and potential, just what they want. Yet she’s also adept at giving them what they don’t yet know they want, in this case a weather-beaten chunk of the side of late 1980s pop-rock that even Haim are sometimes afraid to touch. Syrupy melodies and “la-la”s are carried by production that’s audaciously lo-fi compared to other Main Pop Girl contenders, or indeed the rest of Short n’ Sweet — guitars that languish in late summer heat, a drum sound straight out of a sweltering practice space. Sebadoh Carpenter this is not, but the demo-like qualities lend an added sense of immediacy and closeness to a performer who knows when the time is right to make oneself seem small. Even when she steals Olivia Rodrigo’s flow on the bridge, it’s not out of ill will but rather the inherent comedy of copying from a song titled “deja vu.” She laughs at pop music jokes in her own music — that’s called meeting the consumer where they are.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: If Katy Perry is fundamentally a nasty girl who occasionally plays sweet, Sabrina Carpenter is probably a sweet vacuum who does bitch cosplay. It doesn’t exactly suit her, but if the mask gives her the confidence to unleash a monster wave of pure smug contempt like this, then more power to her. Whether it’s the pilfered hooks or a few groan-worthy lyrics alongside the barbs that hit, I welcome a pop star who isn’t afraid to swing for the fences and make you like her at the risk of thinking she’s desperate. Here, she’s the audio equivalent of staring directly into the midday sun, in a good way.
[8]

Dave Moore: This song is, annoyingly, perfect.
[7]

no blergs » Friday, September 6th, 2024 11:00 pm

Surely someone in the Auntie Anne’s dynasty is also an aspiring musician…

[Video]
[4.80]

Grace Robins-Somerville: It’s getting hard for me to keep track of the bearded Top 40 country singer guys—your Lukes and Zachs and Bryans and such. It wasn’t familiar with either of these artists before hearing this song, so the first thing I thought was that they’re just making up people, and the second was a half-assed attempt to come up with a joke about how Koe Wetzel is a nepo baby because he must be the heir to the Wetzel’s Pretzels fortune. As for Jessie Murph, the fried, spindly baby-voice thing has been unbearable for years. But maybe in a month or two I’ll hear this song on the radio at Cook Out while I’m stoned on a weeknight and be charmed by it, who knows. 
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: This seemingly innocuous song has produced a serious contender for stupidest beef of the year (and yet somehow not the stupidest beef in Koe Wetzel’s career). Wetzel, a Texan country artist, released a duet with Murph, a TikTok-grown pop artist and Wetzel’s labelmate on Columbia Records. For this, the two artists (but mostly Murph) received an amount of online hate that was startling even by easily offended country music fan standards. Why this song, and not, say, Florida Georgia Line collaborating with Bebe Rexha or Morgan Wallen collaborating with Post Malone or Koe Wetzel collaborating with Diplo and Kodak Black (o what a nexus of awfulness)? These cancellable sins, apparently: the duet wasn’t supposed to be a duet (source: trust me bro), the duet is too pop (you don’t write a song with Amy Allen if you’re not making pop), Murph’s voice is too scratchy (I actually like how she blows “indie girl voice” out into the red), or that old classic, “there’s just something I don’t like about her.” The sheer whininess of it all makes me like this more. Good news for shit people, though: there’s a solo version out. This release, a standard tactic that record labels use to juice their streaming playcounts and pander to radio programmers who’re terrified of pop or rap verses in their rotation, is being taken as a capitulation by the haters and even by the artists. “I don’t have to deal with Koe Wetzel fans calling me a rat anymore,” Murph said. When fans go low, they go high, I guess.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: amy allen miss challenge – failed
[7]

Ian Mathers: I’m sorry, I’m just too hung up on the way that none of the songwriters here appear to have any idea what “the high road” means, idiomatically. Or if it’s supposed to be ironic/sarcastic, someone forgot to tell the performers.
[3]

Will Adams: I enjoy the joke: dude claims to be taking the high road but is in fact just drowning his sorrows in bourbon. But neither Wetzel nor Murph lean into the humor enough, playing it dead serious and dead boring. There’s really nothing else besides those distracting flat notes.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The rake at my karaoke bar who brings a different young woman every visit loves singing “Drinkin’ Problem” and other solid contemporary country. I can see him singing the male part here, down to the self-effacing manner in which he’ll run his fingers through his wan mullet. “I don’t need a ticket to your shit show” is not a thing the gentlemen he poses as would say, though.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Whatever his outlaw inclinations, Koe Wetzel has a whole lotta nothing to say and no good way to say it. I don’t mind country mining alt rock for inspiration, because alt rock has soundtracked the boonies for the past couple decades; there’s no point pretending this is an artificial — or novel — intrusion. But if a country artist is going to sell me Staind crossed with Daughtry, I’d like some narrative, some feeling, something more than weed references to tell me why their particular story is worth heeding. Jessie Murph, to her credit, has some vocal fry and she extracts a lot of personality from that creaky voice. She doesn’t have any more material to work with than Wetzel, so all that personality is left to sit and stew but, for the duration of her verse, “High Road” finds an extra dimension.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: That watery early 2000s guitar tone as homing beacon for the kind of subterranean post-industrial sickness that can only be properly transcribed at a 6th-grade level — otherwise known as the key signature of Madden NFL 2003 — still has its disciples. Koe Wetzel uses it here only as a garnish, not wanting to disturb his staid country duet in which, surprise, both sides are at fault and the title infrastructure doesn’t actually exist. I wish he had gone with his instincts and let the post-grunge infection spread a little more, at least to give Jessie Murph a stronger platform for her acidic put-downs.
[5]

Kristen S. Hé: Wetzel’s warm baritone and Murph’s Bhad Bhabie-Taryn Manning squawk: oil and water, but probably more memorable for it?
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Post Malone and Morgan Wallen have more chemistry than this. These two have taken a perfectly good emo revival guitar tone and done some slam poetry bullshit over it, junking the track up with mixed metaphors and remedial melodrama. 
[3]

no blergs » Friday, September 6th, 2024 8:20 pm

And single of ours…

[Video]
[7.45]

Julian Axelrod: You never know when you’ll hear the song that changes your life. It could come from a DJ, or an algorithm, or a girl group lifer who you could have sworn was the third most famous member of Fifth Harmony but was actually the first or second most notable member of Little Mix, depending on who you ask. I had no idea what Jade Thirlwall’s debut single would sound like before I first pressed play, but even if you gave me 1000 guesses, I never would have landed on “Rina Sawayama doing Uffie over a Eurovision sample that curdles into the nastiest dubstep drop since the Obama administration.” This isn’t the first time an X Factor alum has stuffed a solo single with a million disparate elements to keep things interesting; it’s not even the first time it’s happened this year. But the magic of “Angel of My Dreams” is the way it extends that first-listen feeling to listens 2-500. Even though I know the song by heart, each individual section is so strong that I never expect the drop, or the rap verse, or the intro melody reprise at the end. (I didn’t even notice the camera flash sound effects at the 2:07 mark until my third listen!) This could be the start of an all-time pop run, or it could be a fleeting moment of glory. I couldn’t care less: When I’m listening to “Angel of My Dreams,” I just want to live in each moment until it ends, then immediately live them all again.
[10]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Girls Aloud doing nightcore “Bohemian Rhapsody”, except also emotionally brutal. We will watch your solo career with great interest.
[7]

Dave Moore: How do you even write a pop melody like this these days? Nothing borrowed yet nothing new — dozens of refreshes of WhoSampled yields nothing to alleviate my nagging sense that surely I’ve heard it before; my brain refuses to play a rousing game of earworm hunt like with Chappell Roan. It’s a bit of a shame that the whole thing devolves into a K-pop-ish party-by-numbers muddle, but in the end she wins, is not in the bin, etc.
[8]

Kat Stevens: If I don’t win, I’m in the bin. Specifically, the bin on Deptford High Street opposite Perfect Fried Chicken.
[8]

Iain Mew: Some of the joy “Angel of My Dreams” has brought is that it’s 80% of the way to being a maximalist Rina Sawayama song, and yet is also a persistent enough UK hit to have re-entered the top ten in its fourth week. The range of possibilities looks newly widened. Jade brings some specific things to make it her own triumph too. It’s not just leading off with something so ambitious and inventive, but that she is able to wear it so lightly and naturally, Harry Styles-style. It’s even more impressive to do so with a song that appears to dig into bitter personal experience, centred around repetitions of IT’S NOT FAIR so resonant as to move from sulk to deep truth. 
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: Jade Thirlwall apparently sees the chance to etch her name into stone, rather than make a safe, easy pitch that might simply be forgotten or regarded as nice. But there are many songs about the cruel and unusual punishment of daring to use one’s talent and love to make random weirdos who wear unflattering V-necks a lot of money. Thus Mike Sabath, creator of the world-conquering “Escapism” (and, in a fun little twist, another Jade and Mike Joint as well as the second best Liam Payne song) starts us off with a wilting cry of desperation that has to be walloped by the heavy swing of the chorus, glittery synths sitting atop. The song zips into raspy bass and flimsy and flimsier kick/snare patterns from then on, slowly flattening you until you are nearly crushed. The heavy-handed swing of the first chorus sweeps back in to save you and bind you to it as it disappears, Jade’s firm, fluttery soprano left hanging out on the ledge. It’s almost as if JADE, unlike RAYE, is not begging to be set free — she’s begging to be let in.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Cycling through three different song concepts in the first 35 seconds suggests not so much a desire to “do something crazy” as a struggle to hit on anything melodically memorable. It turns out that the slowed-down bass-heavy breakdown works, as does the twinkling fairy dance augmenting the chorus, but a lot of this mistakes attitude for tune — the sort of B-grade effort that made Little Mix only intermittently worthwhile. See, for instance, Jade stretching out  “feels li-yi-yi-yi-yi-ke” and “spoli-yi-yi-yi-yi-ight” for no real purpose beyond filling time before the next switch up.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: The lack of concern for the cleanliness of the transitions make this feel like a promising storyboard in search of a director, or least someone to step in and say that a desire to be seen as daring and boundary-pushing does not equate to such, and can in fact expose the whole gambit. Most listeners should walk away with a favored segment to return to — mine is the chrome-polished, push-to-start recitation of the title phrase — but a quarterlife retrospective like this should feel more internally cohesive than a sitcom clip show.
[5]

Ian Mathers: The classic “pick your battles. pick… pick fewer battles than that. put some battles back. that’s too many” tumblr post, now in song form!
[7]

Mark Sinker: The idea was like a will o’the wisp or Capt.Fawcett’s Lost City of Z, a gleam, a flicker, a dangerous promise glimpsed across a clearing and through the trees — and it was something like this (it was always hard to explain clearly). A manufactured alt-pop girlie gang, perfectly designed to win reality TV competitions because also able to fashion the drama of their rise — and their internal ebbs and flows — into quilted chart-prog rap-adjacent concept EPs and singles-length mini-musicals, like the Hamilton of the Sugababes. It’s there, always beckoning, just out of reach — and the acts that pass through the glamour of it are always great, of course, very great, but they also always dissipate too fast, before they really land on the absolute thing itself. Perhaps that’s the point; perhaps that’s my doom. 
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: I am banned from time machines now because I abused my time-travel privileges to do frivolous shit, like posting this song to the Popjustice forums in 2007 and measuring the blast radius of Xenomaniac rapture.
[9]

5 blergs » Friday, September 6th, 2024 6:23 pm

First Sabrina, now Shawn… we just need one more a triple-repeated title song to get a trend piece going…

[Video]
[4.40]

Iain Mew: Shawn aims soft and tries to bring out the anguish and cyclical hopelessness in small moments. The musical stomp has other ideas, stomping out subtlety without bringing anything worth replacing it with. The resultant sense of aimless momentum leaves it sounding like a festival EDM track with all of its drops missing.
[3]

Jeffrey Brister: On the one hand, it is a dated stomp-clap folk single with gang vocals and a hefty dollop reverb in the chorus; with nary a strummed guitar figure or slide flourish or mandolin accent out of place. On the other hand, this sounds really REALLY good. The worst thing I could say about this song is that it’s unmemorable, and it will fade into the swirling morass of competent-if-not-incredible folk songs that sit at the bottom of my mind, and will eventually get it confused with something else years later. But in this moment? Hey, pretty good.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Mike Sabath can apparently work magic. I mean, he can lay down some firm, surprisingly sturdy but unambitious drums that allow Chris Thile on mandolin, Kevin Barry on lap steel guitar, Eddie Barry on guitar, Shawn himself on guitar with Scott Harris on background vocals to fill up the mix with all the angst and unalloyed joy that come with finding one’s footing after years of grasping around in the dark for your parents to protect you, for your lover to return to you, for the small, imaginary bundle who you’re convinced is crying out for you to hold them. Then you remember they’re not imaginary. You wonder why you thought that. Then you get up and hold your infant son until you fall asleep instead. Mike then has to worry about maybe lowering the bass to let the lap steel sound better but makes sure to not disturb you or the baby.
[8]

Michael Hong: The comparisons to Man of the Woods have been unavoidable, but “Isn’t That Enough” sounds closer to the alt-country of Waxahatchee than anything by Justin Timberlake. Pleasant enough if a bit repetitive, but as “Why Why Why” attempts to kick up the dust into something anthemic, it sounds more like a deflated version of Avicii’s “Wake Me Up.” 
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A perfect choice for listeners who found Benson Boone and Noah Kahan to be too aggressive.
[2]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Sexless Ed Sheeran-ass Zoloft-ass fake deep pop music.
[2]

Ian Mathers: Is it weird that this feels post-Iron & Wine to me? Something to do with the guitar tone and how it and the vocals are layered. It’s pleasant enough, and the idea of post-teen pop Sam Beam makes me smile. Congratulations, you’ve justified your existence for another day!
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: An emulsified soup of folky signifiers, “Why Why Why” achieves pathos of a sort — not from the feelings described within it, but from the singer’s need to transmute those feelings into rustic coffeehouse wallpaper. The once and future teen idol is mandated after a certain age to reveal more of himself, his true self, but only within well-defined limits: no to Big Star’s Third, yes to “Garden Party.” Or “Story of My Life,” if we’re being realistic here. The big reveal of “Why Why Why,” that of deferred fatherhood, is given its requisite four bars in the limelight, then is quickly blotted out by the oncoming rush of billowy acoustic chords and twangy guitar stabs. This may be for the better, given Mendes’s earnest belief in the mind-blowing lyrical power of the father-mother juxtaposition. Best to let the sound engineers do the real talking here; that coiled spring of rapid-fire strumming that sews up the aforementioned verse has replay value of its own.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: The best thing about this fibrous Shawn Mendes strum is how it inadvertently demonstrates the talent someone like Ed Sheeran or Noah Kahan has. They could make “Why Why Why,” and a lot of time they functionally do. And that would sell, and people who want earnest and modestly rousing folk songs, which are a perfectly reasonable thing to want — 12 years later, I’m still willing to defend “Ho Hey” — would be pleased to cue it up on their playlists. But it takes skill to create an “A Team” or a “Stick Season,” the versions of this sound that involve more craft and finesse than necessary. I don’t think Mendes is capable of elevating his compositions to that level, but hey, at least he’s capable of not sinking them to Lewis Capaldi depths.
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: Javiera Mena isn’t supposed to sound like the Lumineers, but Shawn Mendes isn’t not. The sound of basking blissfully in low expectations.
[5]

no blergs » Thursday, September 5th, 2024 11:24 pm

On tonight’s episode of Cheaters…

[Video]
[5.91]

Julian Axelrod: While everyone’s been up in arms over Ice Spice’s shit-centric lyrical fixations, Central Cee’s gotten away with rehashing the same cheating scandal on not one, not two, but three different songs — because nothing shuts down infidelity rumors like constantly bringing them up unprompted. Luckily I’m online enough to know about the love triangle drama surrounding the song, but not online enough to care. So I’m happy to turn off my moral compass and enjoy this for what it is: a cross-Atlantic celebration of mutual toxicity over a Jersey club concoction that’s busy enough to hold the frame, but somber enough to simulate human remorse. This sounds like a big-budget redux of Ice’s early curio “No Clarity” with cleaner production, clearer emotional stakes, and ironically, a less expensive vocal sample, which keeps butting in like a jilted ex demanding their side of the story be heard.
[6]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Apparently there’s some alleged love-triangle/cheating-type drama involving these two that I can’t be bothered to care about because I’m over 23 years old and have a job. It’s funny that Ice Spice is leading the crusade on the “just the tip” movement. Someone’s gotta do it, I guess.
[6]

Holly Boson: Cench was hip-hop’s most vulnerable wife guy a minute ago, sobbing in songs about his girl not wanting to cuddle after sex or not being able to understand she’s perfect at her current weight (and, of course, comparing her to his homosexual gun). The tabloid-dating scandal his team engineered for publicity might have blown up in his face, but as a cheater he’s still got that blokey bathetic Britishness, drawing attention to how his own verse is going to land him in hot water as he raps it in a Pythonesque fascination with his own medium. Poop princess Ice Spice has her success attributed to her looks too often — I think her male haters can tell the dissociated flows and ironic ahegao affectations are “fuck you” rather than “fuck me” and get scared. The beat sounds like a scratched CD of a PSX racing game put in your CD player: one of the first big hits that tries to sound like the music of Y2K and actually does.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Somehow, Riot’s beat here makes a song about cheating-as-extremely-goofy-mutually-assured-destruction into a cyberspace reverie, a blissed out garble of sounds (the gunshots sound carnivalesque) and textures. Central Cee works better here as a feature than as a lead; playing comic relief to Ice Spice should be tough work, but pairing her genuine grievance with his schmendrick routine fits just right.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: Good propulsion, good albeit lite Jersey club, terrible life advice (but at least it’s honest about that, which puts it ahead of many songs).
[7]

Iain Mew: “If he cheating I’m doing him worse” initially reads as farce. Then Central Cee lays it all out in detail too thoughtlessly honest to even be self-serving. By the time their mutual destruction has left the song as just the word “understand” broken and echoing into space, it’s tragedy. 
[8]

Mark Sinker: This song starts well, but I’m really not growing to love Central Cee at any level; he’s just so charmless. Memo to all duelling Bad Girls: get better taste! 
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: I struggle to find a way into Ice Spice’s Y2K!, though it’s just 20 minutes long. Once an impish presence at single length, over even a short album her unvarying flow makes itself too apparent, and her terse quips revolve too much around her being a “baddie” whose man calls her “poopie.” In that context, “Did It First” stands out because Central Cee’s voice is a novel intrusion into the one-dimensionality and the beat’s Jersey club kaleidoscope of cut-up vowels provides breathing room. Alone, however, the song reflects the album’s problems in miniature: too little happening and all of it too familiar.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: I’m doing Riot and Lily dirty/Nico did it first
[3]

Ian Mathers: This song is nowhere good enough to make up for the hour I spent watching and reading things trying to figure out why all the YouTube comments are like that. I was hoping to have enough context to comment intelligently, but instead I just got one hour closer to death.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: The plaintively sped-up vocal sample seems to be animated by the same shrouded heartache that stalked the “Boy’s a Liar” remix, except here the masking is less overt and the lyrical front is even more coldly transactional. By cleanly separating the song’s dual emotional channels into words and music, a proper balance is attained between these polarities of hard and soft, letting the listener either hone in on or ignore the dissonance if they just want to vibe out to a sprightly anti-anti-cheating anthem. Any recorded regrets come not from Ice Spice but from Central Cee, who treats this like the stateside stardom test that it is. He regrets getting caught, Ice explicitly wants to get caught, NY drill and UK drill can swap clothes without anybody noticing: lessons in chemistry.
[7]

no blergs » Thursday, September 5th, 2024 8:35 pm

“The album cover features frontman Ronnie Radke’s mugshot after being arrested for domestic assault in 2012.” well okay then!

[Video]
[3.00]

Ian Mathers: Oh, I hate everything about this.
[0]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: “It’s just not right what they do to you at that publication” – my husband, upon hearing this song
[0]

Harlan Talib Ockey: I could easily spend a thousand words picking apart this song, but to limit it to its most egregious sins: Radke’s fake Southern accent is offensively poor. The mix is glassy and hyper-compressed. The lyrics are beyond hope. “I may have drew blood / But that was true love”? Is this Falling In Reverse’s idea of clever country wordplay? Meanwhile, Jelly Roll sounds deeply uncomfortable, like he’s straining to be heard. The “wee-hoo” is musically unnecessary and, more subjectively, feels like getting hit in the face with a large glob of spit. If I didn’t know better, I would think this was a mean-spirited parody of both genres. 
[0]

Iain Mew: Bro-country and nu-metal make for an excellent match, with sensibilities and sonics at just the right closeness to blend and contrast as needed. Identifying the semi-novelty singalong of “Heaven is a Halfpipe” as modeling the tone to bridge the two is even smarter. Hopefully someone will pick up those ideas and apply them to something with a chorus that isn’t simultaneously underwhelming and grating.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: I’m sorry guys, we’re not currently accepting applications for a new “Gives You Hell.”
[2]

Will Adams: I have a relatively high tolerance for nu-metal that’s been polished within an inch of its life, but the choices made here suggest Ronnie Radke is as much of a troll musically as he is in real life. I could take the “to-gether, GETHURR, GETHUURRRR,” but the “wii-OOOH” was a bridge too far.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Jeris Johnson, pop singer/songwriter; Cory Quistad, rock singer/songwriter/guitarist who rips a crazy solo; Tyler Smith aka MYTH, singer/songwriter/producer; Charles Kallaghan Massabo, producer; Jelly Roll in general. These folks are involved in the production of this song, and I hope that explains the score.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Final-scene-of-Malcolm-in-the-Middle-where-it’s-revealed-that-Malcolm-has-to-pay-his-way-through-Harvard-by-working-part-time-as-a-janitor-in-order-to-fulfill-his-mom’s-dream-of-becoming-a-genuinely-populist-President-of-the-United-States-core. One of the guys in Citizen King went on to do mastering work for Madvillainy and Donuts; people can change, though Radke likely hasn’t. He does the necessary job here of making me mostly forget that I’m listening to Ronnie Radke, with a clutch assist from a more harmless kind of rogue. Come for the Jelly Roll, stay for the jiggy juggas.
[6]

Mark Sinker: Larry, Moe and Curly are feuding. They’re jabbing each other in the eye — except then they’ve also banded together to jab YOU in the eye, while capering about. Maybe it’s funny when they do this to each other, but this song does it to you, and never stops. 
[2]

Katherine St. Asaph: Rare Anthony Fantano W; I just wish the song was worse.
[5]

1 blerg » Thursday, September 5th, 2024 8:00 am

Don’t cry! There’s new Javiera Mena to listen to…

[Video]
[6.86]

Alfred Soto: One of TSJ’s Olympians returns with an acoustic lament about a lover who needs to turn off their brain and look at the stars. The bridge is Javiera Mena at her best: a poignant, sinister supplicant.
[7]

Kayla Beardslee: Softer yet more haunting than her usual icy electropop singles, but as with any good Javiera track, I’m left thinking about how the music interlaces with her wistful vocals well after the song has ended. The sentimental and the spooky will inherit the earth. (Or at least the Jukebox — we’ve written Javiera into the site’s will by now, right?)
[7]

Mark Sinker: There’s something funny and sweet about outing yrself as a rigorous goth girlie — loves Siouxsie! loves shoegaze! — this far in, and while the song itself is a gauzily slight vapour, no more, it is entirely plausible that the ageless undead (who don’t have working hearts) would affect to sway a little to some pleasantly beatless bossa nova. Memory is really no longer a matter for precision for a vampire. 
[5]

Ian Mathers: The goth romanticism of vampires really hasn’t been getting a fair shake in pop culture recently, so kudos to Mena for putting it right back in there: “dare to feel that bitter suffering” and all that. And of course it’s that rare example of a sweeping ballad that actually has a pulse. Eternal life just so you can keep crying forever — what a concept!
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: A gentle guitar arpeggio suggests “Volver a Llorar” will be a polite folk exercise, but Javiera Mena remains too interesting an artist for that kind of dignified but dull work. As the track builds, strings bloom like blood seeping into water, while a bed of subtle but thrumming vocal loops hiccup an accompaniment. Still polite, perhaps, but also rather beautiful.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: So steep a plunge from her previous heights that it’s almost offensive. Javiera Mena is not supposed to sound like the Lumineers! The strings toward the end almost salvage it; the Porter Robinson vocal pongs do not.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: Sandra Mihanovich and Celeste Carballo came from very different upbringings but were connected by their brief romance, and their brave duology of albums Somos Mucho Mas Que Dos (We Are Much More Than Two) in 1988 and Mujer Contra Mujer (Woman Against Woman) in 1990. Milhanovich came from a well-to-do family, her uncle a successful composer (she even covered one of his favorite songs as a favor to him), her father a polo pro, her mother a TV anchor for Telenoche, which was broadcast into millions of homes in Argentina and to Celeste Carballo. Her own fascinating story was never drawn up in any English-language sites, except to say she apparently played with Bob Dylan. She also composed for Argentine TV series Dale, Loly! in 1993, then Inn Trouble in 1997, a Christine Rey Joint meant to address the lesbian lifestyle in the United States, neither of which in this time of streaming and piracy can be found, even with subtitles. These two excellent, long-forgotten icons of Argentinian punk/pop as influences influnced this Chilean maestro. This three-minute jotting of feelings was co-produced by Isidro Acevedo, producer for Jukebox visitor, C. Tangana, Sticky M.A. and Ghouljaboy, nestling Mena in neatly arranged violins while girding it with heavy kick programming, flashes of timpani rolls, and long hi-hat hits. A chirping vocal fragment bubbles forth as Mena’s warm soprano leans out of the center of the song. As for what co-writer Pablo Stipicic and Mena herself are saying, I do not know. All I can say is this: Love is complicated, but death is simple.
[10]

no blergs » Thursday, September 5th, 2024 2:15 am