[Video][Website]
[5.50]

Jonathan Bogart: This is 2010? Not 1985? Because these guys are the best Cars imitators yet; they’ve got the 80s synthpop strobe-and-throb with 70s classic-rock structure down pat. I mean, unless it’s 2010, in which case enough already.
[6]

David Raposa: So now that there are all sorts of examples — most notably, in my eyes, Dam-Funk, tho there are countless others — showing that you can resuscitate the sounds, shades and shoulder pads of the 80s without making like hyper-ironic new wave minstrels, can people please stop giving money and time to clown-college drop-outs like Chromeo?
[2]

John Seroff: Chromeo aspires here to John Hughes era, pop-lock nostalgia but the blueprint is so nakedly displayed and formulaic that it’s hard to enjoy the song without dissecting it. Buttery vocals help, but “Don’t Turn the Lights On” doesn’t distinguish itself enough as much more than Memorex.
[5]

Chuck Eddy: Didn’t their early stuff have more convincingly Zappish or at least Systemy freakazoid electro-funk r&b in it? Or was I just conned then by their schtick, and their very good mix CDs (Chromeo Presents Un Joli Mix Pour Toi from 2005 and DJ Kicks from last year)? Someday I’ll go back to the first two actual albums and check. Anyway, I do like the bumpy electobeats in this (opening recalls “Don’t You Want Me”), and it’s catchy enough, especially that vocoder thing they’re still doing. And they deserve a hit I suppose, but somehow I’m getting a low-calorie Hot Chip vibe from it regardless. Also, what’s with the blackface in the video?
[6]

Martin Skidmore: Some of this is very good indeed – the glossy electro-funk is skilled and slick, with excellent synths and keyboards, and a nicely bubbling bassline. There isn’t much of a song, and the singing is choked and far too weak, but the music is just about strong enough to make the whole thing work anyway.
[7]

Frank Kogan: A perfectly lovely melody and beautifully plaintive synth washes are subjected to Chromeo’s cheap, drab clumsiness. I’ve never understood this choice: do they expect the beauty to be extra exquisite when filtered through all this gray? If they’d rubbed this track with a bit of silver polish, and hired a halfway-adequate singer, it would rank as a latter-day neo-Italodisco classic. Very frustrating.
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: Likeable enough, but it says something about them as songwriters and singers that the highlight of this thing is a keyboard solo.
[6]

Mallory O’Donnell: You might laugh at Chromeo, and, really, you probably should. But what we need is for bands to be more like these guys. Ambition? Highfalutin’ artistic aspirations? Content, of any thought-provoking kind? You can have them. I’d rather sit and watch Chromeo endlessly reiterate the same almond-themed high-school roller-disco R&B tune over and over again than have to endure any new bit of monstrous vainglory by the likes of, say, Muse. More people should be this content to mind their place.
[6]

[Video][Myspace]
[6.40]

John Seroff: A roiling pot of throbbing, reddish-orange impulses and LCD Soundsystem hooks. This is the Sun of an overheated world: angry, relentless and more than a bit off-kilter. If the song never quite coagulates into dessert, it’s sufficiently vital as sauce for sweaty moments.
[7]

Anthony Easton: There is something so techincal in the placement of beats here — a delicate construction that suggests a narrative where new sounds are placed in regular intervals over 6 minutes – and the rigor of that practice elevates any boredom that might occur into a transcendental/meditative practice.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: With all those signifiers of transcendent bliss, why does it still feel lumpy and earthbound? Possibly because the word “sun” doesn’t connote good things when you live in the American Southwest.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The shrewdly timed fades and distortions evoke sunstroke, but not delirium. A glass of water and you’re okay. Don’t trim the bushes after eleven in the morning.
[5]

Mallory O’Donnell: “Sun” is a glorious little tune, blissful and a bit single-minded in its’ way, but quite fine where you left it, right on the album, right after “Odessa”. I understand the tactical move of this as a second single, but I can’t help but wish Snaith had grown some real balls and dropped the bass-fi exotica of “Bowls”, or ballsier still, “Found Out”. Points docked merely for the wearying predictability of it all.
[7]

Michaelangelo Matos: One of those album tracks that sounds pretty good, growing in stature as it moseys along (for nearly six minutes) without announcing itself too much. I imagine the remixes will tell more concrete tales.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: So is this something that a, er, rave club would play when the sun is coming up? Or is it more something one might dance to while the sun’s been out awhile, or maybe even while sunbathing? Do people still listen to stuff like this at all?
[2]

Martin Skidmore: The indie electronica dance music here is a little awkward, but often kind of lovely too, shimmering chords smoothing out the somewhat inelegant flow of the beats. Thankfully we don’t get much of his useless vocals, little but the title, and that processed. Arguably it outstays its useful life by a couple of minutes, but I kind of like it.
[6]

Kat Stevens: At the moment I am a total sucker for anything that sounds like Joy Orbison. I also feel incredibly smug with myself for correctly guessing that this dude must be slap bang in the middle of at least one James Holden mix CD.
[9]

Doug Robertson: Blissful bleepiness, this is the sun as seen through a pixilation filter; block hard but still recognisable. This isn’t the smooth, laidback sound that normally gets associated with Ibiza sunsets, but sometimes the sunburn is all you can remember.
[8]

[Video][Website]
[5.83]

Frank Kogan: New pop as reimagined by dour existentialists. Drizzle, an empty bridge, grim nothingness beyond. I must be a sucker for finding this so beautiful.
[8]

Rebecca Toennessen: OH SHUT UP FOREVER.
[2]

Edward Okulicz: A re-release, but a vital one. Moody and retro, but a fantastic song that could have worked in any arrangement. The vignette is slight but dissolute and intriguing, Theo’s singing isn’t iffy like on “Better than Love” and the mantra-like chorus is the sort of thing that could burn into your eardrums and never leave.
[9]

Anthony Easton: Languor and ease, so often thought to be decadence, collapse into laziness.
[5]

Martin Kavka: Over the months that I’ve been listening to this since the first video was released, I’ve come really close to hating it. The lyrics are just awful and sexist, about a woman with an unhealthy belief that she is in possession of Lips That Redeem Men From Their Deep Dark Pain. The eight-note guitar solo is only outdone in its badness by the sax solo that follows. The beat-on-the-5-but-not-on-the-6 drum pattern is quite close to the one we all heard last year in “Rabbit Heart” (and before that). But Hurts deserves points for being the most aesthetically serious band in ages. The imagery of their promotional material is so carefully planned to be out of joint with this age that their songs gain a revelatory power that they wouldn’t otherwise deserve. And so I am almost persuaded that they could save pop, even if they release the worst dreck from their album as singles (e.g. “Stay”).
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: Is the fact that this anti-suicide song sounds so morose supposed to be ironic or something?
[3]

Martin Skidmore: I gave the last two tracks we reviewed by them 3/10 each, but this is much better. The vocal is restrained, making the weakness into something approaching a virtue, the synth backing also leans towards the haunting, and there’s some good guitar in the middle. Vitally, the lyric is also far better, about a guy being persuaded not to commit suicide. I can’t say there is quite enough to make me love it, but I do like it, and I am close to being genuinely moved.
[7]

Iain Forrester: This sounds more of a faultless, finished product than the somewhat all-over-the-place “Better Than Love”. Where that had an unpredictable intensity which dragged it to life and to now, though, this is definitely more of a period piece. Exquisitely and precisely observed, but with an inevitable predictability to its moves.
[6]

Kat Stevens: The singer dude’s face reminds me so much of Matt Goss that I’ve had trouble accepting the possibility that Hurts might be good. Fair play to them for attempting to mine a section of the 80s that pop revivalism has so far ignored: the atmospheric post-yuppie emo of similarly ungoogleable singer Black. Those Simple Minds-style gated drums don’t fool me, I can spot Hurts’ true goal from the subtle clue in the song title. I wonder if their next tune will be called “Wicked Game”?
[4]

Mallory O’Donnell: If you’re going to sound straight outta the 80’s, at least do it properly. Hurts do, here. In “Wonderful Life”, the minor-key melodrama takes precedence over Hurts’ quite evident desire to craft epic, perfect pop. The result is something that resounds because it doesn’t overreach – the synth and treated sax vibrate with the same emotional quality as the overwrought lyric. Everything more pale and distantly warm than everything else. Somewhere, there is a light that finally goes out.
[8]

David Raposa: I’m not sure if this track sounds familiar because I’ve inadvertently heard it somewhere else, or because it sounds like a hundred other po-faced synthpop tracks, and the fact that this thing is trying to unfurl its bathetic boy-saved-by-girl narrative with a straight face while Theo Hutchcraft proclaims “it’s such a wonderful life” in such an unintentionally arch fashion produces an effect that I’m assuming isn’t what Hurts intended. I’m not asking these guys to exchange sincerity for slapstick, but even the most dour & poofy pop pouters knew how silly they could sound.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Although I’ve cooled on this one — the vocal’s on the wrong side of morose — I can’t deny the backup chipmunks squeaking out platitudes over the chorus or how the synth/drum programming dovetails with said morose vocal to rein in the melodrama on what would be a pompous bad time. What’s most curious about this Eighties retread is the absence of sexual ambiguity; it’s as if the requisite emotions demand the guiding spirits of second stringers like Camouflage and When in Rome instead of Soft Cell or Erasure. If the quality of the follow-up singles is to be believed, second string status is the limit of their ambition.
[7]

[Myspace]
[3.67]

Michaelangelo Matos: Of course Sweden’s biggest export went full-on whoosh-trance-pop since the last time I checked; where else would they go? Too bad: Their pert songcraft was never a big favorite, but at least the tunes used to stick in your brain.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: This dance-pop number chugs along confidently enough with bouncily shuddering synths, and there is a tune, albeit rather a tedious one. I don’t like the singing, and it feels a bit stiff and even desperate, in the end.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Would anyone even be taking notice if it weren’t for the Gaga-led rehabilitation of their 90s catalog? This does nothing to recapture those old doofy cod-reggae charms, instead giving us bog-standard Eurobosh with a singer who’s getting too old for this game, though wouldn’t mind hearing her take on something slower and more thoughtful.
[4]

Mallory O’Donnell: I wasn’t really expecting new material from Ace of Base to not suck, but I was hoping it would at least suck in anthemic fashion. You might have surprised any coworker or colleague at any point in time from 1993 up until last week singing along to one of their three massive hits whether it was playing at the time or not, but no one you know will ever so much as hum this.
[2]

Rebecca Toennessen: Or, Ace of Base Non-Original Recipe. A song for when everyone’s not quite plastered but nicely tipsy enough to wave their hands around in their air like they JUST DON’T CARE. Catchy in that ‘heard it a billion times but who gives a rat’s ass’ kind of way. I do genuinely hope it charts.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Smiling and shimmying like it’s 1994, Ace of Base can be excused for thinking nothing’s changed: the Democrats control Congress on the eve of losing one or both chambers, recession’s on everyone’s minds, and Swedes still manufacture pop songs out of shitty keyboards. Since I never thought their instincts were that unerring, I’m not surprised this sounds like one of their second-tier singles, like “Beautiful Life”.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: No. I reject this “comeback,” especially since the single bites everything about “Waiting for Magic” but the urgency. And especially since Jenny Berggren showed this up already.
[2]

David Raposa: It’s weird to hear an Ace of Base song without Malin Berggren (AKA the one with the throatier, more distinctive voice) (AKA the blonde one) singing along with her sister, and I think it’s the preconceptions that come with that brand that keep me from hearing this perfectly OK pop track as anything more than an effort from a group that’s the Ace of Base in name only.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Explains why ABBA refused to do a comeback/tour regardless of the money.
[1]

[Video][Myspace]
[5.67]

Kat Stevens: Kid Sister is so bouncy and likeable that I can’t help smiling whenever I hear her voice, even if the song is nothing more than a bit of brassy electro fluff. I hope this song gets put on a DDR machine sometime soon.
[7]

Al Shipley: They call her Kid Sister, but she’s always sounded to me like someone’s 40ish aunt, trying way too hard to convince herself that she’s still as hip and with it as she never actually was. When she’s got this rappity rap thing out of her system, she’ll finally get her CPA license and move out of that loft.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: No big guest stars or producer here, so it’s almost entirely about her, and I like her. She’s brash and bright, clearly having plenty of fun, and the bouncy electro almost seems about to tip over into rave. Not sure about the screwed down male voice, but really this is thoroughly enjoyable.
[8]

Chuck Eddy: I’d almost give that irresistible Yazoo sample a 7 by itsownself. Kid Sister’s zestful chattering adds at least a point; who even cares what she’s saying? (Btw, when re-checking out this track on Rhapsody, I discovered that Sis also updated Debbie Deb’s “Lookout Weekend,” with Nina Sky, in July. Awesome idea! That one gets an 8, too; i.e., exactly two points lower than the original.)
[8]

Michaelangelo Matos: Do go.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: I’m definitely on board with any attempt to rehabilitate the Jock Jams genre of 90s party techno-cum-rap. I just wish she was a bit better at it.
[7]

[Video][Myspace]
[3.71]

David Raposa: A boy band Hannah Montana. Where’s the green slime when you really need it?
[2]

Martin Skidmore: This is the fifth single by this boy band who star in a TV show of the same name. It’s not quite working – their third made #93, the others haven’t troubled the top 100. This is unsurprising.
[3]

Iain Forrester: In order to understand why an American Busted should now be emerging, I looked up this band and found that a ‘television comedy music-themed teen sitcom’ is responsible. Given that comedy aspect, it seems odd that no sense of humour manifests itself in this awfully earnest and unimaginative song. Any kind of hint of personality would have been nice, in fact.
[3]

Anthony Easton: The Monkees were quite sophisticated, and worked both straight and as a joke — often at the same time. Here, the joke isn’t very clever, and they lack the harmonics of the best boy bands. I am still unconvinced of Nickelodeon’s genius.
[4]

Chuck Eddy: As recent boy bands go, these guys sound fairly bubbly and unjaded, at least for this song. Good for them, or should I be thanking Justin Bieber? (Also, does Chinese food make them sick? And do they like girls that wear Abercrombie and Fitch?)
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: These guys sing the way your dad used to make fun of rap: EMphaSIS right ON the BEAT, GET the CROWD right ON its FEET. That the splutter-stomp is so ham-handedly Euro is only right. Maybe that should be DJ Ham-handed, since this is a couple glowsticks and a few BPM away from happy hardcore.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Unlike the Jonas Brothers, they can actually sing (and harmonize!), but that means they’re even more anonymous, a collection of stadium-rock-by-way-of-teenpop gestures that don’t add up to anything necessary or, despite all the emoting going on, urgent. You wanna be adored? Get in line, kids.
[5]

[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]

[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]

[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]

[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]