The dubstep crossover continues…

[Video][Website]
[6.44]

Katherine St Asaph: This generation’s “Unfinished Sympathy”. Listen to the normal version first. Pretty great, yes? Now shove it to the back of your head and pull up this one. It’s like it’s been singed by lightning, every single note electrified. The percussion’s been yanked to the front, the difference between glancing over a perfect stranger from across the room and pulling him into a corner. Toward the end, the beats morph into gunshots randomly, trip over each other, ratatatatat faster and faster until they collapse and the air hangs still. The whole song is heightened in fact, Katy’s vocals more plaintive than ever and the background tense as a caught breath. Call it mixing if you insist; I call it human chemistry.
[10]

Pete Baran: It’s like a vignette version of “Inner City Life”, which is no bad thing as Goldie’s track was too sprawling. I only fear that the track in itself lacks a cohesive through line, but it’s a terrific bit of fun while it’s on.
[7]

Jer Fairall: Standard issue drum and bass with a singer that sounds a bit too excited for her sterile surroundings.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: Magnetic Man’s pointless gimmick is making dubstep with live instruments, but let’s not hold that against them. This is lively and almost lovely, and Katy’s slightly sharp high notes help to energise it. It stops and beeps at you occasionally, but mostly it got me moving — my favourite vocal dubstep number in a while, I think.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: Look, if you’re going to use the “Amen” break you need to do something with it. I’m not even a beats guy and I know that much.
[4]

David Katz: It’s pop with genuine sonic ambition, its creators interested in blurring boundaries between genres and prodding at our expectations. Excuse me for the enthusiast-dilettante dubstep references here: it starts like a late 00s hyperdub single with its colourful synths and paranoid reserve, and then explodes into a crunching breakbeat the Prodigy would be proud of. And the ‘all I really know is’ chorus squares the difference between prime-Madge and dream-pop. Like the scenario of its title — fleeting attraction on the dancefloor — it slides into your evening’s listening with an uncanny allure.
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: I like the basic architecture of this, the variance and sequence of its parts. But there’s something about the constituent elements themselves that’s so wan and uninterested in even their own goings-on. Something, something, something…
[5]

Josh Langhoff: The promising opening build, staccato stabs over long-note atmosphere, sounds like an attempt to conjure mysterious caverns of space in the manner of Faithless, but once Katy B comes in the mystery dissipates — poof! — and the sound becomes too streamlined and dry. Unfortunately, Ms. B’s tune can’t withstand the increased scrutiny.
[3]

Kat Stevens: The pub behind my house empties its glass bottles into the recycling bin with a hideous crash every night. During the day I hear my neighbours’ toddlers shrieking at each other and at night I hear exhausted buses wheezing up the A10. Local birdsong consists of ugly crow caws and rutting pigeons. At first I can’t quite grasp how a clear beautiful voice like Katy’s fits into this grim grey soundscape that spawned dubstep, full of chewing gum and fag ends and hard concrete edges to scrape your knees on. She’s not just a breath of fresh air, she’s a children’s environmental poster competition cliche: a single precious sapling growing in a crack in the pavement, surrounded by barbed wire factories pumping out noxious fumes and fascist propaganda. But plonk the same sapling into thriving woodland surroundings, and it ends up becoming an insignificant bramble waiting to be trodden on. Katy’s voice would be wasted on cutesy folk or suburban kitchen sink pop. Her pipes work their best magic when I’m tired and cold and the 149 is full of aggressive wankers eating smelly kebabs. With her help I can press my headphone buds deeper into my ears, stare out of the window and try and remember why I love living here so much.
[9]

Awww…

[Video][Website]
[5.88]

Jonathan Bogart: Cole Porter and Martha & the Vandellas would both be ashamed.
[3]

Dan MacRae: For a silly little pop outfit, Alphabeat’s singles have a weird talent for getting me emotionally invested. I’m not entirely sure why I go nuts for the “Ride On Time” bit of wailing (I only got around to listening to Black Box a couple years ago), but with every listen it just makes my heart skip a bit. I’m probably just a sucker for overstimulation.
[9]

Jer Fairall: I don’t see myself ever missing the hollow synths and 4/4 thump of A Night at the Roxbury-style 90s club pop, but I’d at least appreciate the opportunity to test that theory.
[3]

Erick Bieritz: If songs like “10,000 Nights of Thunder” recalled the late ‘80s of the Fine Young Cannibals, “Heatwave” suggests Alphabeat has kept the throwback dial at about 20 years relative to today and dove headlong into continental pop-house. Previously twee singer Stine Bramsen gets her Evelyn Thomas on and the band members speculate what the dance floors of must have sounded like back then (their answer: “Ride on Time,” like, a lot).
[6]

Edward Okulicz: They don’t know, they don’t know, they don’t know anybody else. But they do know their way around old S’Express, Snap and Black Box records, and the verses here are belting. Stine Bramsen is no Martha Wash or Loleatta Holloway no matter how much you “Ride On Time”-ise her on the chorus, mind you, and her “ooh-ooh-ooh” is a little G-rated to get the pulse racing, but this is so damn agreeable it doesn’t matter. I still prefer the thick misery of “Hole In My Heart”, though.
[7]

Martin Skidmore: This seems to have considerably more energy and punch than most of theirs; even if it doesn’t have much of a tune, she sounds a bit tougher and sharper, and we are spared his terrible singing.
[6]

Zach Lyon: I’m a much bigger fan of Alphabeat 2008 than Alphabeat 2010, but this is alright. Serviceable beat and the diva-ambition of her vocals is nothing but endearing.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Some entrepreneurial programmer should develop a Winamp plug-in that would zap Stine’s voice into any mediocre dance-pop thing. This can be the demo.
[7]

According to her Wikipedia, she’s an actress. Any thoughts on which emotion she’s doing here?…

[Video][Website]
[3.00]

Pete Baran: The sound of a milk drinking popstrel trying to work out exactly where her career fits in, and getting stuck in some sort of no man’s land between Joss Stone and Katie Melua. Not even as good as the John Woo film Broken Arrow, and that’s got John Travolta AND Christian Slater in it.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: If we’re supposed to find her interesting, she needs to do something of interest.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: She always sounds as if she has a bit of a cold, thick in tone and as if she should surely have more of a range than this.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: I’ve generally liked Pixie Lott’s singles, but it’s impossible to overstate how poorly she sings here. Her lower register swallows up entire lines. Poor, innocent words get impaled by her yelps. She bellows where anything else would do. I suppose this is all supposed to signify heartbreak, but it comes off as incompetence. Katy Perry could sing this better. Fergie could sing this better and practically did, on “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” Who knows how an actual singer might do?
[3]

Kat Stevens: Think how awesome the line “you’re still in me, like a broken arrow” would be if Fergie had sung it instead. I miss Fergie’s solo career like a child misses its blanket.
[3]

Frank Kogan: This could have been a fine track if Pixie had known how to make the basic weakness of her voice its center, the voice as broken as the story. Instead, we’ve got generic, wooden “quirkiness,” and singing that tries and fails to reach emotional heights.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Gulps, husk, and the potential of selling a song to the top rows of Meadowlands. But she loves electric strum more than those striking vocals — maybe more than tired metaphors.
[5]

Zach Lyon: Nothing about this works well enough to make up for the fact that fickleness is the least sympathetic personal problem to write a whiny song about. It sounds like she’s stuck between Edward and Jacob, so maybe this just isn’t meant for me or anyone above fourteen.
[1]

Jer Fairall: Conveniently appearing here hot on the heels of Faith Evans’ achingly pretty “Gone Already”, as this resembles something of a steroidal version of that song, although not as much as it does a carbon copy of Charice’s equally banal “Pyramid”. Still, some research on whether those pleasant strums that bookend the chorus are the product of a real acoustic guitar or just some canny production trick did lead me to this nice piano-and-voice version of the song which reveals an actual singer performing a pretty decent ballad that the single version’s nuance-free production is intent to obliterate.
[4]

That Fucked Up song is really growing on me, by the way. I mean, obviously that session version with the Canadian lass is a cut above, but the original’s pretty nifty too…

[Video][Website]
[2.64]

Zach Lyon: ‘ey girl… did it hurt… when you fell from heaven? Also, do you think that’d make a good premise for an entire song?
[3]

Al Shipley: I thought maybe by now Akon had just taken all that Gaga money and reinvested it in blood diamonds, but apparently he noticed the other 8 guys that sound just like him all over pop radio and wanted a piece of the action again.
[2]

John Seroff: It’s difficult for me to express how immensely tired I am of Akon’s vapid, milky electroglossolalia. Marinating him in Guetta’s less-than-special Eurosauce produces a yet ranker, populist tang; kneading in the aural cues of Apple television ads (“The New iPod Angel. Glow different”) places “Angel” firmly into the camp of unlistenable.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: Fundamentally, talking about “I’m looking at an angel” while sounding like a robot doesn’t work for me.
[4]

Josh Langhoff: Forgive me, Akon. At first I didn’t believe you, but that was before I learned she has wings and a halo.
[1]

Asher Steinberg: If you’re going to make a song about an angel, so high in the sky, sitting on cloud 9, etc., and your chosen style of production for this song is synth-pop, shouldn’t it have a dreamy, ethereal feel, not a David Guetta bad-remake-of-“I Gotta Feeling”-thump to it? More problematic is the fact that the singer’s Akon, who, even when he’s singing about angels, can never escape the monotony of the club or the sense that all his songs, even his more high-toned ones like this, are essentially about the experience of being dumbfounded by the size of some girl’s ass.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: David Guetta is the IKEA of songwriters. He is the Mad Libs of songwriters. He is the Windows-default script font of songwriters. He is the Toll House slice-and-bake cookie of songwriters. Radio is powerless against his massive stamp, as are the singers he scoops up and flattens. Points deducted on fucking principle.
[1]

Kat Stevens: I reached my limit on “I Gotta Feeling” re-treads back in February.
[1]

Chuck Eddy: Sounds more like “Your Love” by the Outfield than “Angel” by Shaggy. I guess that’s something.
[3]

Jer Fairall: Given the source, I was expecting a riff on some other popular “Angel”-titled song, so the question was simply a matter of whether he’d be shameless enough to mutate the Sarah McLachlan elegy, whether his memory stretched far back enough to remember the Aerosmith power ballad, or whether he’d be unoriginal enough to do some mild reworking of that Shaggy track that was itself already a dimwitted spin on “Angel of the Morning” (my money was on the latter). Turns out that this is a rip-off of nothing in particular, though it resembles any number of faceless Euro dance tracks in general, making up what it lacks in Akon’s usual obnoxiousness with bland serviceability.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: I’d like to miss him, but he won’t go away.
[6]

Judging by Google Image Search, she’s gone through a fair few looks…

[Video][Myspace]
[4.78]

Jonathan Bogart: Utterly respectable grown-woman pop. Wish there was more to say.
[6]

Chuck Eddy: Maybe half as good as the Eagles version. Also, backwards. But the lines about monotony are trust-worthy; Faith certainly appears to be an expert.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: This seems to be a week for comebacks — her last album was five years ago. This is a slow number, sounding fairly classy if unexciting, and she sings it with the skill you’d expect. I didn’t care for the plinky piano or the droney chorus — the whole thing struck me as rather depressing, even enervating, somehow.
[3]

Alfred Soto: This is the way to do simple: let a vocalist of average emotional and average physical range project without forcing her into something embarrassing. I’ve always rather liked Evans, but, still, facts are facts.
[5]

Al Shipley: I was once debating the merits of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Stressed Out” with a friend who liked it way more than me when I decided that “adversity” is the most Faith Evans word in the English language. This is such a typical Faith bummer that I almost combed the lyrics just to see if “adversity” was somewhere in there.
[3]

Jer Fairall: Her self-empowering sentiment initially sits at uncomfortable odds with the lush surroundings, but the more she tries to build towards a defiant climax, the more her brave face is revealed as a defence mechanism. Plus, I could listen to that lovely piano melody for hours.
[7]

Erick Bieritz: Piano and a thin, stiff beat make for compellingly minimal accompaniment, but Faith can’t show the same restraint and riffs too hard over this, building what should be simple resignation to showy histrionics.
[5]

John Seroff: Most of Faith’s music is at least bombastically emotional enough to provoke some sort of reaction; this kind of snoozy, platitudinous Ms. Lonelyhearts letter is just so much wallpaper.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Let’s see: a midtempo ballad, with piano dripping over the beat like in “Battlefield,” and oh yes, it’s a song called “Gone Already” about leaving a petered-out relationship. Thankfully, the Tedder similarities end there, but this is still just a decent-to-middling R&B number, breezier than some but nevertheless samey. Even the electric guitar that comes in during the bridge is held back in the mix, like it’s afraid of the drama it’s more than earned.
[5]

Remember when Wyclef wasn’t the most successful member of The Fugees?…

[Video][Website]
[4.71]

Jer Fairall: Twelve years on and she has lost none of it: her gentle yet authoritative vocal presence, her fine ear for sounds that evoke the smoothest and prettiest of 70s funk and soul, her pushy didacticism.
[6]

Pete Baran: It’s great to hear her voice again, but this is a thoroughly average showcase. Not as nuts as I had expected, not as interesting as I would want it to be, there is barely a song in here.
[4]

Josh Langhoff: I welcome her voice back into my life like a warm hug; but while we embrace, she just keeps blabbering about karma, and I can’t tell whether this is supposed to be an apology or what, and THEN Beaker from the Muppets comes in and starts serenading us, and this is just the most awkward welcome back hug ever.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: It’s a laid-back, summery, jazzy number — all very pleasant, but I found myself losing interest almost instantly, which is not promising for a comeback single.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: A sketchy fragment of a Lauryn Hill song is better than no Lauryn Hill at all, and the purp-a-durp synth line is a joy to hear. Sure, it’s lazy as hell and there’s barely anything there, but so what? Not everything needs to cohere.
[7]

Al Shipley: Congratulations, you can get on Jill Scott’s level, even if your own level is a distant memory.
[4]

Alfred Soto: A couple of weeks ago I fell in love anew with “All That I Can Say,” her 1999 contribution to Mary: a sinuous, airy production on which Mary J. Blige rides triumphantly. This sonic cousin is neither here nor there; she’s trying vocal and production tricks not with abandon, but with the hopes that something will stick — which, after 12 years, it better.
[6]

It’s our highest-rated song to feature an AMC Pacer in the video!…

[Video][Website]
[5.46]

Alfred Soto: A beautiful chorus sitting atop a corpse of a dance track (is it a dance track? Someone tell me).
[4]

Katie Lewis: Oh neat. I’m going to see Deadmau5 on Friday. I had no idea he could sing like that! Oh, wait…
[4]

Josh Langhoff: Stupid research. I made the mistake of looking up “Brazil” by deadmau5, and now I don’t really like either song. The deadmau5 repeats itself without changing (OK, with admittedly great chord changes) for way too long, and “Happiness” sounds like an awkward lyrical paste over an entirely serviceable track. It’s like when Kurt Elling does a vocalese to a Shorter solo — impressive attempt, but the words are always a little icky. Bumped a point to compensate for my overthinking.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Seldom have vocals seemed so pointless.
[5]

Asher Steinberg: The hook is stunningly prosaic, in the sense that the words are actually prose, the sort of prose in which you might write a rejection letter to a job applicant or a clinical write-up on a schizophrenic patient. It may be the clunkiest, most awkward hook in the history of American pop music. Also stunning is how devoid of any actual urgency is the “quick, quick, quick” bridge. One gets the sense that a computer put the song together from snippets of current hits and gave it to a robot to sing. But what’s even worse about the song is the Stargate, deadmau5-sampling production. Nothing about this song or singer calls for house. And yet there it is, and it’s fairly analytic, cold house at that. So inappropriate.
[0]

John Seroff: “Happiness” has a vivid and lively pulse, vaguely reminiscent of the chugging locomotive belly of Underworld’s “Born Slippy” but washed clean of grime and gothic insinuation in disco rosewater. Jordan’s delicately insistent multitracked voice flashes from between the strobe lights with an older diva’s strength. Her humming is a string trio and the “hurry hurry hurry now/quick quick quick” chorus is utterly charming. In a landscape scattered with message songs and more complex didacticism, Jordan finds the sweet spot on a bit of simple, undecorated pop and hits that underhand pitch out of the park.
[9]

Zach Lyon: Oh, this sneaks up on you. Jordan isn’t necessarily a quality here, and her part could’ve been executed better by a more experienced performer, but she doesn’t detract. The lyrics sound like they’re coming from a QVC salesperson (“You don’t wanna miss this offer!” “You’ve got to be out of your mind not to try this out!” “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!”) and the chorus is trite and awkward. But that hurry hurry now/quick quick quick sounds like it was ripped out of an old Girls Aloud or Sugababes track (I was surprised to learn she was American), and that’s always a positive. The kicker, though, is Stargate’s production. They’re masters, and they turn a generic beat into something amazing just by knowing exactly when to change the volume, when to drop out, when to blast it back in. It’s impressive work.
[8]

Tyrone Palmer: What a surprise, Stargate actually do subtlety rather well! Here they deliver a glacial, Kompakt-esque banger (the song that this instantly reminded me of was Superpitcher’s remix of MFA’s “The Difference It Makes”). The verses slowly crawl into an absolutely jubilant chorus. On paper the lyrics are kind of eye-rollingly basic, but Alexis Jordan’s sprightly delivery here is spot-on and saves the song from overbearing sappy-ness.
[7]

Michaelangelo Matos: Everything about it bubbles invitingly, from the “hurry, hurry, hurry”/”sorry, sorry, sorry” backing vox to the keyboards (of course). Maybe too arty or uneventful for the pop-inclined on here, but it hits the spot for me.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: I’m guessing purely from the sound that she’s a British pop-idol contestant; the overly-mature vocals, the thin house backing, and the big unearned sweep of the chorus give it away. I might like the song with a less anonymous vocalist; as it is, I dig the falsetto “happiness”es and only endure the rest of her attempts to belt. (And it turns out she’s not British, but I got the rest right.)
[5]

Anthony Easton: The woman can sing, love that scaling up when she says “happiness”, and the little grunts are always a nice touch, but too much excess noise.
[3]

Jer Fairall: So determinedly mild that it comes and goes without leaving any impression whatsoever, but in the moment it is easy to smile and nod along with a production that opts for a percolating lite-disco approach over the kind of garish muddle of so much current dance pop. Likewise, Jordan’s vocals emphasize warmth and melody over diva showboating; she actually can sing but doesn’t make too big a deal of it, which is rare for a TV singing contest participant. Small favours, perhaps, but favours nonetheless.
[6]

Martin Skidmore: Maybe her nasal tones and standard R&B vocal moves fail to convey any great amount of happiness, but it’s enjoyable if you ignore that.
[7]

I sense there may just be a tiny wee bit of discussion about this one in the comments…

[Video][Website]
[6.91]

Josh Langhoff: I imagine Eric’s one of those annoying people (like me) who blathers on and on about how his altered state of mind brings him closer to God and reveals deep universal truths and profundities, about how Jesus’s first miracle was making wine at a party, about how the Tao is in the piss and shit and anyway the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao (land sakes, I’m doing it now), when really he’s just drunk (and high? Online lyrics say “Dig down deep / Find my stash,” whereas in this version he finds his glass and strikes his match. Another reason to vote yes on Prop.19!) . The floppy opening riff, dramatic shifts in instrumentation, coda, and abrupt final chord all create the impression that he’s making up the song as he goes along. Not until the third verse do we discover that some absent “her” is behind all this Hakuna Matata philosophizing.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: This is one of the best and most interesting country-rock numbers I’ve heard in a while – the rock guitar sound is vastly less dated than the usual, and he sings with some spirit. There’s a serious enthusiasm to the way he sings it, wanting to convey feelings and attitudes in a less cliched way than is so common in the genre. It’s almost like coming across an indie singer-songwriter who can actually sing, play and write songs.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Best country song about doing grass since Toby Keith’s one about smoking weed with Willie. Could be a lost Allman Brothers track, and I could totally imagine Lil Jon covering it in concert.
[8]

Asher Steinberg: If this were a rap song, it would rise to the level of a late-career B-Legit smoking pot album cut (definitely not even a single). Someone likable but not extremely talented or prone to recording over interesting production. As it’s a country song, it’s a bit more of a novelty, but that only takes it too far.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Country radio has finally caught up to 1992, if the Collective Soul “yeah”s are any indication. Elsewhere, the red-state dogwhistles and coyness about what precisely constitutes a little smoke makes for a bipartisan frat anthem with a limited shelf-life. It’s appropriately laid-back, but with a machine-tooled roar in the chorus that belies his supposed reluctance to embrace modernity. Even country radio adapts or dies.
[6]

Katie Lewis: My parents punished me often – sometimes by confiscating and then breaking CDs I bought that they didn’t approve of or didn’t like the cover art of – when I was in high school because I listened to a lot of “non-Christian” music and was an “impressionable” teenager that needed to be taught a lesson. My sister is 10 years younger than me, currently in high school, is a NASCAR and country music fanatic, and can do no wrong in my parents’ eyes. They are very supportive of her inclinations, and buy her front row tickets to Brad Paisley concerts when he’s in town, and have sing-a-longs to all her favorite Toby Keith albums in the car when they’re all driving around together. I don’t know if she knows this song or not, but I’m sure it would be approved solely due to the guy’s last name being “Church”. I envy my sister’s probably-unrealized power to get away with listening to this kind of reprehensible dribble without being threatened by our parents that she’s going to hell. And I’m glad I got the hell out of Texas.
[3]

John Seroff: This is the kind of calculated, sneering redneck battle cry I can get behind: jangling, channel-ricochet guitar closer to Kraftwerk than Skynyrd; kick pedal heartbeat; power chord multiple climaxes and twangy stoner rebel yells of mo’ mo’ mo’. All in the service of gettin’ fucked up on a Friday night over doing anything vaguely productive. Sure, it’s pandering to the sheetrock set, but it’s also damned well effective; with this on the juke, I’d be first on the floor in my shit-kickin’ boots. Dumb times, good times.
[8]

Chuck Eddy: Um, perhaps I should preface this review by confessing that I frequently wear an black Eric Church T-shirt, which has his name on the back and “I DON’T LIKE TO FIGHT, BUT I AIN’T SCARED TO BLEED” on the front. Glad they got that comma in there! So okay, that said, in these three minutes the rhythm and echo are Delta blues as electronic dance music, the swing and sway give you what the lyrics promise, the increasing crunch is raging hard rock (add all that up you get: mid ’80s ZZ Top?), the quiet-then-loud changes add power in both directions, the “want a little more right, a little less left” makes me wonder why Eric thinks that (especially since he usually tends not to wear his politics on his sleeve) and whether the stuff about his changing definition of “change” is somehow related, the “yeah!” yells are ’90s pop grunge (Collective Soul to be exact), the not-planning-for-future stuff hits close to home, the stuff about getting her back sounds like he’s deciding whether to take a bath, the rap about pulling out his stash and letting his memory crash makes me wonder if he’s a libertarian or just confused. Still, a great track from a mostly disappointing album. Even better as a standalone.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The faint melodic nod to “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” adduces its novelty, and Church’s restraint is unusual in a party number. Good hook.
[6]

Frank Kogan: Wants to turn up the quiet; 50 seconds later he turns up the guitars instead, so he doesn’t know what he wants, and probably votes to kick the shit out of the poor without knowing that’s what he’s voting for. But his groove and confusion hook me consistently.
[8]

Zach Lyon: I really hate trick intros, where the artist will begin a song with something that sounds completely unique compared to the rest of their catalog, or the catalog of their genre, before jumping right back into the boring. Church teases for a whole damn minute with this awesome minimal stomp before he does that awful country yelp and the song is blasted with “Kashmir”-level bombast for some reason. I don’t understand it. I like his whole outlaw-revival shtick and the chorus is hooky enough without all the orchestrations, and he’s got charisma to spare; I just don’t see why he’s gotta betray his own “turn the quiet up/turn the noise down” command. I wish country songs got remixed more often.
[7]

The video version of this is ruddy awesome, plus it’s only 11 minutes long…

[Video][Website]
[5.10]

Jonathan Bogart: When I first saw this song in a playlist, I muttered to myself that it better be the best fucking song in the world to be worth 13 minutes. It’s not.
[3]

Doug Robertson: It just goes “derl derl dearl derl derl derl dearl” over and over again, while getting a bit shoutier before throwing in some strings for good measure. The last four minutes deviate slightly from the template, but only in as much as an oblate spheroid differs from an actual sphere.
[4]

Chuck Eddy: You know, if you’re gonna do a 13-minute “single” this repetitive, it helps to have rhythm guys who can actually lay down some Kraut-like semblance of a drone, if not an actual groove. Also a singer who can do more than croak and bark. And a guitarist whose idea of rocking out isn’t staring at his shoes. I mean, I appreciate that this band seems more ambitious, on paper, than your typical hardcore or noise dumbshits, and don’t even mind that their front fatso’s flab rolls like a bowl full of jelly on stage — didn’t hate them when I saw them at SXSW this spring. But sorry, nothing whatsofriggingever happens in this track until just about the halfway point, when the horns (or whatever) come in, and then the female vocal counterpoint follows around the nine-minute mark. And even those aren’t interesting, beyond the mere fact that they exist. Am I supposed to give it bonus points just for longevity, or what?
[3]

Martin Skidmore: Perhaps it’s like Napalm Death if you gave them loads of tranquilisers.
[4]

Mallory O’Donnell: Three minutes worth of musical ideas spread across a near quarter-hour of actual listening time appended to a vocal shat out by Ian MacKaye in ’86 whilst he waited in line for a Boca burger. Also apparently sued Camel alongside legendary asshole Xiu Xiu for giving the offended parties… free press. Seriously, dude?
[2]

Alfred Soto: The band’s Wikipedia page is even longer than the track length, and more fascinating (did you know that they sued Rolling Stone? that they sang on a 2009 remake of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”?). Local phenomenon — local ephemera too, past the six-minute mark.
[5]

Zach Lyon: You know, the first nine minutes of this are actually pretty good. Cut down the intro, shave a couple minutes off the screamy disyllabic section and end it a bit sooner, and you end up with a nice six-minute pseudo-hardcore track. I’m surprised by how often I’ve been coming back to it, but I do like the aesthetic of dude’s voice next to the sheer bliss of those power chord progressions. And the string interlude is wonderful. Unfortunately, they were insistent on turning some nice sounds into what I guess is an attempt at a modern Marquee Moon. The result, as a whole, sounds much more lifeless and strained than it should, and for all the punk posturing it still put my girlfriend to sleep after three minutes. I’m a good picker-and-chooser though, so I’m glad I got the chance to skip to the nice parts.
[7]

Jer Fairall: Even more so than The Chemistry of Common Life, “Year of the Ox” displays a sonic richness that, as an outsider, I can only assume is unusual for this genre; if anything, the song’s ambitious length, wisely understated orchestral flourishes and well-paced sense of forward momentum remind me happily of Husker Du circa Zen Arcade. Truth be told, it’s only the barking vocals that are keeping me from wholly embracing this (Bob Mould, though occasionally hysterical, was generally coherent), but I understand that such things come with the territory. A genuinely impressive track, overall.
[7]

John Seroff: Epic Lear-on-the-heath raging over a theme that takes a licking and keeps on blaring, “Year of the Ox” runs sandwiched parallel between absurdity and brilliance. Fucked Up’s full-throated devotion and fearless commitment see it through. Something melodic, gem-like and true is at the heart here; damned if I know what it is, but maybe another fifteen minutes in the pit will make it clearer. Couldn’t hurt. Well, it could. But I don’t mind.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Like being gored to death by a sexy bear.
[8]

The motion painting for this should be a treat when it shows up…

[Video][Website]
[5.92]

Anthony Easton: Kanye has always been self aware, and good at apologizing for his excesses, so he is a monster, but he is one of those very sad, emotionally raw ones in Where the Wild Things Are; even the braggadocio is a way of fronting, a way of avoiding the overwhelming loneliness and sadness that grounds all of this work. The Minaj verse has a surgical parody of the hyper capitalism of hip-hop, and the percussion is magisterial, and the whole thing… I don’t know if it’s genius or shit, late period Elvis excess or Liberace kitsch — both have their place, but both have a decadence that is away from West’s centralities.
[5]

Zach Lyon: 1: Bon Iver? Okay, whatever, I guess. Let’s not kid ourselves into thinking his inclusion is anything more than political posturing. 2: Whoa, beat, there. 3: I guess Rick Ross is just here as a hype man or something. I just wrote more words than he has in this song. 4: Kanye should win a VMA for “Best at Being Outshone by Own Beats.” 5: Wow, now that’s the kind of verse that makes you forget that Jay-Z used to be Jay-Z. 6: WHAT. SINCE WHEN IS NICKI MINAJ CAPABLE OF SUCH THINGS. WHAT IS HAPPENING. HOW. I am a sold motherfucker.
[8]

Katie Lewis: Nicki Minaj raps circles around everyone on this track. Given that “everyone” includes Kanye West, (a little) Rick Ross, and Jay-Z, this is quite an impressive feat. And given that I completely identify with Nicki Minaj’s brand of bat-shit insanity, I adore her crazy energy here, but find the rest of the all-star hodgepodge to be rather disappointing and, in some parts, boring.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Docking points for unimaginative use of Bon Iver and a Rick Ross intro that at least has the virtue of brevity. But the rest of them kill it, Ye still sounding hungry after all these years, or maybe it’s the paranoia, Jay playing the capo di tutti role he was born for, and Nicki rolling out a sitcom cast’s worth of voices, postures, and lines easily worth the 50K she brags on. As always, she runs away with the song; at least here Kanye is smart enough to give her space.
[8]

Alex Macpherson: You could write an essay about Nicki Minaj’s still-incomplete crossover from hip-hop underground to ubiquitous mainstream presence, a journey that few are able to make these days. It’s seemed alternately carefully plotted and frantically ad-libbed: Minaj has unveiled different angles to her USP gradually and with strategically-positioned collaborators, but there’s been a fair amount of panicky throwing shit at the radio to see what sticks too. “Monster” is inarguably a milestone for her, though; it doesn’t reveal any new tricks, per se, but is a concise summation of what she’s shown so far – everything thrilling and novel about her in one incredible verse, delivered on her biggest stage yet. There’s almost something suspicious about how comprehensively she outshines the two most famous (if far from best, these days) rappers on the planet, as if that was the primary motivation behind the track existing at all – though any shock dissipates once you recall Minaj has been killing them both for the past two years. Here, West is adequate, in a pleasant surprise; but Jay-Z is abominable, sabotaging his verse from the off by reciting an unimaginative, unevocative list of monsters like he’s cramming for an exam, and somehow managing to get worse from there. (What’s his Achilles heel? INDIE ROCK.) It’s all set up perfectly for Nicki to seize the track by the scruff of its neck, bobbing and weaving through a dazzling selection of vocal costume changes and riding the beat harder into the ground than either of her collaborators were able to do (the physical energy she injects into the track on “hotter than a Middle Eastern climate” is something else). All the while, she discourses sharply on her own realness – is there a more perfect self-definition than “Forget Barbie, fuck Nicki, sh-she’s fake – she on a diet but my POCKETS EATING CHEESECAKE”? [10], once again, for Minaj – and it’s time for her to stop being dragged down by her collaborators now.
[7]

Asher Steinberg: I’ll let others comment on what a thrill Nicki’s “verse” — really, a collection of about twenty separately recorded snippets, which rather detracts from the virtuosic flow-switching mastery of the thing — is. My complaint is simply that none of these verses have anything to do with each other; certainly the minimal beat doesn’t impose any unity on the song. So it ends up being nothing more than a series of disconnected attempts at displays of technical superiority (one of which really succeeds, one of which is unusually solid for Kanye but nothing to write home about otherwise, and one of which is a not very curious curiosity and nothing more), followed by a lame indie singer coda about leaving an unspecified something up to God’s discretion that has absolutely nothing to do with anything. If this is an attempt at reviving that long-lost art, the posse track, Kanye needs to realize that a posse track isn’t the musical equivalent of a dunk contest; rather it’s largely about signifying community in what’s generally an individualist genre. The only saving grace of “Monster” as a song — Nicki’s verse is fine enough and belongs as a freestanding track on her own mixtapes — is Rick Ross’s humble and far too brief intro, which both recognizes the existence of the beat and of his fellow participants.
[5]

Al Shipley: Rick Ross’s 4 bars do the least work for a feature credit in the history of rap, while Nicki’s 32 bars are a little extra, but extra is what she does, so it works. Everybody in rap wants to “make a movie,” but somebody tell Kanye that doesn’t mean every song has to be 2 hours long. This might actually feel as bold as it wants to be if Kanye wasn’t recycling the same clunky funk he’s been peddling since 2003, and the same vocal distortion he’s been overusing since 2008.
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: The muffled basement beat is a good idea musically (‘Ye sounds less self-conscious than usual, and so do his guests) and strategically: if you’re sick of the pomp that accompanies just about everything Kanye-related, well, so’s he! The most becoming Minaj verse I’ve caught in an age, too, not that I’ve been paying super-close attention.
[7]

Martin Skidmore: Kanye struggles to keep up with the beats, Jay-Z sounds as if nothing could be easier, Nicki is brilliantly wild as ever, Rick and Bon may as well not have shown up.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The swampy mix and a couple of swampy voices are the stars here, all of which inspire the ringleader to deliver one of his nastier performances: Tom Waits at the Apollo.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Kanye is an abusive, alcoholic, power-mad husband, and rock critics are all his battered wives. Would be a 2 without Minaj’s star-turn.
[4]

Renato Pagnani: By all logic this shouldn’t work at all, but to Kanye’s credit somehow it does. Like most of the G.O.O.D. Friday tracks ‘Ye’s put out over the last two months, “Monster” is kind of a giant mess — too long and stuffed with too many ideas, many of which don’t quite fit together (see: Bon Iver’s many hooks here) — but like those songs, there’s also some gems strewn about debris. “Have you ever had sex with a pharaoh? Acgh I put that pussy in a sarcophagus” makes no sense, but it’s the kind of vintage Kanye hilariousness that the Louis Vuitton Don brings to tracks when he’s on top of his game. These days it’s a coin toss whether Jay-Z wrecks tracks or just wrecks tracks, and here he embarrasses himself by rattling off names of monsters (‘cause the song’s called “Monster,” get it?) before half-redeeming himself with a twist-turn verse that casts aside the Old Man Flow he’s been polishing lately. All the talk about “Monster” has -— and rightfully, might I add -— centered around Nicki’s star-cementing verse, in which she tries on about a dozen outfits, not only taking the song’s conceit somewhere interesting, but simply rapping her ass off. It’s that beat, though, that impresses almost as much as Minaj — it’s the filthiest thing Kanye’s put together in a long time, all sticky and humid, tumbling forward like a drunk Gigan. This isn’t a song — it’s about five different songs sewn together in Frankensteinian fashion. You can see the loose threads and where the seams are splitting, but that’s most of the charm.
[6]

Mallory O’Donnell: Cookie Monster: also a monster. The Vermonster: a monster too. If this monster had been shorter, my thoughts might not have drifted towards dessert. Everybody knows dessert is a motherfuckin’ monster.
[5]