Let’s just say that our work-life balance has been a bit askew the past week…

[Video][Website]
[5.14]

Al Shipley: Her upcoming greatest hits package presents me with a good opportunity to trumpet Pink as perhaps the best female pop star of the past decade (or at least the one with the most consistent discography). But the new single off the collection, while good, doesn’t exactly help back up my claim by simply putting a more celebratory spin on the sound of her great, emotionally cathartic most recent album, Funhouse.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Not a ten because Greatest Hits fill-em-up tracks don’t get tens. But otherwise this does everything I want uptempo Pink to do: rock, cuss, stomp, laugh at itself, and inspire dumbass dance moves and dumberass pick-up lines. She’s still playing the bad-girl alternative to the prissy princesses of pop, and even now that there are no prissy princesses left (okay, maybe Taylor) in a world owned by Ke$ha, Gaga, and Nicki, she’s still something like a den mother to the wasted weirdos, straddling the table and bawling at you to take a swing if you think you’re hard enough.
[9]

Zach Lyon: It might be the existence of Ke$ha that makes me bow to Pink (or P!nk, if we’re really gonna make this comparison — I do prefer exclamation points), and I don’t even mind Ke$ha all that much, and I used to hate Pink. It’s just that, you put a song like this next to “Tik Tok”, and lines like “too school for cool” seem almost masterful in comparison, with Pink looking like the grizzled sensei and Ke$ha the bratty kid that tries to sweep the leg.
[7]

Alfred Soto: In line with the ignoble tradition of recording new tracks for compilations, Pink walks into the studio, spits comatose rhymes written in handwriting she can’t decipher, and exits in a huff for a Matt Lauer interview. She can’t help but sound committed though, especially when power chords offer assistance. It’s admirable, I suppose, that she remains a devotee of the “Get the Party Started” ethos — occasionally it produces an “All That Money Wants” or “True Faith.” This ain’t one.
[4]

Pete Baran: A string of half-arsed glib lines: leaning on the spectre of PARTY like Andrew WK had never happened. She is raising her glass, but she never says what’s in it. A Bucks Fizz will never get you pissed.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: I wasn’t keen on most of Jarvis Cocker’s valorisation of supposedly dismissed outsiders, but at least I knew who he was talking about. I have no idea who Pink thinks her constituency are on this song along those lines.
[3]

Alex Macpherson: After making such a big deal out of her move away from R&B and antipathy to teenpop in 2002, Pink has wound up making a song that, in 2010, could have been sung by anyone from Usher to Miley Cyrus. Of course, this is more to do with the homogenisation of the charts around a 4×4 beat pounding on a human face forever; rock, R&B and teenpop puréed into one indistinguishable overdriven electrostomp soup. Also, even Madonna at her laziest would have rejected a lyric like “Don’t be fancy, let’s get dancey.” (EDIT: Actually, she probably wouldn’t. Which puts “Raise Your Glass” on a par with the wholly forgotten “Don’t Stop” and its own unfortunate “Feel it in your body/Sing la-dee-da-dee” couplet.)
[3]

Jer Fairall: Within the first 0:40 we get “what’s the dealio”, “where’s the rock and roll” (accompanied by her vocal mock-up of a wanky guitar riff), “call me up if you want gangsta” and, sweet Jesus, “why so serious?” It would be a lot easier to buy her allegiance to all the “underdogs” and “dirty little freaks” were she ever to present her arguments in music that didn’t just happen to fall in line with whatever popular trends ruled the charts at the time.
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: She got away with railing against pop stardom through the sheeniest radio production imaginable because the vocal had some weight. Here it bounces along with everything else, precisely as trapped in polyurethane as those stupid keyboard blats.
[3]

Josh Langhoff: Sure it’s LOUD, because all Adult Contemporary these days is LOUD, but I’m not sure what makes this “nitty gritty”. She seems to think talking like a rapper or the Joker makes her transgressive, when really it just makes her an overbearing fun-killer — like, wayyyy more overbearing than Ke$ha. But man oh man, that’s a chorus.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: One of her most propulsive, anthemic choruses to date, though its simplicity is cheapened a little by its overreliance on glib wordplay and cliches in the verses, which she has never had the ironic capabilities to sell.
[6]

Renato Pagnani: Pink has no fears about diving headfirst into clichés, which makes her fearless but also gives her ironic distance, paradoxically from the inside. And she’s simply a good songwriter, treating these kind of bombastic, shout-y choruses like Lebron does free-throws. And it’s quite clear she’s thumbing her nose at everyone. It’s flimsier than your typical Pink single, and for the all the snap the hook brings it’s not quite enough to make up for the inert space in between, but it’s the right kind of stupid and that counts for something. About six somethings.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s heartbreaking to watch Max Martin turn Pink into a Kelly/Katy clone with shorter hair. Every successive single sands off another bit of edge and then sprinkles the sawdust on top to make it look like there’s more underneath. The worst parts are the glimpses of what Pink used to be. Pink will crash your party, but then you remember how she’d get it started. She calls herself a nitty-gritty, dirty little freak, but she’s been one already with music that doesn’t sound like something Max found attached to an old email draft. She sings one eensy girl-teasing “panty snatcher” line when this used to make up entire songs. And she punctuates her lyrics with clever cursy asides, but Can’t Take Me Home was full of these, and “remember that time we went to Pizza Hut and you told me she was your cousin?” from “Hell Wit Ya” is worth twenty of the drinking platitudes here. Raise your glass if you want. I’ll be weeping into mine.
[4]

Mordechai Shinefield: “Why so serious?” Pink asks, and she’s not just a couple years behind on The Dark Knight but also on her own shtick.
[6]

So yeah, it’s been a little while…

[Video][Website]
[5.73]

Jer Fairall: In which Tim gets a lesson in multiculturalism and doesn’t even have to leave the bar for it.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Even more on-the-nose than power-pop usually is. No shit, the song was really all about a kiss?
[6]

Katie Lewis: Admittedly, the most recent single I’ve heard by Tim McGraw before this was “Indian Outlaw”. I could have sworn this man was a country artist (and too old, married, and child-bearing to be releasing songs of this sort), but the guitars, the overly bombastic contrast between verse and bridge/chorus, and the thinly veiled ignorance of Spanish names, music, and girly drinks makes this a third-class alt-rock single at best.
[3]

Martin Skidmore: This is pretty horrid – not so much country as ’70s soft rock, with one of the most predictable build-ups imaginable and hackneyed yet obtrusive playing. He delivers the slightly awkward lyrics cheerfully enough, but I found it nigh on intolerable.
[2]

Josh Langhoff: Just for aggravating the cranks at the 9513, this song is worth at least a 6. But on top of that we’ve got the skinny tie beat, the riff that sounds like either Sonic Youth or “Since U Been Gone”, the humongous Phil Vassar-ish “WHOA-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH”s, and the driving drum and bass fill on the last chorus. The title is destined to inspire dirty jokes among Tim’s audience, and that was probably the intent. All in all it’s about as country as I am, but if that makes it bad, “Hey Ya!” needed more rapping. This thing is a big dumb monster that’s learning to manipulate tools and will kill us all.
[10]

Zach Lyon: A pretty enjoyable Tim McGraw tune about falling for a Spanish girl. It feels a bit noble-savagey, but this probably represents the best possible hope for making the South less racist with their immigration laws. Whatever happens with the election, I’m going to either credit or blame this song.
[6]

Frank Kogan: Woman as other, with her Latin blood and her candy lips and her feminine motley drink, all of which make Timmy here want to go a little bit loco, though this song is more silly than nutty, McGraw and crew at play with words and tunelets.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: My ingrained love for guitar stabs almost overcame the icky exoticism here — new Spanish woman, new foreign song, new girly cocktail, same difference, right? But then Tim turned all the guitars to mush anyway.
[3]

Alfred Soto: I’ve waited all my life for the hum of those electro-glazed guitars to warm McGraw’s lips; I’ve waited months for power chords as impeccably timed as those cushioning the lyric “I wanna go crazy with you.” Tim discovers Brandon Flowers! Then I remembered McGraw’s talent for of-the-moment studio rock, and more striking, his ear for picking good songs. As much as the arrangement threatens to swamp his vocal, McGraw demonstrates he’s in charge — a slurred syllable here, a belted phrase there. A deserved crossover beside “The House That Built Me” and “Need You Now.”
[8]

Renato Pagnani: There’s a little fetishizing of the Other going on here, but it doesn’t feel like exploitation so much as a natural response. Tim likes this girl’s name (and her in general) because she’s different and exotic, and it comes off as innocent here, but as someone who understands the, “Hey, your name is weird,” and “Hey, your name is really sexy!” dichotomy, it’s also both flattering and weird. And it’s smart writing that it’s not -— immediately, at least -— the girl’s lips that feel good on his, but her name (and what’s even better is that we never find out her name!), and then a strange cocktail that she orders for him. When at the end of the song it actually is her lips (and of course it was always going to be), it feels earned and like a mini-victory for three-minute storytelling. This also -— and somewhat surprisingly to my country-novice ears -— kind of rocks. And those “Woooaaaaahhhs!” and yelps in the background are great.
[7]

Additional Scores

Anthony Easton: [6]

And so, inevitably, we end with…

[Video][Website]
[7.27]

Anthony Easton: You know when you’re really young, and the first boy who ever gave you an orgasm, you confused the warmth of physiological response for an emotional response, and you transfered the awesome power of the orgasm, to this sort of murky emotional swamp that is the mix of country radio, tabloid magazines, and what ever reading you did in AP English?
[9]

Al Shipley: This sounds a lot like that other new song she sang at the VMAs. She really doesn’t have a very deep bag of tricks, does she?
[3]

Pete Baran: I think sometimes a successful artist just clicks, and it starts to become difficult for them not to have a hit if they stick to their comfort zone. This is bang in Taylor Swift’s sweet spot, narrative enough for the proto-country fans out there, upbeat enough for pop radio. It would be churlish to accuse her of playing safe; she is a pop star, and this is exactly what her fans want.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Writing about Taylor Swift is like playing capture-the-flag on a minefield. One pole, she’s the brilliant troubadour of this generation. The other, she’s the childish, reactionary emblem of a movement that shouldn’t exist. Heaps of context are packed down into the dirt on either side, not that either side notices as they palooka their way across. You almost forget that Taylor Swift makes music. So without any biographical criticism (although that September line tempts), with no speculation on which famous pop star or actor this is supposedly about, with no comments about Taylor’s image, and knowing this leaves out a significant chunk of the story, here’s the deal. The almost-staccato pacing in the chorus helps break things up, and either Nathan Chapman suddenly became a vocal-production wizard between albums or Taylor was never the bad singer some accuse her of being. But she’s still wading through soporific malaise, same as always. The bridge is briefly stirring, like Taylor or Nathan got bored with their own work and dozed off for a second, but it doesn’t last. I can’t stand this when Daughtry, John Mayer, Boys Like Girls or Colbie Caillat do it. Taylor is not special.
[5]

Alex Macpherson: One of the least interesting songs on Speak Now, but maybe the best. There are few contextual talking points: no deliberate signposts of maturity à la “Mine”, no potshots or calling out, no feminist-baiting – just Swift taking on a classic pop subject in a classic way and bringing it to aching life. In terms of melody alone, “Back To December” might rate as one of Swift’s finest works, her voice rising and falling in waves of sadness; it’s beautifully paced, too, from the halting first verse to the way the dramatic bridge winds slowly, reluctantly, to the devastating resignation of “If the chain is on your door, I guess I understand.” Maybe what makes it so moving is this underlying acceptance that, no matter how much she swallows her pride and bares her soul, it’s an exercise in futility. Taylor Swift may believe in happy endings – but she damn well believes in unhappy ones too.
[9]

Edward Okulicz: Hardly representative of the quality and maturity — dare I say bravery? — of its parent album, but right in just about every other way. Taylor’s always done fond well, but here she does conciliatory with as much self-assurance and melodic smarts as she does wounded. Once again she brings the simple poetry of the lyrics to life with her voice, and this doesn’t have the layers or vividness of most of her last album but it has more restraint, more room to breathe, and is all the better for it.
[8]

Renato Pagnani: There’s a reason that Taylor sets this song in December, a month rife with symbolic possibilities. So what exactly is over? Not just a relationship that she messed up, but an entire mentality, an outmoded way of thinking that led Taylor first to heartbreak, but then, crucially, to insight — which is why our humbled heroine keeps going back to an ending. Because only from endings are beginnings possible.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: A song apologising for ending a relationship and asking for another chance. I don’t know if it has anything to do with her life, but as usual with her, it convinces. The pulsing guitar sound helps the mood too, making it tense and uneasy. The whole thing is pretty heartbreaking, and very maturely written.
[9]

Alfred Soto: I can’t shake the sense that the strings remind me of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” but it’s the only blemish on a flawless ballad, a perfect mix of rue and toughness. Credit her voice — stronger and suppler than her critics and live performances have suggested. Unafraid to remind her beloved (in her internal monologue, of course) that she lost her virginity to him (the first time he ever saw her cry, Swift resorts to the honesty of someone who’s got nothing to lose. Sharing happy moments — like she laughed at him from the passenger side — is harder than the sad ones.
[8]

Frank Kogan: A beautiful setting, Chapman and Swift populating the sound with guitar tremeloes and strings that weep without dripping, leaving space for Taylor to present us her vulnerability — this the first song where she puts no steel in her voice. The words are missing the nuance and observation we got in the days when Liz Rose accompanied Taylor in the writing credits, and more distressingly don’t have any of the wrenching parallels that Taylor all by her songwriting self put into “Fifteen” and “The Best Day” (Abigail story/Taylor story, day in school/day with Mom, the balm in the second part of each pair not putting to rest the anguish of the first). And dead flowers are a dead metaphor (though I won’t forget to put roses on their graves). The way the song criss-crosses time, back and forth from summer to September to December to now, has great potential for juxtaposition: I keep wanting the song to be about the boy being there for her tears but she then causing his but not getting to see them, Taylor necessarily now being shut out — we need less attention on her feelings, which we can figure out anyway, and more on the boy’s guardedness. I also think the song should have ended 30 seconds sooner, drifting down sadly rather than reiterating her regret while bells ring too loudly; at most they should be tolling. But earlier, her voice falling to huskiness as she sings, simply, “Fear crept into my mind,” she delivers almost all we need, the whole story in a breath.
[7]

Jer Fairall: I maintain that those who carp about her vocals miss the point of what Elvis Costello once referred to as singing in the “author’s voice”, and are slaves to conventional attitudes towards female performers besides. But “Back To December” does illustrate how hers is not one particularly suited to orchestral sweeps, as the more aggressive ones here threaten to drown her out, something that a hopefully-inevitable acoustic version somewhere down the road should correct. As a lyricist, though, she remains rather startlingly wise and observant on the kinds of adolescent traumas we jaded adults think ourselves as having outgrown, her greatest strength (though her sharp melodic instincts run a close second) residing in her giving a plain but pretty voice to what many of us might now regard as trifling banalities. Just watch as “It turns out freedom ain’t nothing but missing you” becomes many a young girl’s post-breakup Facebook status for months to come.
[7]

Josh Langhoff: This melody is such an exemplary piece of text painting, you almost don’t need the text. She hovers around a very narrow range here — the first half of Verse 1 and most of the chorus span just four notes (C# to F#). She’s constraining her usual ebullience to convince whatshisname (I envision Taylor Lautner, fwiw) that she means business, that she really wants to make things right. The insistent chorus rhythm is her determined form of penance. But at key places she breaks out: her voice glowers low on “burned in the back of your mind”; she reaches wistfully for “thaaat night”, wishing she’d behaved differently, put the roses in water or something. Second verse she’s got her foot in the door, so she widens the tune’s range coquettishly, trying to remind whatshisname how great she can be — only to snap back shut for the chorus. To get him back she’ll forswear freedom, so much that she even assumes a chain on his door, subconsciously associating it with her voluntary imprisonment. Bonus: she and Nathan Chapman forswear power chords, leaving space around her voice. OK, maybe she’s as brilliant as you all say. Docked a point because the bridge doesn’t do anything for me.
[9]

David Moore: This isn’t really the place to take out my frustration with Speak Now — it’s a nice song and it’s not hurting anyone (it’s vaguely wistful, though implied more through the vaseline on the lens than what anyone’s saying). But I would like to note how Taylor Swift’s sense of complexity through economy has degraded this time out. Pluck one detail from the memory stream — she’s in the car with her boyfriend and notices him laughing: “I think about summer, all the beautiful times / I watched you laughing from the passenger’s side / And I realized I loved you in the fall.” Now compare to: “Just a boy in a Chevy truck / That had a tendency of gettin’ stuck on backroads at night / And I was right there beside him all summer long.” That line’s from the first verse of her first single, “Tim McGraw”, and it’s been quoted a lot in my own corners of the rockcritverse as a refutation to Taylor’s alleged “sexlessness” (in fact, it took her till album three to tut-tut about someone else’s lack of “saintliness”). But here I just want to point out the detail in that older line. We have a description of the car itself, the players, their behavior, their motives and machinations, the mood. And from those details we start to imagine others — the windshield fogging up, crickets chirping, little crunches from the sidelines that might be a squirrel or another couple or your parents hunting you down. There’s flirtation, danger, coyness, possibility; and that line is really only there to set the scene — the rest of the song flashes forward a year to longing and bitterness and then doubles back to nostalgia. In this one, I learn next to nothing about her, him, or anything that might make this relationship even remotely interesting, except that it’s not-so-secretly referring to some celebrity I don’t care about. But it gets a couple of points for plain and pretty.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Points for ambition: the lyric juggles several different conceits without mixing metaphors, and if the arrangement inevitably recalls “Novemeber Rain,” well, there are worse acts of pop/rock hubris to emulate. But the result is a rather lumbering, unwieldy, and wordy song without the clean through-lines and emotional transparency of her best work. She’s learned to write; now she needs to learn to edit.
[6]

Zach Lyon: This isn’t vintage, but it feels like new territory for Taylor, who is still wonderful at being a 20-year-old who singularly crafts better narratives than most country veterans. It’s simple, but the lyric “turns out freedom ain’t nothin’ but missin’ you” tells us so much, where a less-talented writer might have spent an entire boring verse documenting every excuse for the breakup. Taylor’s priorities are in the right place with the emotion of the song, and she has a good grasp on the priorities of her narrator. The chorus actually sounds like an above-average teenage Livejournal entry set to music (it sounds like she’d stumble over the words in a live setting), and it loses points for initially characterizing the ex by his “tan skin and sweet smile” and for the lazy orchestrations, but I’m probably just expecting too much.
[7]

Course, she’s not actually broken-hearted here, but I’ve got my theme and I ain’t letting go no way nuh-uh…

[Video][Website]
[4.82]

Jonathan Bogart: If there’s one thing that irritates me more than anything else in modern country, it’s the near-dogmatic insistence on happy endings. It’s an old and grumpy complaint, sure: country used to be about heartache and busted marriages and girls murdered horribly down by the riverside, what’s wrong with kids these days, etc. etc. And who am I to begrudge America a first-wedding-dance song for new brides without dads? But America’s Sweetheart doesn’t do enough with the tritest, most facile lyric in ages to make it sound lived in, substituting vocal runs for emotion. Pretty chords are nice, but they’re no basis for a long-term relationship.
[5]

Josh Langhoff: Music for use! If people start playing this for Mother/Daughter dances at wedding receptions, because Dad’s not in the picture or whatever, I’m totally on board. I also like how Mama “gives away” the daughter, reclaiming the barbaric women-as-property tradition. Lovely and open-hearted, with a supportive crowd of background singers.
[8]

Anthony Easton: This is where the kitsch of sentiment becomes an earnest expression of emotion–and the idea of good becomes an ontological category. The problem is that she is so wrought on convincing us that this man is good, we are only convinced that he is anything but.
[6]

Pete Baran: I cannot help but think that, since Carrie is professing the man’s goodness so much, he is almost certainly a serial killer.
[5]

Renato Pagnani: How much of a bastard must Carrie’s pops have been for her to spend a whole track called “Mama’s Song” insisting to Ma Dukes that the dude she’s with now isn’t beating the shit outta her?
[3]

Martin Skidmore: One of her sweetest vocal performances in a while, but it’s on a rather wet song. It’s a simple reassurance to her mom that she’ll be fine because she’s found a good man. Trouble is, everyone is a cipher in this — the lack of specificity is particularly apparent after playing Taylor Swift’s new one — and there is no sense of ambiguity, of her maybe being wrong or whatever. Nonetheless, it is a rather lovely vocal.
[7]

Alfred Soto: He’s so good that he’s unbelievable, which is where Underwood’s voice – dusky, committed – carries the slack.
[4]

Frank Kogan: Could’ve been moving if a Karen Carpenter or a Gloria Estefan had taken hold of it and given it a quiet, uneasy stillness. Instead, there are too many expressive touches, too many instruments.
[3]

Zach Lyon: I try my best to keep my writerly side and my music-appreciating side separate from each other, for fear of destroying them both. I understand that the two media follow different dialogues and that lyrics can’t be held to the same kill-all-clichés(-unless-you’re-subverting-them) ideology that dominates prose/poetry culture. Certainly, if I held lyrics to that standard — ignoring the fact that, in the right song, from the right musician, in the right context, a now-meaningless phrase like our love will last forever can catch me crying on the freeway — then I’d be left with practically nothing outside of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits and some Pharcyde tracks. I know this, and I hope I don’t come off sounding like an Creative Writing major when I say this shit is unforgivable: “Mama, you taught me to do the right things,” “so now you have to let your baby fly,” “you’ve given me everything that I will need,” “to make it through this crazy thing called life,” “and I know you watched me grow up,” “and only want what’s best for me,” “and I think I’ve found the answer to your prayers.” This is not writing. This is rearranging. This is a series of phrases that have been used by every living English-speaking person without a single original word. And it actually took Underwood three(!) additional(!) writers(!?) to come up with it. After the first couple verses, there was nothing the song could do to redeem itself. Not that it tries: for some reason the bulk of “Mama’s Song” is Underwood defending her new boyfriend in another unbearable series of faith-crushing clichés that may actually be about Jesus, because it sort of sounds like she’s singing about Jesus, which would actually make the song better because at least it’s something. But I don’t think that’s right.
[1]

Jer Fairall: In affecting a authentic twang in her vocals, she thankfully downplays her usual Idol showboating, and the pleasant wisps of acoustic guitar and piano never goad in the wrong direction. That’s not to say that she adds anything particularly fresh or insightful to this bit of Mama-I’m-a-big-girl-now sap, but she manages to sell it reasonably well this time out simply by virtue of ignoring her worst tendencies.
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: It seems heartfelt and something about the arrangement catches me. But the song is another big pretty nothing.
[5]

It’s Broken-Hearted Country Girl Tuesday!…

[Video][Website]
[6.67]

Josh Langhoff: If a state can cry, goes the argument, it has jurisdiction over rain and sky, formerly the domain of the federal government. National airspace becomes state airspace, militias start firing on Air Force One, and pretty soon we’ve got a Civil War 2 to rival Sudan’s, ostensibly over water rights. Great. As it happens, Mississippi’s governor is currently challenging the constitutionality of “Obamacare’s” individual mandate — which leads to my probably untenable hypothesis that, if a state song personifies its subject or depicts the state as a metaphysical sympathizer, rather than simply as a nice place to live, it’s about a Red State (with a few exceptions for California, which incidentally has its own water issues, but the Red States are much more common). Examples: “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Tennessee”, and “Rainy Night in Georgia” brashly extends its reach “all over the world”. Anyway, Durante’s from Maryland, not that it matters.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: I’ve not heard the Emily West original, but the song is very emotional, and Margaret gives it plenty. She’s a very strong singer with immense control and good judgement when to open up and when to go easy. It’s a shame the guitarist (which for all I know may be her too) doesn’t have the same restraint, giving us some nasty old soft-rock licks where they aren’t wanted. But I like her voice a lot.
[7]

Renato Pagnani: What’s clever about this is that Durante flips the standard weather-as-metaphor-for-my-emotions trope, literally giving her honky tonk & heartbreak power to cause thunderstorms and torrential rain. Badass.
[6]

Pete Baran: This is the way you do a decent storytelling country track. It’s raining, rain is like tears – BOOM: you have your metaphor for sadness wrapped up in a jaunty little number. The only thing missing is a direct link between our heroine and Storm from the X-Men, and more of a diss of Tennessee.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Could have some details of specific geography, and the production could be a little less bombastic, but that last verse, which connects cheating on a state and cheating on a person, is fantastic. Though I feel like I need to point out that Memphis is much more seductive than anyplace in Mississippi.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: The score is on the basis of a single listen; future listens will, I suspect, only push it up higher. Sure, weather as metonymy for emotional states is as old as human invention, but this is how you tie a sense of place into your country weepie. Bonus points for everything not being all right.
[8]

Michaelangelo Matos: You know how some songs just grow with repeat plays? This one diminishes, somehow: rather than hearing the story behind the craft, I’m finding it’s the other way around. Still, the craft gets it over a little bit.
[6]

Alfred Soto: OK song, charming performance, catching the singer at the point where she’s thinking about whether to show off that big voice or restrain herself enough so that we beg for more (Full disclosure: since I could find no studio versions I had to rely on an okay live clip uploaded to Facebook, so I reserve the right to add or subtract from the score).
[6]

Frank Kogan: The lyrics are so strenuous and resolute in their determination that no one possibly be able not to get that rain equals tears, I at first was certain that the pun in “You’re leaving me in this empty state” was entirely unintended. Otherwise, why weren’t they explaining it to us? But in fact it does seem to be a quick flash of wit. Later, a brief moment of good hot storytelling emerges in the middle eight, Durante singing “You never said a word about Memphis, so who is she?” In the rest, the main metaphor rains down on us in sheets, and the music suffers a subdued version of this fate: a warm singer, a poignant tune, but the arrangement fills in the spaces, the impact gets diluted.
[6]

He may have a surname, but I couldn’t find it…

[Video][Myspace]
[6.17]

Anthony Easton: The begging and pleading, the falsetto that drops into a grovel, and how I believe him when he says that he is exhausted — it almost works from beyond the hackneyed beats.
[5]

Al Shipley: If you’re gonna go ever so slightly leftfield with some trip hop noir on urban radio, you should make the tune stronger so it doesn’t just shrink into the background.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: The opening rap is clumsy and weak, but I rather like Miguel’s thin, high voice, and the hip-hop-era gentle funk music is likeable too. It’s a bit too laid-back in style at times, almost somnolent, and there are some weak moments, but overall I am interested in hearing more of him.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Salaam Remi’s standard clipped-soul production and Miguel’s creamy tone make this go down easy, but J Cole’s half-assed spitting doesn’t do relistens any favors. Just saying “Will Smith” in a grocery-bag cadence doesn’t mean you’ve said something clever, or even sensical.
[7]

Zach Lyon: It’s annoying how often hip-hop posturing gets in the way of a love song’s believability, but I guess they can’t all be Passin’ Me By. I had this problem here with J. Cole, who isn’t a feature as much as a collaborator, but I’ve warmed up to it. There’s a nice dichotomy between J and Miguel, a yin-yang before-after type of relationship that adds a bit of depth to the ordeal.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: Miguel’s a raw recruit, but he runs through a pretty impressive array of vocal techniques in his song (which he obligingly lets J Cole open and rudely interrupt): conversational sing-rap, Saadiq vibrato, long-missed Cali falsetto, a dip into Bobby Brown terrain and some awkward phrasing (I understand, Miguel. It’s hard to tell a girl how she smells, no matter how good). The beat and backing is excellent, too–just the right hints of jazz and forlorn guitar plucking, vaguely Latin and sad, LA rap cut across temporal and racial barriers. Languid and promising.
[7]

Not saying anything, just, y’know, this…

[Video][Website]
[4.75]

Katherine St Asaph: Had no idea a-ha was still around apart from literal music videos, but apparently this is their farewell single. They’ve still got it. The gurgling bass synth is clearly the work of decades of practice; although the vocals have sunken, too many guys never even get to this point. And if you’re going to sonically depict a butterfly, the strings toward the end are the way to do it: flitting in all a sudden, only to twitch their way to their end.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Has it really been twenty-five years? The only concession to popular music post-1995 is a bit of Chris Martin whine as he goes into the chorus; otherwise we may as well be in the Eternal ’85.
[6]

Zach Lyon: Buildings burn, people die, but a-ha is forever.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: It’s a pretty dull way to bow out — pleasant enough in a predictably old-fashioned way, but Harket’s voice doesn’t soar like it used to, and the medium-paced electropop does nothing interesting.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: As their career fades, their music fades to grey too, i.e. it sounds a bit like “Fade To Grey”. Actually the most 80s sounding thing they’ve done since the 80s; Morten Harket’s voice is, as always, a gorgeous instrument even when this is not one of their best melodies. What works here are the wisps of strings floating here and there. Though I wonder why, when the song’s called “The Last Hurrah”, it is pronounced “Hooray”. Oh Morten, you so crazy.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: Take away the fey vocal (it’s always a vicious internal struggle with irony as soon as this guy opens his mouth) and excessive Nordic melodic embroidery, and you’ve got a drum pattern and set of luxe, Oriental-esque synth and syn-string parts Depeche Mode would not be embarrassed by. Surely, that’s something.
[3]

Alfred Soto: I’ve belatedly acknowledged these guys are adored in most parts of the world where their thin Eurodisco commands attention. Thanks to Kylie and David Guetta, this should be their time for grand, creamy crossover semantic drivel. Instead, they craft a thudding anthem too close to U2 for comfort. Last hurrah, eh?
[3]

Jer Fairall: Elegant, gently melodic and thoroughly professional-sounding. Exactly what one who hadn’t paid attention since “Take On Me” (e.g., me) would expect a twenty-five-years-later a-ha to sound like, in other words.
[6]

It’s [insert proper noun here]’s answer to Metro City!…

[Video][Website]
[2.12]

Jonathan Bogart: What if Mike Posner, Owl City, 3OH!3, and Travie McCoy were all the same person? What if Sugar Ray was the most important influence in modern rock? What if we made the introductory woah-oh chant the most interesting part of the song?
[4]

Katie Lewis: That WOOOAAAH OOOO-OOH OOHH OOOH is going to be eating a hole through my auditory cortex for the next 3 days, at least.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: Oh my god I hate this. It’s emo-pop with a reggae nursery rhyme beat, fatuous lyrics and singing (with annoying autotune help) that wouldn’t get him to boot camp on American Idol.
[1]

Zach Lyon: The production is alright in an I-just-ate-a-whole-cheesecake-but-I’m-not-ready-to-throw-up-yet kind of way, which you need to balance with the fact that this irritating moron exists in a world where “like whoa” is such an accepted cultural norm that it can be punned.
[2]

Chuck Eddy: Wait, so when young sheeple use the dependably irritating phrase “like woagh” (or however you spell it, Urban Dictionary seems conflcted on the issue — almost as annoying as Miley Cyrus’s similarly meaningless “like yeah” in “Party in the U.S.A.”), do they really mean “like woe”? Meaning, like, sad? That honestly never occurred to me. Anyway, if this is supposed to be emo, it’s pretty catchy. If it’s teenpop, not so much.
[4]

Jer Fairall: Facile, horribly-sung and aggressively non-threatening white-boy pop of the sort that was the boy-band standard a decade ago and the punk-pop standard a half-decade ago. These days, it’s being crafted independently in bedrooms and basements by the likes of Owl City and The Ready Set, kids with too many toys and too little taste, and all of the MySpace pages and Pete Wentz’s in the world to spread the word.
[2]

Al Shipley: Say Anything did emo synth pop better, and had a song with a similar woe/woah theme first, but it feels wrong to mention such a great band even just to contrast with something this insipid.
[1]

Alfred Soto: The title rhymes with “This song blows.”
[1]