Somehow petite.

[Video][Website]
[5.33]

Alfred Soto: In too many country songs, some by Mr. Aldean himself, the singer hurries towards the uplift. Here the melody lines serve the brawny licks, and the nostalgia is kept in check. A much more deserved crossover than “Dirt Road Anthem.” But it won’t be.
[7]

Brad Shoup: The snarling, winding guitars make a bigger statement here than some of Aldean’s previous, self-consciously ecumenical/gimmicky singles. Memo to Michael Knox: keep this up, and you won’t have a Chesney clone on your hands.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: There are volumes to be written about the geography of memory and the digital marks we’re adding to the physical ones we leave. Jason Aldean would have no idea what I’m on about; he tattoos his track with hard-rock bluster that’s probably stick-on.
[3]

Alex Ostroff: No matter how many details he throws at us, Aldean’s tattooed small town never manages to feel as real and lived-in as the town where Miranda and everybody else dies famous. She spends more time talking about her friends and neighbours than “me and you,” but in doing so, she gives her audience context and characters and an idea of how she’s been marked by her surroundings. By highlighting only the points where the town intersected with his romancing of Allie, Aldean limits himself. They clearly had a lot of memories, but those memories could have happened anywhere. For all his claims that the town left marks on them, I doubt the marks are more than physical.
[4]

Ian Mathers: I think my pro-city bias has been established before, but I grew up in a town, and I have affection for those too. Yes, it’s just as wrong to think that your cruddy little hometown is a precious, unique snowflake as it is to think the same thing about yourself, but in both cases the point is to avoid entitlement and aggrandizement, not that people and towns aren’t special. Aldean’s rather generic but kind of anthemic song nails the point fairly nicely. I could do without the Grey’s Anatomy-quality melodrama in the video, though.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Leftist discourse about class around Occupy Wall Street, and much earlier, fails to realize how traumatic the economy’s dissolving of farm and small-town ties can be, and how deep that landscape is. I think one of the reasons for the recent influx of taxonomic texts in Nashville about the South is an oblique way of working through what the eventual dissolution of this way of life would look like. There are some explicit works, but the side-eyed gaze to the marks places leave on people functions better. Aldean has done better songs about this, and his best songs are slightly nostalgic marks of lived pleasure. Often those songs conflate genre with geography: the rock and roll of “Hicktown,” the hip-hop choruses of “Dirt Road Anthem,” etc. So the genre purity of this and the lack of pleasure, or anything really prescriptive, has hints of already giving up, which is actually sort of terrifying. That matters, more than the problems I could point out — the vocals are not as adventurous, and the lyrics don’t have the details that he and his songwriters excel at. “Tattoos on This Town” is smack in the middle of a geographic and cultural shift that is continually being recorded. I am not sure that this is a good song, but it is an important song.
[5]

Sweet.

[Video][Website]
[6.71]

Alfred Soto: From the neo-retro hum of the “Simon Says” keyboards to the triumphalist sentiment, this has got cult classic written all over it. To my ears it comes up short. Thin and repressed, the chorus matches the vocals.
[6]

Pete Baran: Woo-ooo-oo-ooh. It means nothing but signifies everything in this arms-in-the-air, cooler-than-thou anthem. It’s a five-year throwback in many ways, glitchy, Scando, precision bleeping. But it’s coming out without much else like it knocking around and, unlike many of its progenitors, actually sounds like everyone was having fun making it.
[9]

Ian Mathers: It’s better than “Manners,” but it’s still rather anonymous; the production is kind of needlessly busy, the chorus doesn’t do much, and I think at one point they’re trying to justify every blurry party photo on Facebook. As unimpressed as I’ve been with both Icona Pop songs we’ve covered, they’re not far from doing something interesting; they just need to modulate things a little. That’s not going to help what is maybe the dumbest video I’ve seen in a while, though.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: Most of “Nights Like This” is a bit brash and stompy for my taste — triumphal electro pop always seems more lumbering than exhilarating to me. Underneath the big drums, though, there’s this lovely video-game synth noise playing around at 0:30 and elsewhere in minor key harmonies. In fact, the entire shifting landscape of electronic burbles feels like it’s cobbled together from a hodgepodge of spare parts. Given the option, I’d like to ditch the Katy Perry-esque vocal hiccups, the MGMT-style children’s chorus and the accompanying thumpa-thumpa, and keep everything that sounds like the squiggly glitchy coda.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Give this to the right kids and the right blogs, and they’ll make that whoa-oh chorus as anthemic as anything that’s come before it. They’ll also turn Icona Pop into a group not for me, but this is squelchy and strange enough that if evolution’s happening, this is only an intermediate step.
[6]

Iain Mew: I love the line “Me and my friends grown tall, we make this city small”. It’s such a great image. They do a good job of following through on the sense of power in it as well, with thick layers of bloopy synths and a chorus of some force.
[7]

Brad Shoup: “We make big cities small” could be a generation’s cross-stitch. Radio people, mall-punks, glam kids, Mouseketeers: Icona Pop’s got a little something for everyone with a giant bass squelchworm besides. It’s like a black-light party in an arcade console. I can’t wait for the Seacrest interview on American Top 40.
[9]

Neat!

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Hazel Robinson: I love High Contrast, purveyors of high-speed, smiley drum and bass that makes even a great big old goth like me jump around grinning. I like Tiesto and Underworld. This was bound to be immense. What I wasn’t prepared for was how irrepressibly, bouncily gleeful it would be — a high-propellent joy, hurtling forwards with streams of bass and keyboards like go faster stripes. Listening to it sneakily at work, my colleagues have just asked me what I’m smiling about, to which the answer is “you must hear this now.”
[10]

Kat Stevens: Christ what a load of bobbins.
[2]

Iain Mew: Warmth and drum and bass and euphoria, which is a good combination but only takes off once the underwhelming vocals get out of the way. Even then, it’s slightly more timid than it needs to be.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: This doesn’t just let its seams show; it’s all seams, less a deconstruction than a splaying-out of guts. The vocals both sound like and sound like they’re saying “Mellotron,” the piano progression doesn’t dither a second before becoming the first one you’ll guess, and the drums could quiver beneath anything but seem gratuitous here. This track has one purpose; for me, it failed it.
[5]

Brad Shoup: With a roster like this, and the current reality of long-distance collaboration, a mess could be expected: an over-upholstered piece crammed with each artist’s strengths to the detriment of the song. It’s a minor miracle, then, to receive this: a weighty alloy of trance and drum’n’bass, topped with an euphoric Karl Hyde vocal. Though he’s got a catalog of sights and sensations to share, Hyde’s not quite transmitting, more like processing in real time — his half-time, lagging vocal is partly responsible. Everyone puts across a rave-induced giddiness while staying far away from the unbearable lightness of beaming. The best moment is the buzzing synth figure that brings to mind a stray melody from Groove Armada’s “At the River.”
[9]

Alex Ostroff: The way the chopped-up vocals are distributed throughout and between the cascade of drums is really quite effective, and the whining organ-grinder synth noises provide a nice contrast with the crispness of the drum patterns. Unfortunately, the bland melody and sleepy delivery of the song itself are difficult to overcome. It’s as if someone put together an incredible remix of Keane or Coldplay — no matter how many BPM you add to it, you’re still trying to revive a song that never had a pulse.
[4]

Ian Mathers: Underworld are one of my favourite bands of all time, and their last collaboration with High Contrast resulted in “Scribble,” which I adore here. There are moments here, in Karl Hyde’s vocals, the production, even the video, that I respond to extremely positively. But I’m not sure these four minutes work as a song, just like I’m not sure the video, “directed, photographed, and edited” by High Contrast, works as anything more than a mishmash of (often striking) images. There’s a warmth to “The First Note Is Silent,” even at its most frenetic, that I gravitate to. And I guess the structural mess is appropriate for a song that’s trying to take on so much. But I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about this song tomorrow.
[7]

Best headgear in a 2011 video?

[Video][Website]
[7.29]

Brad Shoup: Starts as sort of a bitter Hi-NRG update, segues into an awed sweep. The transition is accomplished with a phenomenally restrained sequencer/orchestral section that bears resemblance to “With Every Heatbeat.” If Google Translate is to be believed, the Statistically Improbable Phrase is “look at me while I puke,” which may be unprecedented in pop. I keep expecting the song to explode into a dread-filled breakdown, but Medina seems concerned with making appeals to reason, and the elements.
[8]

Iain Mew: I love the jittery, prickly synth line and stuttering vocals all over the place. The late switch to being cocooned in strings and triumphant re-emergence with a sparkly new synth line is fantastic. And Medina holds onto a mood strongly enough that even as the song goes a bit dubstep, for once it actually doesn’t feel like a disruption as much as another facet of the same approach. Even better than “Kun For Mig.”
[9]

Alex Ostroff: The totally random detour into chopped and screwed male vocals and a twinkly synths’n’strings breakdown before the final chorus are the best part of this. The dirty South snare runs are a nice addition to the Medina template. But, for whatever reason, it fails to grab me the way “Kun For Mig” did.
[5]

Jer Fairall: The voice expresses a longing so earnestly and gracefully that I wish I had subtitles for it, as the music, oscillating between sterile electro-pop minimalism and epic cinematic sweep, gives me conflicting clues as to what’s going on. There’s an unresolved tension at the core of this that’s compelling, and some robo-belching interruptions and vague hints of autotune that are unfortunate, but I like wherever it is that she’s taking me.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: There’s the pulses and the beats, all of which are good and catchy. And there’s Medina’s voice, which conveys the idea of “dancing with tears in one’s eyes” better than anyone else’s right now.
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: Between jittery blips and sweeping washes, these synths should be grandiose, but even with bonus dubstep bits, there’s too little dynamism for any sense of drama to properly build. Icy, then, but a bit sludgy as well, like the end of a frozen Coke. 
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: This is the series of pre-choruses before the most cathartic chorus ever recorded: first slow steps and tenterhooks, then a dubstep drop that never quite makes it off the precipice, then the same in a higher register. Later comes the bridge after the most cathartic chorus ever recorded. That chorus never comes, but the rest is so masterful you don’t care.
[9]

In which one of our writers becomes a breakfast dish… now available at IHOP!

[Video][Website]
[3.75]

Anthony Easton: Natasha Bedingfield has a good to great voice, and a willingness to understand the rhetoric of whatever she is working with — I think the liquid quality of her performances makes her interesting, and it elevates this from the same fucking Rascal Flatts song that I have heard on country radio for, what, a decade now?
[5]

Kat Stevens: I will always heart TashBed as my vocally-talented-yet-still-super-awkward alter-ego; she’s as charming as ever and has put in a decent amount of hollering effort here (and luckily said hollering blends well with the other dude’s). The song itself is a bit trickier to love — the histrionics are a bit much for the stilted grown-up social awkwardness they’re singing about. The two of them are going to have to learn to keep those feelings well bottled up, otherwise their Friday night bridge club is going to quietly move to Tuesdays and not tell them.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: So much singing and so much straining, so many get!-to!-the!-punch! percussion, somehow so little drama.
[4]

Brad Shoup: Looks like Rascal Flatts found a setting on their musical blender below liquefy. It’s easy like Wednesday evening, which is fitting, as the Flatts are Nashville’s premier recording act comprised of youth pastors trying to look “relevant.” It’s a lurching 6/8 arrangement with delicate ivory-brushing, jeweler-handled guitar and those flyover harmonies, all in service of a denial-of-depression song so generic, so heavy-handed that even Lady Antebellum would blanch. In other words, it’s “Tears of a Clown,” sung by actual clowns.
[2]

Jonathan Bradley: This is some high quality goop handicapped by, well, basically the fact that it was created by Rascal Flatts. Gary LeVox’s schlubby everyman vocal isn’t rich or detailed enough to sell the central “Tracks of My Tears” conceit, but it succeeds despite itself. A whomping chorus will do that. Bedingfield, too, is out of place, and freighted with a baffling key change piled on halfway through her verse, but the American boy/English girl interplay inserts enough contrast into the delivery to make the characters seem as though they might be real people rather than figments of a factory writer’s imagination.
[7]

Alex Ostroff: TashBed was more convincing trying to pull off pop-punk. There’s something about the timbre of her voice or her pronunciation that doesn’t fit into a big pop-country ballad, even though she clearly has the pipes for it. It’s not the Britishness, as she rarely sounds British when singing. There’s just something… off.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: The song would have been one thing — ignorable fluff, a bunch of thoughtless and tiresome hollering about what could in the right hands make a great song, the ways in which our relationships are performed for one another, but just goes for thirty-second Tide commercial tropes instead — but the video, oh my God. It’s either high camp or the stupidest thing in the world, and since I don’t trust the Rascal Flatts guys to have a knowing bone in their body…
[1]

Alfred Soto: That syrup you’re pouring — you pour it on waffles, not Alfred Soto.
[2]

The video: Brit’s audition tape for Gossip Girl…

[Video][Website]
[5.44]

Katherine St Asaph: Britney’s in love with a slightly sketchy guy criminal, but Max Martin’s even more in love with traversing the melodic minor scale. This would be much better during Blackout and estranged from its “mama” refrain. At least 33% of Femme Fatale‘s remaining tracks would be much better singles.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Because Femme Fatale has no real ballads to speak of, we’re stuck with this as the gear-changing single. It’s a mincing zombie of a track that sags with seriousness. True, the text flips the script of a redeemed rogue — Britney’s boy is rotten, and she’s well aware — but she’s not interested in veering toward either pride or tragedy. Whatever one’s opinion of the last three singles, none of them had an arrangement as static as this.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: In anyone else’s hands, this would be eerie pop&B, but Brit’s criminal is the kind who wears a black band across his eyes and carries a sack with a dollar sign. One cartoon deserves another, I guess, even if the little acoustic guitar flutters are a satisfying curlicue on an arrangement that’s otherwise too plain.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: I can’t remember the last time Britney released a single this mid-tempo. While still digging into the normal “in love with a bad boy” tropes, “Criminal” turns the narrative wistful. Framing the entire song as an attempt to address her mother’s worries is almost quaint — a throwback to The Crystals and Carole King. It’s a good thing that the screwing of the repeated “fun”s and “none”s is an effective hook, though, because the chorus and the chintzy pan pipe melody are far too lightweight to anchor the song.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The guitar-flute-drum-machine combo, plus a studio-manipulated Britney descending the scale, is my favorite collection of purposeful sound effects on a record all year, and that she included them on one of Femme Fatale‘s weakest tracks says something about the album’s excellence. But unlike Ke$ha she isn’t a good enough actress to feel gross, violated, or — I wish — excited about dating a criminal. These days she just isn’t very good at direct expression. Bait a catchphrase like “Til The World Ends” with enough aural significance, however, and she can deliver all the ambivalence that mental breakdown can buy.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Britney makes the tragic Elektra ballad everyone forgot she was capable of. (She plays with auto-biography so well that we go to TMZ and connect the dots — but it’s unnecessary here.) This use of auto-tune as a filter not for musical/formal issues but for techno-ennui I am sure has been done often, but I am not sure that it has been done as well,
[10]

Edward Okulicz: Britney’s autobiographical, or might-as-well-be album closers are usually complete wastes of space that you can disregard after one listen, or preferably, midway through one listen (“Everytime” is classic, though). But “Criminal” has this one moment when the song breaks into the middle eight and Britney actually sounds like the actress she needs to be to spin this corny tale so you can believe it. The rest, with the shower-sung vocals and childish lyrics, is the sort of thing Britney should know better than. Even if she doesn’t know better than to avoid bad men, she should avoid bad songs.
[4]

Jer Fairall: “Papa Don’t Preach” for a girl more in danger of becoming accessory to a Bonnie and Clyde crime spree than becoming knocked up, set to a witty little noirish whistle and a melody that twists, for no good reason, in the direction of “Breakfast in America.” I’d like to commend her songwriters for tapping into several strains of classic adolescent melodrama, but Brit remains too much of a non-entity to pull it off, and her “love the guy” sounds far more mocking, to me, than impassioned.
[5]

Kat Stevens: My favourite part of this song is the immensely childish “BUM BUM BUM BUM“. I like to think that Britney, who probably has fewer legal rights now than when she was 18, has decided to be as silly and immature as possible. That’ll show them!
[5]

Promotional consideration provided by…

[Video][Website]
[6.50]

Anthony Easton: Is it “shock the wave” or “show me the wave”? I am a sucker for super-fast flow with weird sounds, and this hits the spot — like a carnival ride, and you yell when the DJ asks you if you want to go faster. I always wanna go faster.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Thumping, not kinetic; nagging instead of burrowing — I can’t help but unfavorably compare this to J2K and Kenzie May’s recent effort. One thing Sneakbo has is a sense of impatience; when he demands people stop fighting, it sounds like he’s worried about his style being cramped.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I’ve already liked-to-loved Nero, Skornlex and Noel Gallagher this week, possibly because my brain’s done little in that time but manufacture funks, procrastination, nerves and other interfering variables. Nevertheless, I expect this’d be equally giddy and hypnotic in any other week. Maybe more.
[8]

Alex Ostroff: I’ll be honest. Most of these points for the DAGGA-DAGGA-DAH. The rest are for the delightfully elastic instrumental, which combines the best elements of scratching vinyl and Pong.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: The “dagga-dagga-dah” is an astute use of human breaths as either punctum or percussion, and there are some delicious non-sequitur squelches in the production. That said, it doesn’t coalesce into anything particularly exciting, tripping over itself as it runs in circles like an overenthusiastic puppy.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Somehow this is a vision of masculinity I can get behind — sleek, fussless, and glitchy.
[7]

Not entirely sure we’re the intended audience for this.

[Video][Website]
[3.67]

Katherine St Asaph: O, Jason Mraz, you’re like a fucking fungus / You are the blight that has now infected Bieb. 
[3]

Kat Stevens: This is very sweet! Docked three points for repeatedly saying ‘shorty’ though.
[7]

Anthony Easton: This seems really early for an Xmas single. Really early. Also, I don’t understand why he calls women “shorty.”
[3]

Doug Robertson: First up, that Justin Bieber’s not only doing a Christmas song but doing one where he sings about wanting to be under the mistletoe with a noticeably unspecific “you” is a stroke of  marketing genius and one that’s likely to be so financially lucrative that we are finally free of recession, the world’s economy rescued solely by the undiscerning tastes of his target market. And it’s this that leads me on to the second point, which is that it really doesn’t matter what I, or what anyone else here says about it. Of course it’s awful, and of course it’s the sort of saccharine schmaltz that took more time to record than it did to write, but it’s not for us, and slagging him for the triteness of his music is like attacking Barbie for being made of plastic. Bieber is now as much a part of growing up as braces and social awkwardness, and if it gives his fans some joy then good luck to them. It would be nice if he at least tried to reward his fans’ unthinking devotion with even a hint of musical effort just once in his apparently unstoppable career, mind.
[1]

Alfred Soto: Roast your own chestnuts, Jason Derulo. The Canadian pixie whose talent for cross-promotional marketing is as impressive as his lip size makes nice over cod “island” good-times beat. J.C. Chasez would have choked on his frosted tips for Bieber’s voice control. Had I children, I’d put this single in the stocking in lieu of Bieber himself.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: It’s not as though the phrase “Jason Mraz featuring Sleigh Bells” inspires particularly high expectations. As it turns out, “Jason Mraz featuring sleigh bells” merits even lower ones.
[3]

Jer Fairall: For a good many of us, the thought of Justin Bieber + Christmas probably conjures up any number of horrors, but a pastiche of Jason Mraz’ unctuous acoustic wisps was not what I was expecting.  Yet, the Beeb’s understated junior Lothario act feels right at home in this kind of inoffensive mush He’s currently our most polite and affable teen pop star, and “Misteltoe” is, accordingly, easygoing and painless.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: It’s hard to shake the idea that, given Bieber’s warm, generous delivery, and the lobotomised, sunny luau feel of this, that maybe this was a bit of fluff gathering dust in Bieber Towers made profitable with a new lyric here and a scrubbed-clean chaste romance video. I love Machiavellian ingenuity, but I hate records that try to cram laid-back down your throat.
[3]

Brad Shoup: I’d assume that recording a Christmas album is a dreadful prospect: the obligation to put a quick-fading stamp on songs that have been recorded thousands of times, the creativity-crushing original songs that tick off the referents (“cheer,” “wise men,” “chestnuts,” “winter [sic] snow”) and sound like the result of a Bruno Mars writing workshop. More likely, though, your Biebers and your Obersts see the task as confirmation — they’ve made it! People want them as background music for about five weeks in winter. Now you have to explain to your aunt what “shorty” means.
[3]

I forget which one’s the band name and which one’s the song title…

[Video][Website]
[4.88]

Katherine St Asaph: If you think this single’s optimistic, it’s so insufferable you’d like to shoot down every damn bird chirping about dreams and heroes and rainbows, and it’ll justify all the shit flung over the years at Noel and his terrible band name. If you think it’s pessimistic, though, that’d better suit the piano line’s dirge jostled to agitation and the keening guitar. It’d make lyrics like “it may be a dream, but it tastes like poison” and “you might lose your mind” work as bile does. It might also make you tear up like I am.
[9]

Josh Langhoff: A charmless ode to the benefits and travails of rock stardom. When he sings, “I’m gonna take that tiger outside for a ride”, why do I fear it’s not a metaphor?
[4]

Anthony Easton: I am amused at the purity of Noel Gallagher’s rock and roll vision; it’s nice to see the whole Anglo-American tussle over the ontological nature of guitars still being traded back and forth over the Atlantic. I wish that I cared more about this, but it’s smarter and better constructed than most. Plus, the long instrumental bits are well worth it. Minus two points for how anemic the woo-hoos sound. 
[5]

Doug Robertson: High flying birds, low hanging fruit. At least there was once a time when Noel tried to punch above his weight, but now he clearly feels that the machine built predictability of Coldplay is something to aspire to. No-one should ever feel like that. No-one.
[2]

Brad Shoup: Baggy’s a weird look for Noel. He sings with precise measure and well-held notes, like someone trying not to fuck up Rock Band for the group. The Birds trail out a consistent percussive roil, nearly danceable, totally ominous.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Wonderful driving piano riff, boring song on top, though points for going outside his comfort zones both vocally and compositionally. AKA… What a Waste!
[5]

Alfred Soto: Mixing this real loud so we don’t forget this is a manifesto or something, Noel Gallagher reminds us that while he loves the Beatles he has the instincts of George Harrison. He’s even got platitudes, spiritual or otherwise, to share: chasing down rainbows and taking tigers outside for a ride over Lightning Seeds keyboard. What’s Paul Weller up to these days?
[3]

Sally O’Rourke: If Kasabian insist on being the new Oasis, Noel Gallagher may as well try being the new Kasabian.
[5]

So evidently it’s Dodgy Covers Wednesday around here or something.

[Video][Website]
[1.89]

Iain Mew: This song being in the top 5 is a neat gathering together of everything wrong with parts of the UK pop world at present, illustrating as it does 1) A post-“Someone Like You” feeling that being really slow and serious makes a song Important and Real and that’s a good thing, and that things like dynamics, humour, excitement and drums are to be avoided. 2) The fact that advertisers have realised that by jumping this trend they can turn a song into a hit and gain further attention for their Twincest tweebags or whatever. 3) An X Factor mentality that taking a song that everyone already knows and “making it your own” is always some kind of revelatory thing, even if you’ve just turned it into a different kind of rubbish. Which is very much what Charlene has done here. She strips away the bluster of the song in the hopes of revealing a hidden depth of feeling or meaning. But no, it resolutely remains “Wherever You Will Go”, the only effect being that it seems to last twice as long.
[0]

Brad Shoup: Hell calls you collect. It sounds important. You’re put on hold.
[0]

Edward Okulicz: They play a bosh version of this at the gym across the street from me every morning. That’s right, a bosh version, and even then it’s still a zero. What chance does this have?
[0]

Katherine St Asaph: Half snooze, half caterwaul, all pointless.
[2]

Jer Fairall: Finally, this spawns its own genre.  
[2]

Ian Mathers: I am on record as being one of the few here who liked Birdy’s similar-in-spirit cover of “Skinny Love,” but I hate this. Birdy was improving something turgid and awkward; whatever the relative merits of Bon Iver and the Calling, the original “Wherever You Will Go” is mercilessly effective. On the plus side, Soraia’s version doesn’t sound as much like Creed; on the minus side, it sounds a lot like a piano cover of a Creed song.
[3]

Alfred Soto: So guileless is Soraia that “down low” carries no subtext — not even a giggle. But guilelessness needs greater transformative powers than our singer demonstrates.
[3]

Alex Ostroff: This is awkward. After rolling my eyes at the post-grunge sea of modern rock for the better part of a decade, I’m now forced to admit that some of it did what it did quite well. (Specifically the original version of this song, ‘Kryptonite‘, and that one song by Lifehouse.) I know this because the merits of this cover are almost entirely due to the strengths of ‘Wherever You Will Go’ as a song, and its weaknesses are due to the fact that vaguely silly passionate (mostly kind of dumb) rock-dude-feelings are what this song was designed to communicate. I miss the stupid way Alex Band pronounced the word “wondering” to sound like “wandering.” Charlene effectively teases out the melodic intricacies and and emotional nuances, but at the end of the day, this was intended to be slathered in power chords and totally gratuitous orchestral string sections.
[6]

W.B. Swygart: You know how every other advert on Eurosport (the ones that aren’t for speed-skating) is about how awesome conference facilities in Qatar are? The Calling were the rock equivalent of them. So, as tempting as it is to bust out the whole “making something slower and quieter does not make it better” line here, that’s not strictly true.
[1]