Maybe Brad would be interested in a button. down. camo?

[Video][Website]
[5.86]

Brad Shoup: I’ve been scanning various country-music blogs, and sentiment seems to be running 70/30 against this song in particular, and his last few albums as a whole. Guess that’s what happens when rock critics start digging you. As for me, this hits my sweet spot. Paisley’s an amiable magician, wringing poignancy out of novelty pop celebrations. The genial twang of his arrangements and the lived-in details offset his limited vocal style. He overplays his hand with the combined “Dixie” quote ‘n’ reference to the Stars and Bars (which isn’t even the Confederate flag of modern controversy), but before that point it’s a straight-up party. His fretwork’s in the pocket, the rhymes are fantastic, and there’s people shouting (always a plus for me). Whenever he gets around to commemorating mechanical bulls, I’ll be ready.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: I’m against joke songs but I love songs with jokes in them, or at the very least some wit, and there’s liveliness in both the words and the guitar break. What’s best about “Camouflage” is that it wears its sing-along designs with pride — not just in the chorus, but a little shout before the last verse, a nice touch.
[8]

Alfred Soto: As long as Paisley’s guitar makes funny noises to match his funny faces and he keeps developing ridiculous conceits (for which, again, the guitar does the winking), he won’t get stale, not to mention keep Carrie Underwood types at a distance. Like its parent album this example isn’t near his best — regard it as a palate cleanser between Odd Future and PJ Harvey on your iPod playlist.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Somewhere under this culture-baiting mess is a dynamite Speedy West/Jimmy Bryant homage dying to get out.
[4]

Anthony Easton: Someone is gonna figure out how to strip Paisley’s vocals off these joke songs, and then we have beautiful and horrible show guitar — guitar that is the opposite of camouflage (I am not even going to rise to the bait of the stars and bars line).
[2]

Pete Baran: It’s a real thigh-slapper Brad delivers, a wisp of a gag about, er, camouflage. The main problem is that its bar-room ambience feels  contrived, and it is certainly reaching in the last third when the song turns into a ribald, jingoistic hoedown. I don’t have a problem with that, at least after all of the gags Paisley (hmm Paisley camo) finally references what camouflage is actually for. Though it is telling that Brad seems to favor jungle camouflage to the more common sandy/desert camo being employed in the Middle East at the moment.
[5]

Josh Langhoff: Paisley’s recent songs disappoint some folks, and I guess I see why. Tossing off the impossible has become his shtick, and it’s starting to feel like a shtick, even when much of the shtick — jawdropping guitar solos, “garage”/”corsage,” standing astride Town and Country like some great unifying Colossus — compares favorably to his country radio surroundings. Not only does he disown the stars and bars, he uses camouflage to expand the orthodox American color scheme, and the outcry has been minimal. How can you trust such facility? My conservative Facebook friends used to say the same thing about Obama; now they complain about his teleprompter. Even if disappointed Paisley fans vote differently than anti-Obama folks, I can imagine them agreeing about plenty, maybe in ironic sitcom-y situations where they THINK they’re griping about the same guy but they’re actually not.
[8]

That DJ costume is probably better after a few tabs of E, anyway.

[Video][Website]
[5.43]

Anthony Easton: This guy is selling out the Air Canada Center, and though I kind of love him, I have no idea why?  I mean I like this well enough–propulsive, atmospheric, sets into a grove but doesn’t quite stay there, quite lovely, but it mostly seems to be you know a 1000 person club and not stadium music. 
[8]

Brad Shoup: Our first Deadmau5 track in two years, and it’s just some tranquil progressive house. I do associate those little squeaks that keep cropping up with him (naught to do with his name, I swear). But the track isn’t dense enough for a dream, and too languid to muster a decent progression.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: There will always be music for stoners.
[5]

Pete Baran: So what I am looking for is the Whooommpphhh, the breakdown, the WHOOOO-WA-WA-WA-WA-WHOOMPPHHH, and the moment when the repeated melody line becomes so ingrained in my head that it is second nature that I no longer have to listen to it. And this Deadmau5 track has all of these elements, so I am not sure why it is a little disappointing. Should I just put it down to it being 7am in the morning and after a hard nights sleeping I am in no fit state to review this? I took an E with my cornflakes though, and I’m still not feeling it.
[6]

Alfred Soto: If I owned a sampler as cool as this guy, I’d type “starts promisingly” and let the thing go up several octaves. 
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Admitting to liking Deadmau5, in certain circles, is the equivalent of admitting to enjoying cheap coffee or tawdry novels. But I tolerate these sounds in poppier contexts already; it’s cheap dopamine manipulation, but you don’t get called manipulative if what you do doesn’t work.
[7]

Jer Fairall: Spacey and mildly propulsive enough to make for pleasant aural wallpaper, though I have an unshakable allergy against the particular brand of hollow synth riff that kicks in at 1:27 and recurs at frequent enough intervals throughout, rendering occasionally uncomfortable something that I mostly want to not particularly notice all that much in the first place.
[5]

Maybe we will stop stanning next album?

[Video][Website]
[7.88]

Iain Mew: “Together” combines Patrick’s maximalist romanticism and a deep disco pulse to incredible results. The message feels entirely natural but is uncommonly refreshing – not “I can’t go on without you” but “I can go on without you but it would be a bit rubbish, so let’s not, please”. Which still allows his love to feel monumental, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary and powering the most ecstatic chorus of the year. And oh, the strings! The sweep up and out of the spoken bit! I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this song already, but it still makes me so, so happy every time.
[10]

Jonathan Bogart: I’ll always have time for a good Midge Ure tribute. While this gestures towards all the tropes of the post-“Heroes” New Romantic landscape, including solitary lovers in poses, cascading orchestration, and that warm robotic sequencer pulse orienting us in spacetime (England, 1979-1983), and Wolf’s mannered, sighing baritone practically swallows its consonants in an attempt to mimic the most florid of the era’s mannerists, it’s not so starstruck as to attempt the apocalyptic anxiety of the Cold War.
[8]

Pete Baran: The vocal delivery is a bit precious, and spends much of the track ignoring its own backing, but that is all part of what makes this sweeping throwback so enjoyable. I did spend a lot of my listens trying to track down its exact antecedents, like a geneologist I was perhaps a bit disappointed when I discovered that it is not really an 80’s synth-pop homage but rather wants to be Scott Walker singing Queen’s One Vision.
[7]

Alex Ostroff: “Alone again in Paris,” he sighs. Alone is his natural state, since the first time he fled to Paris. The magic of ‘Together’ is that, despite the title, despite the despondency, despite the disco strings, Patrick doesn’t give up his hard-won independence. “I can do this alone,” he insists, “but we can do this so much better, together.” How easy it would have been to drop the ‘but’ and insist that “I can’t”. It’s the little things you do together that make perfect relationships. Codependent? Certainly not our boy — not after the lessons of The Bachelor. After this, there’s nowhere to go but up, up, up. Essentially, this is the song that makes me wish I’d graded everything else Patrick released this year more harshly, if only to emphasize how wonderful it is. Can I give it an [11]?
[10]

Katherine St Asaph: A male version of “Hang With Me,” plus strings, whispering, something like a soprano and flickers of darkness. What other score could it possibly get?
[10]

Alfred Soto: “House” was a fluke: the lilting melody and grand arrangement mitigated Wolf’s gulped histrionics. Starting promisingly with bass sequencer and the speaker alone in Paris, the chorus crests with an unearned flourish, and Wolf reminding us that the Ian McCulloch of Ocean Rain is his model.
[4]

Brad Shoup: I’ve a growing suspicion that Wolf’s primary audience is those who acquire and assemble high-end audio systems.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Makes the plea for comforting togetherness sound like the rush of a love that’s new; completely inviting, completely beautiful.
[9]

There used to be four of them. Guess which one we liked…

[Video][Website]
[3.67]

Anthony Easton: They don’t kiss, and then they do kiss, and it should be this climax of sexual longing (well, kissing rarely is, but it is a country band who loves Jesus, so you take what you can get.) But there is no climax in the song — the chorus spoils the plot, but even without that, there is no rise and fall. The lack of thinking about what kisses mean, or even what kisses might lead to, condemns this as much as the lack of vocal change or give-and-take.
[5]

Brad Shoup: The he-said/she-said format of “(Kissed You) Good Night” does a couple things. One, it pushes the final scene into the first chorus. (This is a mistake, one that Taylor Swift will never make.) Two, it cuts the songwriting burden practically in half. It’s a typically stuffed Nashville full-band production; one marvels how they got to each other through the mandolin, pedal, violins, etc. Only for the chorus do they allow themselves the pleasure inherent in the story.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: He’s moping at the sidewalk after not kissing her (or pushing her against the wall, a detail that’s got to be from a more passionate song) and she’s moping at the window, then he runs through the grass to a soundtracked, blissful reunion. OK, whatever, it’s plausible in a romcom. Even then, “kissed you” is sung so flatly for something supposedly joyous.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Calling to mind the still-incredible “Wild at Heart,” I thought, hmm, Gloriana singing a song about kissing, surely that’s gonna be a wild bacchanal of fiddles and twang so intensely pleasurable I’ll get grass stains on my jeans just listening to it. Little did I realise that Cheyenne Kimball had left, seemingly taking with her any sense of abandon, let alone fun. I found it hard to care if anyone kissed anyone else.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Two parts Lady Antebellum not-really-duetting because just singing the same thing an octave up doesn’t count, one part that thing every rock band does now where you just plug away at one chord like it’ll lead to transcendence, and three parts pretending that words have meaning. Not when they’re this generic they don’t.
[2]

Iain Mew: I’m such a sucker for pedal steel but the way that it swoops in to emphasise almost every single line does get a bit wearying. It’s part of a bigger problem – the song feels too tightly fixed in place  ever really take off emotionally. The switch of vocalist feels like the only thing providing any kind of forward motion.
[4]

Korean boy band sings Japanese song, world fails to end.

[Video][Website]
[3.33]

Jer Fairall: Thin-voiced, blandly emotive, tepid dance pop of the Backstreet Boys variety, like travelling halfway across the world only to order a Big Mac.
[2]

Edward Okulicz: What a bunch of fops these boys are! Not just to look at, but to hear as well, and they match their hour right to the second — bright and sunny. Suspicions that this might be just a key change from brilliance, or at least glory if the long-promised Asiavision Song Contest ever gets up are confirmed when the last minute at least lights a few sparklers in lieu of being explosive. I guess if Super Junior had been too butch for the Japanese market this might have fit the bill.
[3]

Iain Mew: The second half of this, in which someone turns up the speed and pitch past reasonable limits and challenges 2PM to somehow keep pace, is great fun. I can’t find much to latch onto in the rest of it though, when they already sound a bit out of their depth but in a less enjoyable way.
[6]

Brad Shoup: This is standard, capital-letter Boy Band stuff: six boys waxing heroic in an egalitarian fashion. But once the backing singers stop cartoonishly echoing the lead’s phrases, the fun is lost. When the key modulation occurs, the earnestness becomes unbearable.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: It would be highly presumptuous of me to make any blanket statement like “apparently pop in the Pacific Rim has the same gender inequality that US pop does, in that the ladies are exciting while the dudes are terminally bland.” So I won’t.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Let’s dissect “Ultra Lover,” because that’s the only way it’s going to make any sense to me. Piles of boy-band harmonies; equal piles of synths; a piano line and crystal-pillar synths that’d be lovely if they weren’t buried beneath piles; key change; a rap interlude and more goddamn dubstep, because you can’t even escape that in Japan. One of the boys keeps thinking he’s lead on “Marry the Night.” Hmm. Still doesn’t make sense. Would it be useful at all to keep picking at it?
[3]

Is she the first Canadian Idol alum on the Jukebox?

[Video][Website]
[5.86]

Anthony Easton: There’s a really great music scene around Mission, BC — it’s mostly acoustic stuff, with the odd piece of nu:country and pow wow music for good measure. (They also have a pretty awesome folk festival.) It’s interesting to see stirrings of that, or at least the possibility of that, in this work. It’s a pretty standard pop song, but it does seem delightfully, earnestly, campfire-worthy. 
[8]

Iain Mew: There’s really not much to this. A chorus that in one form or another takes up 80% of the song, a beat that stays out of the way, a voice with a slight catch in the throat that (alongside her Idol positioning) has me thinking Canadian Diana Vickers, some dramatic string hits. Giving Carly and those strings the space to bounce around in works wonders though, as the sense of confused excitement and hope grows and grows into something quite powerful.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: Too many songs are running around with more than one good idea for me to reward this for only one good idea, no matter how much I like it.
[6]

Jer Fairall: Completely frivolous, but in a particularly effervescent, cheerful way that runs completely counter to the hard edge currently infecting most modern pop. By which I mean that this really doesn’t stand a chance.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: This is essentially a Katy Perry song aged down five years and free of my standing objections to Katy Perry songs: offensive crap, bad vocals, blown-out Luke choruses (not an objection then but an objection now; at least the strings let a bit of air free.) It wouldn’t be her best song even then, but evidently she’d have a great batting average.
[7]

Alfred Soto: If you want melodrama in a pop song, you can do worse than the clipppety-cloppety beat and string stabs without which Ms. Jepsen’s voice would collapse into a tinselly pile of Kylie-isms. The ambivalence of the title metaphor is a problem too. Forget that a more resourceful singer would have played with it instead of bouncing right off; it’s that the “maybe” gets the wrong stress, as if the songwriters understood on what kind of tightrope they were walking with this performer.  
[3]

Brad Shoup: Merely “co-written” by Marianas Trench’s Josh Ramsay, but I don’t buy it. The stop-start riff that was a stand-out obnoxious feature of “Haven’t Had Enough” got Vanessa Carltonized for Jepsen. As for the singer herself, I suspect there’s some pitch-shifting at play, or clever AI software. The sweet, youthful lilt? A young girl trading her soul for the chance to approach a skinny rocker? Sounds like wish-fulfillment to me. I’m onto you, Marianas Trench!
[3]

“The Voice” one-ups the FOX/”Idol” single machine with… TashBed?

[Video][Website]
[2.71]

Jer Fairall: A surprisingly non-ostentatious voice for someone who won something called The Voice, more of a flavourless Bruno Mars than a Daughtry-style post-grunge belter or a country sap in the Scotty McCreery mode. But if this wispy nothing of a single is meant to do little more than showcase his meager vocal talents, why make his audition piece for the world beyond TV singing competitions do double duty as another step in 2011’s unfathomable campaign to make the always boring Natasha Bedingfield happen again? 
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: I’d already dismissed Javier, who won The Voice on mellifluous maleisma but not much else. Surely the show, if they were serious about his career, would at least release a single before season two? Then, just in time, came this, a version of the All-American Rejects’ “Gives You Hell” with all the annoying parts cut out. If NBC, Javier and (past/current?) mentor Adam Levine were just hacking away, they’d write either another “Moves Like Jagger” or a Jason Derulo thing, not sunny pop-rock with a TashBed cameo. Points for — yes — balls.
[6]

Brad Shoup: I can’t believe they didn’t cast this slice of domesti-pop in a country mold. I mean, the track swings like Darius Rucker and features Natasha Bedingfield. That’s Nashville royalty right there.
[0]

Jonathan Bogart: The video version is parenthetically titled “Walmart Soundcheck,” which I guess means it’s slightly more country and significantly less TashBeddy than the single. I tried to listen to both in the line of duty, but once was enough; bless the grandmothers of all ages and genders for whom it will form an acceptably sentimental backdrop to Christmas 2011, but outside of that narrowly imagined field, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a use for it.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Either the songwriters are confused about love and money or I am, but it’s the singers’ job to sort this muddle, not mine. What we’ve got here wouldn’t even qualify as AMC theatre pre-show muzak.
[0]

Iain Mew: A verse about having no money but having love, a Tashbed verse about now having money and love, and a chorus about how their love means it won’t matter if they have no money again. It moves so fast, with such little dramatic tension, that the idea that they’re still hung up on those first verse days doesn’t seem credible.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: I am having Shawn Mullins flashbacks, and Jason Mraz panic attacks. The sturdy rock chorus showcases and exposes Colon’s voice — he’s competent enough to sing it, but boring enough that you don’t give a damn. Bedingfield sounds like she’s pining for Simple Plan, which, really, she probably was until the cheque cleared.
[2]

In which Alfred and Brad unintentionally ruin an appropriate score…

[Video][Website]
[4.29]

Jer Fairall: “If this party gets any more fun, a funeral’s gonna break out.” #rodneydangerfield
[4]

Zach Lyon: Oh, so this is that song that makes me rush to switch the station every time I hear “drippin’ Swagu.”
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: A series of baffling choices from an album where every other choice seems so deliberate. Why would you evoke the Vengaboys? Why does your party involve a chill-out drum loop and poly-blend synths? How is “swagu” acceptable? What, besides dues-paying, possessed someone to swap Andre out for J Cole? Seriously, how is “swagu” acceptable? Where the hell are “I Care” or “End of Time” instead of this?
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: If it weren’t for one of Andre 3000’s preciously rare 2011 verses, the original “Party” would have been one of the most disposable songs on 4. Not that it’s a bad song — Beyoncé’s performance, as always, rescues the generic jam with its specificity — but without Dre’s good-time reverie, it can only build up to the sickening thud of a J. Cole verse.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: The song’s massively less interesting than the weird tricks played on B’s voice, layered and melting into itself. If anything, a song called “Party” is crying out for some of the ostentatious fanfare that “Countdown” had to provide some interest. Even with that wicked slow-jam bassline, this is a wind-down rather than a fire-starter.
[4]

Brad Shoup: I could listen to a loop of B singing “I may be young but I’m ready” for hours. But it’d have to be divorced from Kanye’s oddly busy slow-jam groove. I get overly excited whenever Knowles drops Southern signifiers, so while I understand the horns in “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” are a nod to reggae, I hear the Atlantan detour when they’re suggested here. Once again, Cole’s a placeholder, but at least he doesn’t offend like the coinage of “Swagu”: someone’s truly gone mad with power.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The fat eighties synths and multitracked Beyoncé compensate for this faintest wisp of a song and Kanye sounding like a dumb ass. J Cole, I hope you’re grateful.
[5]

Fair to say, Aura Dione got off pretty lightly in the “you racist!” stakes.

[Video][Website]
[4.88]

Brad Shoup: Once again, Florence + The Machine are unable to resist the dark spell of maximalism. Primitive drumming evolves into a civilizing force of organ, chorus, and harp. This isn’t to say that they’re uppity, it’s just fairer to say they’re comfortable in their own skin. Welch knows it’s not about bursting out of the blocks; it’s all about the race. It’s the fireworks before the breakup blackness, with the singer laying out the ways she and her blue-eyed paramour are separate and unequal. “You want a revelation, some kind of resolution,” she taunts — I thought I heard “revolution,” but that’s definitely the last thing on her mind. Though it’s utterly lowbrow to consider, violence is her last resort, but it’s still a constant threat. I may be in the minority, but as usual, I’m concerned with the integration of all the sonic elements. Clearly Welch is uneasy about any kind of mixing.
[8]

Iain Mew: I’m now quite happy that I’ve never liked Florence’s overstuffed and subtlety-free music, because it means that I don’t have to make any attempt to justify this video.
[3]

Zach Lyon: The song is a [5] like every song I’ve heard from Florence that isn’t “Dog Days,” all of which sound like meaningless, easy-to-ignore Rennfest-inflicted mediocrity. I’m not reviewing the video with my score, but my feelings on this song are certainly skewed by the knowledge that it’s performed by someone who partook in its filming. I can’t really look at her or her band without thinking about the video: blackface, fetishization of black bodies, massive cultural appropriation, Othering, demonisation of foreign cultures/skin colors, complete lack of research into said foreign cultures, an army of little Christian white boys saving her at the end (and not to mention this fun little pic that surfaced of her doing some happy NDN appropriation) — how the FUCK do her fans forgive all that? That isn’t “gray area” racism, that’s just straight up racism. How can I really judge “No Light, No Light” simply for what it is when everyone involved in the video production, including the musicians themselves, seemed to use that title as a jump-off for one big dark-is-evil-so-dark-people-are-evil narrative?
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: I’m the one who talked up “What the Water Gave Me,” so you might expect me to defend this video. Screw that. The video practically is racist imagery, and not original either; “evil black and/or blackface priest dude ruins whiter protagonists, creates plot” was overused from use one. And no, YouTube knights, “but she’s besties with Dizzee Rascal!” wouldn’t count even if you cared who he was before; nor would her “friendships” with Drake or Beyonce count even if you regularly saw them photographed together. Neither does “you just don’t appreciate the music!” stanning; go back and look at my previous fucking scores. That’s the worst part. Nothing in the lyrics or song — for all the bombast, it’s a quite subtle portrayal of a relationship snuffed out — called for such a treatment. In other words, Florence fucked up major when she had to go out of her way to fuck up, and when she didn’t exactly need more critical demerits. I am livid.
[5]

Anthony Easton: Oh, that wonderful place where cackhanded earnestness and artsy pretentiousness collapse into po-faced accidental racism. Sort of like the plot of a David Lodge novel rewritten by Will Self, but less clever.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: There might be no singer on the earth who needs more to learn the lesson that great art is capable of speaking for itself than Florence Welch. You don’t need big arty videos; they too can be art but just as often can be self-indulgent nonsense. You don’t need to signify so much if you just are. God, you don’t need any of this. “No Light, No Light” is strong enough to stand on its own merits, and all of these diversions make Florence out to be some kind of magician guarding her secrets with five-dollar words, urging you to look until you spot the coin behind her ear, cheapening her power. But away from that, this is Ceremonials‘ equivalent of her first album’s “Howl,” as tightly coiled and hungry, if not quite as poetic. She sings the hell out of it too; her gifts are easy to see if you can avoid all her vocal cloaking and ill-fated video art projects.
[8]

Alfred Soto: She’s so blank that the impressive shows of soul could have been punched in remotely via computer. Fans pretend she’s deeper than Rihanna though.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: I’m ignoring the video — as confused in its messaging about religion as it is about race — because the song in itself is a one-note stomp that doesn’t bother with dynamics, just crescendos throughout. Which might be okay if it had anything to say beyond “Florence Welch sure has some pipes, huh?”
[5]

The winner of this competition will score a copy of the latest Da Capo Best Music Writing and a US$50 (or equivalent) Amazon gift card. You can read some great music writing and then purchase some great music — or, if you prefer, movies, Kindle books or apps.

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