Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our readers. We’ll be on holidays for the next week or so and returning early 2012. Thanks for reading us this year.

Nothing says holiday cheer like T-Wayne…

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[6.50]

Jonathan Bogart: I love how pissed-off T-Pain sounds; with the Auto-Tune, it sounds a bit like that old childhood lark of speaking directly into an oscillating fan. The two of them seem to have switched personas; here Wayne’s the one being laid-back and sly, while Pain goes hard and paranoid. Not that either is a new look for either of them, of course; but after preparing myself for another stripper ode it was a pleasant surprise.
[7]

Andy Hutchins: Stealing a lot of the repetition repetition in the hook hook tricks from Drake and disregarding typical decibel levels works for T-Pain. Demure, Barcalounger-based lines from Wayne (“I think all these niggas sound like me, that’s a compliment!”) work a lot better than the overly aggro vein he was mining closer to the middle of the year. And the anxious strings give a new and more urgent tweak to the world-dominating Lugerian snares. Turn it up.
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: The string figure lends a certain baroqueness to proceedings, but T-Pain’s Auto-Growled bluster is too sinister to be convincing. Wouldn’t he rather buy me a drank? Weezy’s autopilot functions better than it has most of the year, but even his cleverest punchline here (“These hoes are all alike — they put the ho in homonym”) pales next to the sublime dumbness of previous 2011 accomplishments like “I’m a made nigga; I should dust something” or “Get it? Leave ’em dead in the living room.” No one sounds bad here, but no one’s really trying either. 
[6]

Iain Mew: “I go so hard they call me go so hard”. That is magnificently stupid. Over the dramatic strings and straight after dropping the barked chorus and gun sounds, it completely punctures the tough mood, which makes it even better as a punchline. Nothing else made me grin in the same way, but I guess it works.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: The intro attempts to play on my nostalgia for “The Thong Song” and its magnificent “Eleanor Rigby” flip and then sprinkles some operatic grandeur on top. T-Pain’s verses are unimpressive, but Wayne supplies us with some brilliant/stupid/brilliant moments: “I go so hard they call me go so hard,” rhyming “mom ‘n ’em” with “homonym,” and a “do it big #hippopotamus” hashtag. This might approach Lil B levels of based genius, but I honestly can’t tell if Wayne is concertedly not giving a fuck or is no longer capable of doing so.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: I’m going to apply Occam’s razor here and say Lil Wayne sounds bored and laid back to the point of comatose because he is bored, and it’s not an act, or clever. More’s the pity, because that arresting string loop and T-Pain’s explosive onomatopoeia make for something impressive and impactful. Wayne’s verse is mere interlude.
[6]

We’ve slyly chosen an Xmas-themed band for today…

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[6.57]

Iain Mew: I was almost starting to wonder if this was a new, different Sleigh Bells and then CLANGCLANGCLANG. The compressed noise overload is still effective but limited (and limiting), and if there’s much else here to get anything out of they’re making it very difficult to do so.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: The driving dugga-dugga-dun drum line is promising, the chant-along bit is fun and Alexis’s voice remains pretty, but the vocals and guitar riff are a bit more plodding than I’ve come to expect from Sleigh Bells. I suppose it pummels as hard as “Tell ‘Em” did, but their best moments have always had some lightness of touch and some swing hidden amidst the full-on sonic assault — “A/B Machines” made me want to dance; “Crown on the Ground” had the tiniest bit of stutter. But I suppose that’s the difference between Treats and a Reign of Terror — personally I prefer cheerleaders-on-acid to this.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Alexis’s about to drive those guitars into the ocean. Her voice’s about to skim over lyrics bigger than her. 
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Alexis Krauss’s thin voice leaves a mark like an HB pencil amidst the thick crayon jags of Derek Miller’s guitars, but she letters the title in bold enough tones to render the mess inviting enough. I’d stick this scribble on the door of the refrigerator, but this pair has brought home work more deserving of gold stars.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: An impressively noisy piece, nothing shocking for Sleigh Bells, but I’m taken with the elements of the collage nonetheless. The crashing percussion and the big concrete slabs of guitar are really impressively imposing and ear-devouring, and Alexis Krauss has never sounded more like she’s stuck between Lush and Ladytron. That’s a pretty decent place to find yourself.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: Remember how the Raveonettes were awesome, and then they did that album where they took away all the distortion and tried to do ’60s pop straight? I’m pretty sure that Sleigh Bells is going to do that one of these days. So every release where they aren’t doing that is de facto awesome.
[8]

Andy Hutchins: “Just get on with it” is the perfect lyric for a track this unfortunately undecided between being bombastic and swaying drunkenly.
[4]

Yep, this really is a cover of the Xtina song…

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[5.29]

Anthony Easton: When did “Hurt” become the new “Hallelujah”? Also, why are my favourite songs about BDSM being co-opted by middle of the road pop stars? Which X-Factor star is going to perform Lady Godiva’s “Operation” next? 
[5]

Iain Mew: The spooky piano owes much more to the original than to the Cash version. That’s surprise enough, but together with Leona’s voice it helps to place an emphasis on a kind of numb dread (rather than creepiness or sadness) which makes her take add something worthwhile of its own. At least for a while — once it inevitably leaps up a gear it sounds like empty triumphalism and the words no longer mean much. The guitars think she’s still covering Snow Patrol.
[5]

Brad Shoup: An embarrassing attempt to catch some thirdhand shine off the original Man in Black: Trent Motherfucking Reznor.
[0]

Zach Lyon: I hope this is a big hit, if only to further enrage the NiN diehards whose brains explode when someone claims Cash wrote it.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: There’s a case to be made, and a lot of bros would love if you made it, that “Hurt” is Leona Lewis’ grand foray into trollgaze. It only is if you’re specific: she’s trolling everyone who thinks a) an X Factor winner, b) a woman, c) a pop artist and d) someone who sings with melisma is incapable of delivering emotion or selling a song.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: A big power ballad cover of “Hurt” is actually a pretty good idea, and it’s to Lewis’s credit that she almost pulls it off. That’s one versatile set of pipes she’s got, not that we needed reminding. What keeps her version down is the arrangement; the stark piano is faithful to the original, the big wall of guitars is incongruous and jarring, which would be fine if it was flattering or powerful, and it’s neither. It’s like Leona Lewis and her producers have a big button in the studio that grants a one-size-fits-all, generic mega-ballad treatment to anything they desire. That worked brilliantly on “Run,” but as Johnny Cash’s cover showed, a great cover needs to be tailored to the song as well as the singer. This only gets the second part of that process right.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Look. I love the Johnny Cash version. I called it one of the hundred best songs of the 2000s, and I stand by that. (I have no opinion of the Nine Inch Nails version. I’m sure I’ve heard it.) But I think a lot of people have fundamentally misunderstood the Johnny Cash version; he didn’t just turn it into a Johnny Cash song, a song which would forever be exclusively identified with his personal history and mythos and end-of-life narrative. He turned it into a song, and so set it free, rather than leaving it yoked to the millstone of a single definitive recording. But all of that’s only to explain why it’s okay for Leona Lewis to sing it in the first place; why I gave it the score I did below is something else. Part of it is that I have become, unexpectedly, a Leona Lewis fan; not only does she have a superb voice and astonishing control over it (she always had that), but she’s created a niche for herself as the darkest and depressingest, the most operatically concerned with metaphors of violence and destruction, major pop star in the world today. I don’t know or care what her visual presentation is: the sonics are pure gothic theatricality, with her too-rich, throb-sobbing voice as the central pillar in a cathedral of gloom. The arrangement here insists on that gloom, with the destabilizing assonance that keeps ending the piano lines ensuring that on a purely twentieth-century-music-history level, this version is more avant-garde than either Cash’s or Reznor’s. She elides half a verse in order to do away with the false martyrdom and focus purely on the pain at the center of the song. That’s not a hack singer’s move; that’s an interpreter’s move. I hope she does a whole album of covers like this one.
[10]

Dubstep is over. Brostep lives. Long live brostep.

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[6.43]

Katherine St Asaph: “I’m the kind of girl to put dub on the track” translated: “I am a girl in pop music.” But if every girl in pop music had Cher’s snap, pop music would be more awesome.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Dub on the track — sort of dated, not really avant garde, trend-following, and noise-y with no real interest in what noise means — that sounds right. 
[3]

Zach Lyon: With some luck, maybe this will kill, rather than continue, the trend. Just kidding. I’m sad.
[4]

Alex Ostroff: As everyone will probably point out, 2011 was the year when every single person on the planet was the type of girl to put dub on the track. Nonetheless, Cher acquits herself well — swirling into her upper register is a lovely little hook, and the three guest features are a coup. If anything, the assimilation of wobble into the standard pop toolkit this year allowed me forget exactly how effective it can be when MCs are up for the challenge of attacking the beat, dodging and diving in and out, between the bass and in time with it.
[8]

Iain Mew: Being the kind of girl to put dub on the track is not exactly much of a claim for uniqueness in 2011, but the dubstep wobble is both more built into the song and more inventive than your average pop flirting. Cher’s “I’m hard to swallow but a spoonful of sugar might make it go down more easily” alone has a sprinkle of awesome retro electro, along with a sweet sing-song “ee-ee-ee,” which is echoed under the music and comes back unexpectedly later on under Mic Righteous. All involved contribute a lot of fun and energy as they equate raving with spaceships, salvage the middle eight of “Just Dance” for good, and declare “whoever came up with this idea” a “genius”. Fair point.
[8]

Brad Shoup: That this is one of my favorite posse cuts this year is most attributable to my poor 2011 listening habits; still, that cod-Eastern melody pops up when it ought and ought not, and all the featured are on point. It’s nice to feel the work and the party.
[8]

Kat Stevens: WUB WUB WUB WUB i.e. aww bless. 
[8]

We are hungry for the great 90s boyband revival single. This isn’t it, though.

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[4.40]

Brad Shoup: Josh Ramsay’s work on the chorus punches things into *NSYNC territory: the self-sufficient joy of singing, the power of the moral high ground (the enraged scream is a scary-nice touch). But it can’t mitigate the awful shaming of the under-sequenced verses, or Belly’s tax write-off of a rap.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Josh Ramsay’s chorus bears so much resemblance to Michael Jackson’s paranoid 90s that it almost tricks me into hearing the rest of the song as that tightly wound and darkly glamorous (the sheen and trashiness of the video helps), but hey, props to them for even trying.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Teen pop turned aggro when “Bye Bye Bye” roared up the charts. By then N’Sync weren’t interested in your heart — they wanted you to smell their cologned assholes. The processed guitar squealing behind Josh Ramsay is an adequate Lance Bass-Joey Fatone substitute; if Justin and J.C. had wanted B.T. to go farther they’d have done the same thing. What will Fernandes and co. do when it’s time to recast 2011?
[6]

Jer Fairall: A fair bit of Asian pop that I’ve heard via the Jukebox this year suggests a delayed piling-on of the boy band onslaught of the turn of the century, something I’m willing to forgive due to my ignorance of the speed with which massive North American trends tend to saturate further reaches of the globe. Here in Canada, though, I know for a fact that we had as our own sorry excuses for the Backstreet Boys in the form of B4-4 and Wave, making this exhausted bit of MJ-by-way-of-JT detritus about as necessary, in 2011, as an Ashley Parker Angel solo disc.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: 1990s Belly > 2010s ft. Belly. 
[4]

Europe-devouring bilingual ballad o’clock!

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[5.67]

Jonathan Bogart: One of my favorite things about Shakira has always been her wide view of popular music, her willingness to borrow from anywhere and to allow odd juxtapositions in order to construct her post-national vision of pop. That she would pluck Francis Cabrel’s great ballad from the dustbin of 1979 and give it new popularity just by singing it on tour in Francophone countries is par for her course; that its popularity would inspire a single release and a number-one hit in France (where she’s had more #1 hits than in the U.S., to my patriotic shame) speaks to her status as the premier global ambassador of pop in all its forms.
[8]

Iain Mew: We’re right back into ballads and language barriers here. Particularly as the song is minimalist to the extent that there isn’t much to go on in the absence of understanding, but not to the extent that it’s strikingly so. All it really offers for me is proof that Shakira’s voice, amazing as it is, isn’t enough to carry a song on its own.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I heard that Shakira settled down, and she found a ballad, and she’s placid now.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Shakira sings this with love and tenderness and while I’m impressed as ever, I’m also completely bored. Her own ballads tend to be more intricate, more felt, more moving.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Possibly from a mistaken belief that paring instruments necessarily causes emotional nudity, Shakira turns the bulk of the track over to brittle acoustic plucking. This track’s bass is essentially a placeholder. It’s nothing like the lowing Pastorian four-string deployed on Cabrel’s original. Shakira’s rock roots likely inform her stomping on the strum and reaching for the rage. But with a text that keeps circling back to thoughts of death and war, perhaps she’s made the superior choice.
[5]

Alfred Soto: At the risk of looking reactionary, I find this her strongest performance in years. Supple, full, and in control, her voice doesn’t ladle the sentiment, especially in the second verse, for which she injects a rasp that prepares us for the sap of the French lyrics. Of course it’s not as daft as her own compositions; what she’s trying to is reestablish herself for an international audience, and on those terms this cover broadens her stock portfolio.
[7]

…Gloomy side down.

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[6.20]

Edward Okulicz: “You” is probably my favourite single of 2011, and Nina Sky’s ethereal menace was a lot more convincing than Holly Miranda’s half-swallowed and zero-danger delivery. From her vocal cords, “We are all just animals” sounds empty, leaving the music to provide all the drama, and the music’s good but it’s not that good.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Gothic creep, witchy twitch — but despite its best efforts it never builds to any real catharsis or convinces of any real dread.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: CREEP pumps too much fog and smoke into this atmosphere, resulting not in tenser atmospherics but in smog. Meanwhile, Holly Miranda’s voice is great but, at least when she handles lyrics, not at all eerie. She’s like Zooey Deschanel cast as Lady Macbeth.
[6]

Anthony Easton: That’s some excellent Arthur Russell style full creep there, and this is how you get an entire idea looped for maximum effectiveness, like the trick about whispering in a crowded room to make yourself heard over the din.
[9]

Jer Fairall: Too much Florence, not nearly enough Machine.
[4]

Sunny side up…

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[7.17]

Alfred Soto: Asking For Flowers, an overrated breakthrough, required that we concentrate on its followup. Here it is, and she sounds lost so lost in the big beat. What is she trying to say, and to whom? Of course it might sound better on the album but I don’t know if she’ll get that chance.
[5]

Jer Fairall: Upon hearing of her romance with Justin Vernon, whose voice makes me itch and whose music bores me to tears, I could only say that I was happy that she was happy. After hearing this first taste of their musical union, though, I’m left stunned at what they’ve seemingly brought out in each other: “Sidecar” sounds nothing like his listless, humourless soft rock, what with this live wire of a bass line that could alone kick the moribund ass of anything he’s ever released as Bon Iver. Nor does it resemble anything like the rustic, harrowing sketches that Edwards once constructed her songs out of, chiming and buzzing where she would have once drawn out and prodded her stories for every bloody detail. Of course, the difference is as much tonal as it is structural: “Sidecar” is a happy song, happy about finding a new love to face the world with, to make breakfast in bed for, to commiserate with over past personal tragedies only fleetingly in the rearview. As a concluding note to 2011 (and an introductory one to 2012, as this is the advanced single for Edwards’ upcoming album), I love this as much for how it runs counter to my personal musical highlights of this year, from EMA to “Someone Like You” to Drake and The Weeknd, as I do for how it just makes me bop foolishly around my living room for its two-and-a-half minutes, literalizing, as much as one simple, charming little song can, all of my foolish, hopeful optimism for the year to come.
[9]

Dan Weiss: Fast ones by Mrs. Bon Iver number in the few and her other tunes in the league of the perfect “The Cheapest Key” number in zero. So this “fun” song has something to celebrate. Not the unfinished title metaphor though.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: A shock, but a minor and pleasant one is a Kathleen Edwards song opening with garage drums and a big, raucous bass sound that sounds like the discharge of a giant battery. In fact, it’s as kinetic as this sort of thing gets, to the extent that her voice is a little drowned. The surprise that saves the song is that once you’ve heard it a few times, it’s as sunny and catchy as it needs to be.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: Maybe it’s just because I watched two live sessions of the song in order to find a screencap before listening to the studio version, but the buzzy guitar and ghostly electronic wail in the background (theremin? possibly) are making this song for me. With just her and two guitar players, it’s a cute enough ditty; with a full band, it’s enough to worm its way into my affections even in the middle of year-end free-fall.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: This song was not written for me. I can appreciate the buzzy synth, and Kathleen sings well enough, but the point at which I’d sing this song is the point at which I’d get the sidecar thrown in my face.
[7]

“Pottymouth pop,” and yet, listener for listener, Skrillex is probably responsible for the most swearing on the BBC Sound of 2012 poll…

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[7.33]

Katherine St Asaph: There are five things you should know about Stooshe. Their name may or may not have two capital S’s (here, I follow the “eschew obnoxious and unnecessary capitalization” rule.) They’re a girl group. They’re on the BBC Sound of 2012 list. Their bio compares them to Salt-n-Pepa, and their bio compares them to Odd Future. You could extrapolate “Betty Woz Gone” from that alone, but listening is quicker: it’s a deceptively pleasant morsel of midtempo R&B track spiced up by adlibs, with Kit-Kat slogans and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme smushed in like walnuts and steeped in possibly-problematic themes like rubbing alcohol. The first two are immensely likable; the last depends on your tolerance for not-exactly-empathetic, or rather not empathetic at all, portraits of downtrodden women. That’s your call; it just better be the same tolerance you have for Ed Sheeran.
[7]

Brad Shoup: This brings the chaos. A few hard-luck vignettes would seem to be the point — with all those ad-libs an unfortunate reaction, perhaps, to the pull of the R&B-piano-and-BLACKstreet groove — until the Fresh Prince parody replaces invented tragedy once and for all with goony fun. The face-pulling, the vocal filters, the word gizone: it’s so obnoxious and never dull. For those poor souls who’ve longed for the piss to be taken out of “Waterfalls,” we finally agree on something.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: Yes, yes, yes! The BBC Sound of 2011 was a near-universal disaster of awful music that neither deserved or needed exposure, and that’s not just Jessie J. “Betty Woz Gone” has more sparkle, more sass and more hooks than last year’s list put together. Their asides, their enjambment of obnoxious but endearing uses of “not” everywhere, and the roughness and colour to their anecdote are all indicators of personality and charm — and on top of that, the chorus goes off.
[9]

Iain Mew: I like the rickety piano, and they deploy some of their swearing and drugs references in inventive and amusing ways — the whole “I was going to say fucked up but I just fucked up” thing, and particularly breaking the rhyme scheme to switch in “crack” (for what, I’m not quite sure.) In between, though, I don’t really care too much about the story and find the overload of ad-libs and obnoxiousness just a bit too much. I don’t know why I find this accent easier to take from Nicki Minaj than from actual Brits.
[5]

Anthony Easton: The chorus on this is monster, and the storytelling — rangy call and response, genuine narrative — reminds me of so much that I love, from the Shangri-Las onward. Once it gets to the East End London roughing up of the Fresh Prince, it exceeds its own cleverness.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: The raucous noisemaking and pass-the-mic conversation was all getting a bit wearisome before they interpolated the theme to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and all was forgiven.
[7]