The artist formerly known as Butterfly…

[Video][Website]
[6.14]

Iain Mew: “It’s a feeling” but it’s barely even that, drifting by without ever making an impact.
[5]

Anthony Easton: Is that a piano around 2:31? Because if it is, it foregrounds the rest of the track. The track itself is a little chaotic, a little confusing in places, the flow isn’t as strong as I was hoping and the details could do with a little more effort at isolating. As it is, there is not enough attention to detail paid.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Even granting that Shabazz Palaces’ fantastic album is not exactly primed to compete with Diplo-helmed chartbounds, this one is particularly resistant to anything but a well-earned headphone reverie. Note the bass, thick mix, and Ishmael Butler’s querulous timbre.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The track achieves weightlessness, which mitigates the drag of Ishmael Butler’s flow. The bass is nearly subliminal, the synthspace takes up the whole brain pan. It makes Butler’s nagging meter a real bummer by contrast.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The bass is bathymetric and the keys oceanic; the effect is of a song that rolls languidly along the horse latitudes. “The ship I came here on vanished,” raps Ishmael Butler, and his verse tips willfully into obscurantism for the most part. The coyness works, however, because, as the hook of sorts says, “It’s a feeling” — impressionism is the point. The sharpest, most interesting parts are when the lapping leaves behind coarse sediment: “I can’t explain it with words, I have to do it,” for instance, or “I slowed it down once; everyone was going fast/So I sped up, cause I ain’t the one to reach the end last.” As the words build momentum, so too does the melody — but still only intermittently. The song is one to be submerged in. I enjoy it the same way I do, say, DJ Sprinkles’s deep house inversions.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: It could be a bit clever for its own good; the music and the words are doing two different things and not in harmony. Ishmael Butler jerks me around and never lets me into the story he’s telling. The music, by contrast, is a soulful trance. I might even wish that the two ideas had ended up as two tracks, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t intriguing enough on its own; indeed, what seemed like a mismatch on the first listen just made me listen harder.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Takes forever to get going, and when it does never rises above a mumble. The fact that the mumble is pretty compelling isn’t quite enough.
[6]

Get spiritual…

[Video][Website]
[6.62]

Iain Mew: SMD take a stab at ghost in the machine dance soul like Hot Chip used to do. It’s enjoyable but the haunting refuses to last past the end of the track.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: I’m imagining that dropped in a DJ set, “Seraphim” coming over the sound system would be like the the view of the fake smoke and the stench of the real stuff lifting, the lights going on, and the sweaty disco becoming a serene palace made of ice and stained glass. And everyone would stop to sip cool, green cocktails before bobbing their heads just a little to enjoy the tranquility.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Seraphim are, of course, of the heavens, but listening to this song has me at all sea, with the synthbursts acting like sudden pockets of warm water. Who needs progression when you’ve got timbre?
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: “Seraphim” makes a mistake so obvious it must surely be intentional: the gospel vocal loop culminates not in the expected euphoric release but in finicky synth pedantry. It’s like being born again and discovering that godliness is actually next to tax accounting. Color my expectations subverted, but for what reason?
[4]

Alfred Soto: Of course I want the vocals to claw their way to the top of these synth glaciers. Then I remember the adage: Some say the disco will end in fire, some say in ice.
[6]

Michaela Drapes: It bears mentioning that seraphim, strictly speaking, are often depicted on fire, which is kind of the opposite effect of what this perfectly frosty track is up to.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: The title’s far too lofty for the track’s plasticine loops and squiggles, but that doesn’t detract from the slow-bursting pleasure they provide.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Almost minimal, with a lovely vocal, and easy beats. It would be dull if it lasted longer than a couple of minutes, but the short length and spare instincts open up a kind of middle ground. 
[7]

The copyeditor in me really wants to make Marina put a space in this title…

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Michaela Drapes: Marina continues apace with her postmodern, footnote-providing stomp through the perils of contemporary femininity, a role she occupies with an intense glee that’s the flip side of someone, say, like Lana del Rey. But really, how could I not rate this as almost perfect? I mean, a Stone Roses reference! Also, she can actually, really, amazingly … sing. For all the Zola Jesus apologists in the house, this is what someone with actual training sounds like.
[9]

Anthony Easton: Self consciously dramatic and convinced of its own power, it moves somewhere between silly and ludicrous. Is only really redeemed by Marina’s impure falsetto. 
[6]

Iain Mew: Marina sets up a character that I don’t think we’re supposed to like, but she neither skewers her or revels in the unpleasantness. She’s just kind of there. When Marina sings “I’m sad to the core” she swallows the words as if afraid to actually bring emotion into it. Which is a shame, because musically there’s personality to spare. If Marina managed to put across as much in the narrative as in the sounds (The “wow”s! The fuzzy jolts of bass!) it could be an amazing song.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The whomping synths that enter during the verse make trudging through this a chore, but even without them, “Primadonna” wouldn’t be any fun. “All I ever wanted was the world,” Marina sings, but with neither the intensity to make the character real nor the absurdity to make her silly.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The rent-a-Guetta beat and Marina’s thick, affected low notes make for the year’s oddest amalgam. But said beat demands an idiosyncratic vocalist, and Marina’s trying too hard to sound like the competition. I do like the idea of failed crossovers though!
[4]

Pete Baran: The harder edged electronic backing suits her sometimes cutesy vocal acrobatics more than some of her past singles, but you do wonder what the Diamonds are doing whilst this is on. But the whilst the song allows for her usual swoops and gulps, the centre has little to recommend it, “Primadonna Girl” is a near embarrassing lyric to repeat over and over. Rescued by the backing, but I can get that elsewhere. File above La Roux, but only just.
[4]

Brad Shoup: Did Robyn and Katy Perry co-write this on tour? 
[3]

More like a powerwalk in the late afternoon, these days…

[Video][Myspace]
[4.50]

W.B. Swygart: Kevin Rowland’s career, and that of Dexys, has been riddled with commercial suicides — never intentional, because Kevin’s all about triumph, a battle to achieve whatever he feels is victory at that particular time. It’s just that victory on Kev’s terms quite often hasn’t been victory on most other people’s. So it is that the first track released off One Day I’m Going to Soar is a near-five-minute follow-up to “My National Pride”, a seven-minute track off 1985’s Don’t Stand Me Down, the least commercially successful Dexys record by an enormous distance. “My National Pride” was even more rambling, with several bits where Kevin’s vocal becomes indecipherable; both songs deal with his relationship to national identity. Where in 1985, Kev looked to his Irishness as a source of strength, an elixir to fuel his self-esteem, here it’s just not enough. “Nowhere Is Home” is the sound of him admitting he has no idea how to find happiness, but refusing to stop looking. At one point, he yelps “I wanna be everything!”, which just about nails it. The voice may put other people off, with its snarls and curdles; I hear vulnerability, inconsistency, impotence and fury, and I well up a bit. Somehow it doesn’t matter that “Irish stereotype” probably isn’t in most people’s list of least favourite things about Dexys, because it’s clearly very high up Kevin’s. He’s always made records about himself for other people, has always fought a war to be proud of himself. Epic battles rage, some of them more listenable than others. “Nowhere Is Home” sounds like a prologue more than a single (how it’ll fit in at track 9 on an 11-track album I have no idea), but I don’t really mind. Kevin Rowland made “This Is What She’s Like”, for fuck’s sake, and the best thing I can say about “Nowhere Is Home” – the thing I should probably have said several words ago now – is that it fits alongside that quite nicely.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Kevin Rowland’s career is more or less the definition of mercurial, what with the press embargo, the firings, and the identity adoptions. This move is the latter’s opposite, explicitly rejecting his Irishness as a distinguishing mark. But the Swampers soul sound looms as its own mark. I do like Dexys, but since I’ve never figured out what he’s trying to outrun, this doesn’t really tug at me. 
[5]

Anthony Easton: For a song that is supposed to be about a kind of restlessness (of touring, of the Irish diaspora?) this song is quite domestic, though it has an aggressiveness that is almost self-conscious. This troubadour routine seems to be as much of a stereotype as anything that could be done before, and it is foundationally self-limiting; does he recognize the irony? 
[5]

Pete Baran: It sounds like Dexys squared. Kevin Rowland is playing up the vocal tics to a wild degree almost beyond parody. And for a reunion that is out of the blue, this is clearly designed to promise something which any Dexys fan can feel comfortable with. If you like the ballads, or the rockers, this mid-tempo shuffle and statement of intent promises that they are still there. But the problem is that it is a little too comfortable; the Dexys I loved had the mad-as-a-hatter explosion of force. That is hidden all over this song, and whilst Dexys have aged with their audience, it’s clear the threat is still in here. I wanted more than a threat — but hey, playing all your cards in your opening hand is hardly good poker.
[5]

Iain Mew: It would take a lot for me to get over the limitations and oddities of the vocals when they’re front and centre like this. After five minutes of polite music and rambling about fitting in I’m not at all convinced that it would be worth the effort.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Holy smokes: it’s 1983 and Joe Jackson’s still on the radio, which of course coincided with the success of Kevin Rowland’s only American hit. Rowland’s thick, stuffed-sinus voice atop the Willie Mitchell-esque arrangement is like a rat thrown into a butter churn. It’s hard to tell if he’s parodying soul and if so, why.  
[3]

John Seroff: “Nowhere Is Home” is some seriously hoary dad rock, rescued from lounge lizardry by Kevin Rowland’s gradual embrace of an odd, world-weary confessional that is neither Waits raucous or Cohen beatific, but more embarrassingly naked and confrontational. I question how effective telling your non-Irish listeners to “take your Irish stereotype and shove it right up your arse” is in building a rainbow bridge, but at five increasingly loopy and indulgent minutes, there’s little doubt that “Nowhere” is engineered almost entirely to please the boys of Dexy. Any enjoyment you get is purely incidental.
[5]

Jer Fairall: I have my reasons for wanting to like a new Dexy’s Midnight Runners song in 2012. Sometime around age 15, a family friend passed along a copy of Too Rye Aye to me during that brief cultural blackout when “Come On Eileen” had been pretty much forgotten and just before its mid-90s revival made it the thing of flashback radio programs, lame pop-punk covers and a punchline via Clerks and The Simpsons. All the more marvellous and inexplicable to me for the fact that the album’s mixture of mangled soul, sentimental Irish folk balladry and an almost theatrical exuberance ended with a perky novelty hit, Too Rye Aye briefly became a badge of my outsider status against people I wanted to confuse and alienate, only to be snatched away by said hit’s reintroduction into the cultural consciousness, immediately rendering it both accessible and uncool in exactly the wrong way (though, truthfully, I was ready to move on to bigger and better things by that point, anyway). If “Nowhere Is Home” had been what my 1994-by-way-of-1982 Dexy’s had sounded like, I cannot imagine having found much kinship with it, despite its casual profanity and somewhat amiable creakiness. Dexy’s Midnight Runners will always be a part of what my messy, wonderful childhood sounded like. This sounds more like the boring adulthood of someone who, thankfully, isn’t me.
[4]

Michaela Drapes: Ideally, a video for this track would feature Rowland serenading a wedding party gone wrong, backwards and in slow motion. That’s the only thing that could possibly provide the appropriate visual pathos for what’s going on here, which is something vaguely painful, vaguely interesting, but ultimately, too long in the tooth to be taken seriously.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: In which the only things that separates Kevin Rowland from 1985 are a) the inevitable lowering of his vocal range and b) production work that’s caught between being too glossy and not being glossy enough. 
[6]

Louis Louis Fendi Fendi Prada…

[Video][Website]
[5.88]

Iain Mew: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is a fashion blogger turned alternative model turned pop singer and apparently Japan’s most popular Twitter user. If you haven’t already watched the video to her first single “PONPONPON”, I recommend that (it’s a unique experience), but while I fall in the LOVE rather than HATE camp for that, the evolution from its kindergarten beats in “Candy Candy” is probably a necessary one. The chorus is bluntly direct with sweetness  written large, but beneath that there’s a gorgeous dance track that moves with a languid bounce rather than the same giant steps. Intricate detailing — the tiny melancholy hints of synth strings under the verses and the way that the bass pauses a fraction in a different place from everything else to fill up the pause and set up the chorus — fits perfectly next to the more overt stunts like the metallic slides and quacks. It’s sugar rush pop, but the sugar rush is unusually peaceful and serene. My perception of Kyary’s popularity and importance has been skewed by the amount of time that I spend with people who soundtrack their fashion shows with her, but “Candy Candy” makes me feel more than ever that she does have an above average chance of some kind of Western crossover. She already gets coverage alongside 2NE1 in (minimal) Asian pop articles in newspapers here, and while this is more because she visually fits into an easy zany Harajuku stereotype than for the music, that seems to be part of the plan. I’m fascinated to see what happens next.
[8]

Erick Bieritz: It’s commendable or… maybe remarkable… or at least notable that an artist can do a video in which she fires an assault rifle at a flying, singing onion… and it’s downright restrained compared to some of her other hits. Musically this is also a step back from–for example–the kaleidoscopic headache of 2011’s “PonPonPon,” despite a pidgin English chorus that would probably be discarded as “too obvious” by the writers of the interminably obvious “J-Pop America Funtime Now” sketch on Saturday Night Live. Kyary still has time to channel her inner Nobuhiko Obayashi into a musical/visual persona that’s as focused as it is bizarre, but her extreme approach leaves her with less margin for error than her more conventional peers.
[6]

Brad Shoup: She hasn’t been in the game long, but I know what I’m getting when a Kyary single hits: a time-release melody, videos like 2C-T-7 daydreams, and endearingly atrocious vocals. The lyrics are so infantile/retrograde they’re giving off stink lines, but there’s a 70% chance she’s on some next-level shit, so.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Piano to drums, and then the manic calliope starts, and you know that something at least interesting is going to happen for the first few seconds. By the end of the first chorus, if you aren’t pogoing like a plastered six year-old, you have no soul. NO SOUL. 
[7]

Michaela Drapes: The creep barista with oversharing issues at my local coffee shop/hipster pizza joint recently turned me on to Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (specifically “Pon Pon Pon”) — I blew him off because he’s a smarmy know-it-all jazz saxophonist having a second adolescence in some ridiculous master’s program at NYU. (Who listens to those assholes?) Now that I’ve actually heard (and seen) her work, I understand why he likes what she’s up to; I, however, am not sure I need to keep abreast of what’s going in Harajuku culture anymore, especially if the vanguard sprang fully-formed from the forehead of Takashi Murakami. On toast. (I’d totally buy the fake eyelashes, though.) The one point is for the disgusting onamatopoeticness of “CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING,” in case you were wondering.
[1]

Alfred Soto: She sounds like she’s saying “chewy chewy,” which would have made sense: nodding towards one of the great bubblegum hits in rock history situates her in its future and ever permutating present. “Crunchy crunchy” would have made for tastier pop fare, not to mention chewier (eventually).
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: The next evolutionary step in the international arms race to be as Twee As Fuck. Japan leads.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: More like a candy necklace: snappy-seeming at first but less sweet than chalky, and never something you want to consume more than half of. 
[4]

Now taking bets on when 90s revivalism will work…

[Video][Website]
[4.25]

Jer Fairall: Plodding, lethargic grunge of the sort I had little use for twenty years ago, never mind now. If this is what 90s nostalgia is gonna sound like, we’re in for a few years that’ll last as long as this song feels.
[3]

Brad Shoup: This is what happens when 1991 is your Year Zero.
[5]

Alfred Soto: This plods something awful, a phenomenon that turns the title from metaphor to prophecy. It’s supposed to be the opening salvo in a concept album about emo.
[4]

Iain Mew: The chiming riff sounds like Mew’s “Comforting Sounds”, but this is more like thoroughly discomforting sounds. The combination with Dylan Baldi’s reedy vocals also resembles early Radiohead, but their misery was always much more dynamic. “No Future/No Past” just goes round in hopeless circles that make its opening command to “give up” a fait accompli. Eventually Baldi strains to sound more hoarse and unpleasant and the band bring some energy, but it’s not quite worth the wait.
[4]

Anthony Easton: Reading Jonathan Bogart’s singles lists for the 90s last night, working through a decade where I first listened to rock and roll seriously, I was reminded of how much I love the Smashing Pumpkins and that much of what I previously thought to credit to the Pixies or Nirvana or Punk’s Women’s Auxiliary actually came from Billy Corgan. We might as well add this to the pile, now that I’m in a generous and nostalgic mood. 
[7]

John Seroff: Perhaps unsurprisingly, when you mix Yuck and Radiohead, you get Yuckhead.
[3]

Michaela Drapes: No, really, the youth of today don’t need a Pavement-by-proxy facilitated by too many stoned listening sessions to Radiohead and Interpol.
[0]

Sabina Tang: I have to give this credit for being on-brand: it’s a great sonic representation of the clothes in Urban Outfitters. To wit, desaturated to a muddy shade, and overpriced for what you get.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: Corporations are people now, meaning that the video description really can say that Urban Outfitters co-produced this. Unlike their clothes, though, the metaphor fits; this is a thin, fraying and artfully grungy ripoff of better styles, with uncomfortable implications if you buy into it too much, that I’ll hate myself for not hating.
[7]

W.B. Swygart: Video co-produced by Urban Outfitters, which I think means someone at Urban Outfitters is a Katie Melua fan. The song itself is like a slightly duller, more predictable Slint, but it does the klangenwhine nicely enough.
[6]

Michelle Myers: A sprawling landscape of alt rock in broad, impressionist strokes. If you get caught up in hating the entire idea of 90s revivalism, you might miss the Recession Era Gen-Y hopelessness, the crashing cymbals like a bucket of water in the face, the Spiderland chug of the bass guitar. Dylan Baldi made the wise and timely choice to stop singing like most of his bedroom rock peers. After a few years of indie rock mostly sounding like ghosts at the bottom of a well inside a dentist’s office from the 80s, an emotionally-demonstrative non-poltergeist singer is a breath of fresh air.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: No present, either.
[3]

Reigning on all of ya’.

[Video][Website]
[7.29]

Brad Shoup: The evolution’s in the flow, clearly. Diffused bass, slushy handclaps, a twitchy one-handed riff: this is practically preset stuff. Never easing up over three minutes of 140 bpm, Wiley goes chorus-free and nutrient-rich. At points it sounds like a cribsheet freestyle (I’m pretty sure Dave was in charge of the Chipmunks, for instance), but again, there’s no flagging of energy I associate with extra bars. But is an impressive flow over aural mush really evolution, or just lab work in a controlled environment?
[5]

Iain Mew: The fact that Wiley’s official site is still leading on “Take That”, his “fantastic new single”, says something about how separated out his pop career and the career with songs like this are. He is, indeed, evolving. So “Evolve or Be Extinct” is more technical and isn’t attention grabbing in the same way as “Take That”, but that’s not to say that it isn’t fun. “You forget I’m giant like Haystacks“, sticking in a line ending “orange” just for the challenge, deliberately stilted delivery tying his lines in a knot just before he gets to “tight like an old knot” are all a lot of fun. Only when the silly voices come in at the end does the point scoring overtake the invention to the detriment of the track.
[7]

John Seroff: The spectacular Evolve or Be Extinct album is the product of a mind on a higher plane, featuring the emcee at peak on consistently awesome riddims. The title track is no exception; Wiley gracefully twines around an industrial piston of a beat with all the smoothness of Big Daddy Kane and all the linguistic fluency of Andre 3K. The man is album-after-album consistent, talented and woefully underrated in the states. What I wouldn’t give for Wiley’s caliber to be the target for aspiring US chart rappers; “Evolve” is as sharp as anything I’ve heard in 2012.
[9]

Andrew Ryce: The beat is a little invasive/overblown/annoying, but Wiley sounds pretty fiery here, which is always nice to hear. Reminds me a bit of JME’s “96 Fuckries” in the way he’s just going totally nuts here without much of a chorus. But that beat is too distracting! It turns what should be thrilling verses into monotonous racket. The little pseudo-breakdown though… “Stop thinking of old songs/Move on… Them spitters good but their flow’s not tight like mine like an old knot.” The moment where I remember that he’s Wiley, and fuck what I have to say. Also, is that a Come Fly with me reference at the end?
[7]

Alfred Soto: Intelligible flow, smart enjambments keyed to those canned claps and snaps — no chance of extinction. Docked a notch for the Greek chorus applauding him in the outro.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: What with all these kids and their newfangled dubsteps and funkys and bass musics, it’s nice to sit back, pour a tall one, and unwind with some good old-fashioned grime.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Wiley’s speed and fluidity here is as impressive as it is infectious. To say nothing of its technical chops, what’s best about “Evolve” is how Wiley keeps the listener interested without using a lifeline — no guest choruses, no novelties, even no instrumental breakdowns. It’s three minutes of one thing done so well it needs no other things to distract from it.
[9]

May the odds be ever in your trailer…

[Video][Website]
[6.14]

Sabina Tang: Little of The Hunger Games’ soundtrack seems to be actually featured in the film, at least not the songs in their original forms. I suspect this Pistol Annies number to have left its mark as an instrumental, trailing tendrils of inchoate dread that the music shouldn’t by rights evoke. Lyrics aside, it’s a sad, pretty, instantly hummable folk melody that doesn’t make active use of the vocalists’ personae, though I grow increasingly fond of Ashley Monroe’s timbre.
[8]

Alfred Soto: With harmonies evoking the other place that’s quite a remove from hell, these ladies continue their reputation for rooting sublimity in terra firma, in this case Angaleena Presley’s dusky blue notes. Inessential but a relief nevertheless.
[6]

Iain Mew: “Can you hear the devil drawing near?” they sing, and then, a line later, they give you the space to really contemplate the death rattle bass and the tension verges on spooky. The vague, ominous dread is done well too.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I believe the Pistol Annies and Miranda Lambert when they talk about general and localized disasters — the lost job, not paying rent, the banal hunger — just as I believe Taylor Swift when she talks about the broken hearts and bad boyfriends of teenage melodrama. I have not read the books or seen the movie, so I don’t have an opinion about how the soundtrack is loyal to those texts but the abstractions are supposed to be both violent and haunting. Yet I listen to this compared to something like “Lemon Drop,” and the dystopian seems less dangerous then the hardscrabble that’s occurring so close to home.
[6]

Brad Shoup: I can’t put my finger on the melody, but its reverence reminds me of the schlocky “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”. The electrifying cruelty of “Hell on Heels” is not the same cruelty of the Games, but I was hoping they’d find a good conversion rate. Alas, the title is much more warning than threat. Here I was thinking they’re here to kick ass and chew bubblegum; weirdly, they’re all out of both. Even more disconcerting, Maroon 5 trumped them in the soundtrack stakes.
[5]

John Seroff: Yeah, standard outlaw formula; yeah, Hunger Games tie-in; okay, whatever: you give me a straight-faced murder ballad with ugly reverberating underneath and plenty seething on the skin and you can keep the context cause you done got me already sold. “Run” brings all that plus mourning harmonies, traps that snap shut, tambourines that collapse and claw hammers brought down hard. The sophomore album from these ladies is gonna be a brutal joy; here’s a thoroughly enjoyable and bitter heart to chew on in the meanwhile.
[8]

Michaela Drapes: I am loath to say this, because I rather like what the Pistol Annies are up to in general, but this veers too far into Neko Case/Trio/The Lovemongers territory, and not in a good way. Stick to the stompers, ladies, and leave the dirges to the pros.
[3]

We’ll charitably assume he isn’t side-eying this song in his promo photo…

[Video]
[4.29]

Brad Shoup: Too lazy to check: is there a slang term for the sex act where you mumble dirty talk until you both fall asleep?
[3]

Alfred Soto: I doubt anyone broke dere backs assembling this retread. 
[2]

Erick Bieritz: From “Throw It On Me” to “Morning After Dark” to “Pass at Me,” Timbaland’s modus operandi through his Shock Value albums has been clear: partner with whichever goofballs will let him do his wacky schtick with minimal resistance. While those songs range from weirdly fascinating to utterly stupid, none of them are particularly boring. “Break Ya Back” slogs along on a minimal snare that sounds more like a Neptunes cast-off than a Tim beat. Neither he nor Dev have any business trying to carry a song, and distorting their voices isn’t hiding it.
[3]

Jer Fairall: Seductive and menacing. Given Timbaland’s history of leering goofily over his productions for any number of pop starlets, the balance he strikes here between the sexy and the sinister is downright astonishing; his words could all to easily be the threats of a serial killer misunderstood as figurative by his prey. Dev’s porny, ice cold sneer suggests she may be able to hold her own in the face of whatever ecstasies or horrors are headed her way.
[8]

Iain Mew: Dev plays against Timbaland better than anyone else I can remember, able to get down and mumbly and silly as well as him but just different enough not to be pointless. That’s still not a tremendous compliment. A production of booming bass and dive-bombing loops is engaging but a bit murky and defeats both.
[6]

John Seroff: Perhaps Timbo’s new strategy is to make his rapping the strongest element on the track? Talk about a Pyrrhic victory.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: “Promiscuous Girl” : “Break Ya Back” :: backbreaking : a tap then an apology. At least Timbo in his laziness forgot the synth claps.
[5]

Mohawky!

[Video][Website]
[4.33]

Katherine St Asaph: Someone involved wants to be Diplo. Someone else wants to be “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall.” Sean Paul just wants a nap.
[3]

Brad Shoup: It’s totally possible that my recent appreciation of Flo Rida is attributable to the groundwork laid by Sean Da Paul. Flo’s got more melodicism (although Sean’s had exciting workouts in that vein), but he and Sean exalt syncopation over all other concerns. But it’s melodicism that puts the latter on the wrong side of the Europop divide (in the correlation-not-causation field, Stargate hit big right around the time of Sean’s last top 40 hit). He tosses in a yodeled yawp, perhaps compensating for the lack of a true rise, but rote production plus an opaque bark does not augur a smash.
[4]

Iain Mew: The reaching for the high notes in the chorus sounds weirder and more out of place the closer I listen to it. The thick of-the-moment production is perfectly constructed to obscure that, though, as well as removing most traces of personality in general.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The sudden vocal swoops are hooks within hooks. Inspect them too roughly though and the misogyny will cut you.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Beware songs in which dudes tell you how women feel. The remix has Pitbull on it, which just feels redundant; surely Sean Paul is smug enough for two.
[4]

Michaela Drapes: Dream date with Sean Paul: I meet him in the bar of Le Poisson Rouge (I saw him there once!); he asks to take me out the next night, and I acquiesce. He pulls up outside my Bed-Stuy pad in a ridonk limo. He’s looking very fine indeed, and smells lovely. We have dinner at Pastis, and then he takes me to a silly club (doesn’t matter which, really) in the Meatpacking District, where we dance endlessly, all night, to this track — a heady and potent blend of nonsense and freshly-cracked falsetto.
[8]