The other day, I saw a 5-year-old kid running out of the elevator singing this at the top of her lungs. A man in the elevator grumbled about how he told her she shouldn’t sing and she’d thank him in ten years. That mood sums up this track pretty well, I think…

[Video][Website]
[2.00]

Katherine St Asaph: Dopey-faced, slick and functionless as a Fisher-Price phone. Adam Levine, who couldn’t pass a Turing test anymore, delivers “the plans we made for two” with the thud of a dropped call. Wiz is livelier, but the only message he leaves is “man, fuck that shit.”
[3]

Alfred Soto: These sleazos had a decent thing going when they found a plastic funk correlative for their jerkdom. Now Adam Levine sounds like the demo program for Pro Tools. He even has the nerve to sing this line and mean it: “One more fuckin’ love song I’ll be sick.”
[1]

Jonathan Bogart: What a maroon.
[2]

Jer Fairall: As an example of 21st century pop’s desperate need to be everything to everyone, this is even more damning than the latest Nicki Minaj clusterfuck, finding the world’s lamest band dabbling in cynicism, profanity and Wiz Khalifa cameos, yet still sounding every bit as bland and neutered as the radio edits will eventually render this anyway. 
[2]

Brad Shoup: Maybe the conceit’s past its sell-by date, maybe it’s not. I’m also unsure who Levine’s trying to impress with the cussin’. I’m sure of this: the non-Wiz portion will be extracted for the trailer of the fourth-best Nicholas Sparks adaptation.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: Every syllable Adam Levine stretches beyond half a beat evokes in me a feeling of discomfort not unlike that which you might feel while a nurse is just about to stick a needle in to your arm. I think the similarity is that while in one you’re dreading your skin being broken with a sharp point, during the other you’re dreading a piercing high note. As for what the song sounds like, Wiz’s bit is there because it could be, and it was played by the same machines that played, and possibly wrote, “Moves Like Jagger.” Levine is, or was, actually a competent singer, and if his last brace of singles weren’t selling like hotcakes, I’d actually feel sad that he feels the need to perform, and allow his voice to be surreally highlighted, like this. This was music without a shred of feeling to it even before it was glossed and spray-painted to death. I’ll take Marion and Marit’s take on the subject at hand, thanks.
[1]

Iain Mew: Do you remember “Breakeven” by The Script? No? Well, now I do, so fuck Maroon 5.
[2]

Side-eyeing the song, perhaps?

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[5.71]

Jonathan Bradley: For their first three or four albums, the White Stripes fronted like they’d never heard any music released after 1960 or north of the Mason-Dixon: a pleasant piece of theater made better by the duo’s unwavering commitment to it. Since then — let’s date the transition to the release of “Seven Nation Army” — Jack White has steadily worked to erase that pretense and replace it with the fiction he has never heard any music that wasn’t made by British groups from the 1970s who themselves wished they’d never heard any music released after 1960 or north of the Mason-Dixon. The recursion isn’t interesting. 
[3]

Anthony Easton: Even with his collaborative work, you could tell White’s influence pretty explicitly, so his solo album is just refining or purifying his themes or interests into one place. That said, the grind of this, the sophisticated attempt to appear unsophisticated and the wry nonsense lyrics make me want to hear the whole album.
[10]

Iain Mew: I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE YOWLING ABOUT BUT IT’S QUITE EXCITING!
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: The reason I eventually stopped caring about the White Stripes was that I didn’t care enough about Jack White, Genius Auteur, to try to parse lyrics that were, on the face of it, just there to rhyme. I see he’s even given up rhyming these days.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The title, bursts into falsetto and “who’s jealous” bits mark the only time this beloved Rolling Stone cover artist does something I’d want to hear twice. I’m inclined to blame the editors of venerable, dying publications for abetting White’s thirdhand misogyny, too.
[4]

Brad Shoup: “I’ve always felt it’s ridiculous to say, of any of the females in my life: You’re my friend, you’re my wife, you’re my girlfriend, you’re my co-worker,” Jack told the Times. “This is your box, and you’re not allowed to stray outside of it.” Someone forgot to tell his songs.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: The guitar histrionics might outdo Jack’s mewl, but he can’t fool me. It’s gonna be fun watching White Stripes fans defend the Nice Guy(tm) peepings and really fun watching them defend “I float in a sea of sadness.” (In his despair room?) Points for fun, I guess, or for trolling.
[5]

His finger lingers over the Top 11 of ’11. “Oh HO,” he thinks, “so they like country with horns…”

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[6.83]

Alfred Soto: Eric Church, Luke Bryan, and Dierks Bentley get the fratboy tag, but Niemann’s closer to the stereotype and talented enough to, like, write a concept album about it. Confident about his increasing confidence to talk-sing over organ and horn chart, glancing right off the “ain’t sweatin’ the little things” trope, strumming a guitar alongside a pretty good solo, luxuriating in his thick phlegmy voice, Niemann deserves the primo product placement at Target.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: I really like the turn towards New Orleans R&B as a signifier of (authentically Southern) good-time cheer.
[8]

Iain Mew: Possibly the ultimate lazy summer’s day song. I mostly mean that as a compliment for its laidback brassy groove, but on the other hand, I can feel the energy sapping away from me as it goes on.
[6]

Anthony Easton: There is a thin line between accurately reflecting the theme of the music and not really trying. This leans toward not really trying.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Niemann’s one of the few people on the country charts who’s able to summon a groove. His flatness on the refrain, his navigation of the syllabic filagrees, is totally winning. Boosted, the horns could have taken some of the edge off his tone, but I’ll take summer wherever it comes.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: “Ain’t sweatin’ the little things,” Jerrod drawls amid the musical opposite of a drawl; close harmonies, horns and organs arranged just so. This guy probably spent hours the day before landscaping his porch and figuring out which angle’d give her the most breeze and moonlight. He probably accidentally-on-purpose leaves books out, too. Trying too hard? Possibly. But charming!
[7]

A little Sunday evening aggro…

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[4.20]

Iain Mew: Man, it’s been over a decade since “Shinobi vs Dragon Ninja.” Ever since then, every single that Lostprophets have released has failed the fundamental test of whether it has anything remotely as awesome as the riff in “Shinobi vs Dragon Ninja”. This one eventually comes closer than most with some excellent riffing of its own, but it takes more than three minutes (i.e. longer than the entire length of “Shinobi vs Dragon Ninja”) to get to that point.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: The first couple of minutes of this have absolutely no idea what they want to be. Tough guy pose? Crowd-devouring sing-a-long? Profound commentary on something? It’s not really working on any particular level other than being loud and buzzy. The last minute, where the guitars roar unencumbered by the remainder’s unpropulsive rhythms, is a high point. Alas, it’s 30 worthwhile seconds padded by so much more dross.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: When Fred Durst got signed to Cash Money, our office got into this half-hour debate about whether nu-metal could ever be cool again. They argued no; I argued yes. I’m a piss-poor arguer sometimes, though, so the Skrillex SPIN covers and Weezy psychoanalysis and wayward brothers I deployed convinced no one. They could’ve just played me this. I’d have caved by the first growls of the crowd.
[3]

Brad Shoup: I know just enough not to call these Lostprophets the last men in the ghost town, but not enough to wonder who else is carrying 311’s catchphrase! banner. (Besides 311, I guess.) Efficient phased guitar strokes and urgent non-harmonies in the chorus: if you ever wished Refused had gone half-hair metal, God bless you.
[5]

Anthony Easton: Living in a small town at 14, and angry more than I should have been — or at least unable to process the exhaustion and frustration as anything but anger — I found music that sounded a lot like this a worthwhile bower. I think we might have had slightly better musicians, but that might be the arrogance of someone no longer young not paying careful attention to the burnishing of nostalgia. In a decade, someone will remember being a 15-year-old twerp from Kansas and thinking this was worth something. 
[6]

Flame-haired guitar-toting goddess skanks it up a little. Literally.

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[5.67]

Alfred Soto: “Baker Street” is epochal, Gerry Rafferty’s second big hit less so, but the years have been kinder to this proto-Dire Straits number. Raitt and Rafferty sound like a can’t-lose team, so why is this a dud? Her voice still exudes the peculiar combination of laconic warmth which wowed lots of us at this year’s Grammys (when she turned Alicia Keys into a Joan Crawford character), and she plays a guitar solo to match. The watery skank though is beneath everyone involved. 
[4]

Anthony Easton: Perfect. Well constructed. Elegant. I love her voice, and her voice has not gone anywhere. There is a longing here — no anger, and not too much sexuality, just a perfect little push. I love the soaring guitars — could be cheesy, but they manage to pull it out into something well worth listening to. 
[10]

Brad Shoup: Why, oh why, did she not cover “The Ark”? My Raitt stereotype is genial mid-tempo depictions of relationships. Or maybe that’s just the one song. Anyway, this is such an unsurprise that I’m 85% certain I grew up with this reggaefied version.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: She’s no stranger to reggae-lite, even if just being willing to use its rhythm, having dabbled outside the textures she’s best known for on occasion, but if this song means something to her, her performance doesn’t quite show it. Not that she doesn’t try hard, her voice still oozes an appealing, calloused sexuality and the arrangement is meticulous and neat; it’s tailor-made for a slightly eclectic AC radio station. But beyond the video’s quite lovely juxtaposition of couples of all kinds, you could swap the lyrics out so they were about anything and I’d barely notice. Bonnie Raitt can be major league brilliant but this is really, really minor Raitt.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I’m straining not to deploy a certain word to describe the reggae-ish stabs and flourishes that never quite embody either of those nouns. You certainly wouldn’t use the word for the song or Bonnie’s voice, or shouldn’t; somehow, both seem simultaneously more melodic and more creased over the years. But she doesn’t sing it all the time; the instrumentation keeps nudging her away. It’s all so timid; it’s all so tasteful.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Bonnie Raitt herself — both voice and guitar — brings more sex and fire than was ever in the original. Unfortunately, the Boomer-reggae rhythm takes it all away again.
[6]

As heard in “La que no podía amar”…

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[5.88]

Iain Mew: This basically ends up as a by-the-numbers Snow Patrol mid-tempo song in a language that I don’t understand. (What’s that? “Corre” actually means “Run”? I swear, I did not set that one up deliberately!) Yet I enjoy “Corre” a great deal more than that suggests for two things it does on its way there. First of all the unforced intimacy that comes across in Joy’s voice in the initial verses, which codes Swedish indie-pop more than anything to me. Secondly, the magnificent swish of retro space synth across the song at 3:40 which lights the place up before dying a flatlining death ten seconds later and never coming back — a lovable addition to any formula.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: The dramatic beauty of the piano-and-guitar arrangement is  fine — like a Mexican Swell Season, if such a thing needed to exist — but it’s the warm 70s synth burbling in over the bridge, ratcheting down the potential floridity of emotions to a healing evenness, that makes it the rare ballad worth sticking around for when it twinkles across the radio.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Melodramatic, where the softness becomes so overwrought that it becomes more than hard — plus I am always a sucker for twinkling piano.
[7]

Alfred Soto: So pretty it’s anonymous. 
[4]

Brad Shoup: Wish they could’ve found a way to integrate the Sigur Rósy intro with the delicate ballad. I also wish it was Couples’ Skate circa 1993.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: A ballad like this isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but even a cynic can hear lots to like in it. Joy has a strong voice, for starters, and would be well-at-home singing just about everything from a power ballad to a sweet trifle, and “¡Corre!” shifts enough to give us a few data points to prove it. The longing melody of the chorus brings to mind U.S. country more than anything Latin as its inspiration, too.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: The instrumentation does the remarkable trick of bringing to mind both Dream Academy and Buddy and Julie Miller, and the barely functional Spanish speaker in me is charmed by the chorus of “corre, corre, corre, corazón.” None of that erases my disappointment in Jesse and Joy’s inability to build to anything greater than slushy mid-tempo plod. Surely the exclamation points in the title need to be earned?
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: It took that long to dub “I Hope You Dance” into Spanish?
[4]

Jack White approved…

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[6.00]

Brad Shoup: Answering the question, “what would Jack White sound like if he weren’t such a raging, seething id?” with “a little like the Stampeders.”
[6]

Alfred Soto: I prefer their guitar tunings and voices to Jack White’s, to cite that other avatar of musical necrophilia. But a preference is just a preference.
[5]

Anthony Easton: It’s a museum piece, but I like some people working through museum pieces, so that’s not really my objection. It doesn’t quite release itself into full chaos, though it seems to want to. It is trying to bring back Muscle Shoals, but the stuff that comes from Muscle Shoals is a lot more interesting, so that might be my objection: a poor compromise between historically minded Southern soul and noisy fun for fun’s sake.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: When I listened to it sight unseen, I mentally filed it away as Okay Kingsofleony Rootsrock, not for me but not to be held against anyone who liked them either. When I watched the video — I’ll be embarrassingly callow — I was surprised to learn that Brittany Howard was a black woman singing in her own voice instead of a bearded boy aping John Fogerty and Ronnie Van Zandt. My racist, sexist bad for assuming a default setting of White Male, of course — and it might not also be entirely creditable that once I saw her I was much more interested in her music. Except, well, here we are.
[8]

Iain Mew: The official video sees them play live rather than being of the recorded version and it’s easy to see why. It’s a magnificent performance of controlled power that shouts out that this may be old music but it’s everything that matters to them right now. The drums and bass are whipped into a thick foam and Brittany Howard’s roar and the song sound like two things which need each other really badly and are clinging on to make things work, rather than just being two separate neat impressions. The record sounds very tame in comparison. The mark is averaged across the two.
[7]

Will no one get these children a washcloth?

[Video] [Website]
[5.67]

Iain Mew: I’ve seen tUnE-YarDs play live and thoroughly enjoyed it, but there’s something about her records which still doesn’t click for me. There are too many ideas with too little development and without seeing the high-wire act of the songs being assembled on the spot, they just don’t get across the same kind of energy to make up for the lack of coherence. “My Country” is closer to making sense than most at least, and the fuzzy blow-out after “the worst thing about living a lie is just wondering when they’ll find out” is definitely worth something.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: Marrill Garbus doesn’t make things easy; like so much of her work this song’s most immediate quality is a sense that it is excessively vivid. Her voice swoops and ruptures while horns honk, xylophone pings toddle about, and, on one occasion, an obtrusive bright synth line smears messily across the mix. It’s not quite sensory overload, because she allows plenty of room for the track to breathe, but the jumble of sounds ensures that nothing quite fits comfortably together. “My Country” is a song about how some people in America are poor, but other than a reference to shopping at a Salvation Army store, there’s none of the narrative cohesion required to elevate it above (thankfully rather ignorable) didacticism. A bon-bon, and one with a flavor neither familiar nor unwelcome.
[6]

Anthony Easton: As someone who owns several Salvation Army band cds, and goes to the Salvation Army Christmas concert every year, I always thought that the indie hipsters who finally understood that the glorious and holy noise of the Booths could be used for evil, or at least rock and roll, would get points in this world and the next. The tUnE-YarDs call out the Sally Ann, and they get really close, especially with some pretty tight xylophone, but they don’t go completely over hill and dale, like the Salvation Army Marching band would. Holding your fire due to some avant-garde honour is a kind of lie, and people who have heard it have not quite found out, considering how well they do at the Pazz and Jop. Are they worried they will eventually be called on the bullshit, and is it worth our effort to point out they continue to be as uninteresting as they possibly could be?
[4]

Alfred Soto: Appropriating a patriotic hymn to add sinew and muscle to a declaration of aesthetic intent is a conceptual coup. The concept itself becomes flesh with Muppet-style background vocals and tribal drums.
[7]

Brad Shoup: I hate people singing about angels guarding their bygone youth with flaming swords, I’m weary of country dudes immortalizing the same six rural signifiers, I can’t stomach the millionth song sardonically addressed to Uncle Sam… at this point, I might only accept subject matter that concerns the proper way to prepare desserts. It helps that Garbus puts the super joy to her drive-by observations. Bug-eyed synth smears, cod-xylophone, her remarkable force and range: it smuggles in a lot of medicine. No idea why the “na-na-na-na-na” chant is still musical tender, but by then it’s far too late.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Isn’t this pretty much what Maureen in Rent was written to make fun of? 15 years ago?
[5]

And finally, in college I called this band “The Flaming Jets” for a couple months because I could never remember their actual name. That is all…

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[5.50]

Zach Lyon: If I were much younger I’d certainly have a tolerance for “Someone Purer”‘s self-deprecating yearning for self-improvement, especially via music. But the problem with being a teenager in love with music is that it takes forever to internalize the fact that your favorite songs were written by grown men who should know better. You might (but probably not) know Mystery Jets as the band responsible for one of the most gorgeous and lovely and delicious choruses of 2008; I was never a fan of the irony inherent in “Two Doors Down” — 80s pastiche is its most tired incarnation — but maybe that’s just what they need to avoid the quicksand pits of sadsack navel-gazing.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: I know I’m morally deficient because of it, but I prefer my soaring rock songs to have more than a single texture.
[4]

Alfred Soto: For the purportedly simple task of persuading a singer with a Mercer-esque weakness for what used to be called “soaring” melodies to embody literate lyrics about salvation, these boys deserve our thanks. Next time I hope they find a cause less pure to embody.
[5]

Iain Mew: Mystery Jets’ ability to transform themselves with each album is impressive. To date, their incarnations have always been out of time — they were The Coral far too late, they worked with Laura Marling too early and they got on the ’80s yacht-indie bandwagon too early (and possibly with too much subtlety, if Noah and the Whale‘s horrifying success is anything to go by). This time round they sound right on time though, trading in an of-the-moment epic-but-too-scuffed-and-shy-to-actually-be-epic sound which The Maccabees and Bombay Bicycle Club have found commercial success with, and that has made The Shins more popular in the UK now than ever. The Jets actually bring something new and good to it as well, at least in the verses and their creeping discomfort before a disappointingly familiar resolution brought to you by rock ‘n’ roll, “oh” and “oh!”.
[6]

Brad Shoup: “Deliver me from sin/And give me rock and roll” — I’m not sure these concepts have been abutted anywhere outside of a Stryper record. And I’m up to my eyelashes in these kids wringing their hands over their adolescent Narnias. But damn if, when they punch into the chorus, rock and roll doesn’t seem like such a bad solution.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I like the idea that rock ‘n’ roll works as a kind of religious hope — the idea that pleasure, or sexuality, or music can redeem someone, make them a more interesting and less difficult person, a person that does not require the arithmetic of subtracting desire as a response to adding religious purity. This rock ‘n’ roll-as-new-religion seems to be uniquely English, because Americans still haven’t quite gotten over the swamp of Jesus and still feel guilty and still seek innocence; the innocence sought in this work is profoundly ironic.
[8]

Continuing the autobiography of today’s editor, a kid in high school would tell me I looked like the lead singer of this band every day in the lunch line…

[Video][Website]
[4.50]

Rebecca Toennessen: Releasing a single from a concept album might make a single seem impenetrable to understand without the context of the album, and sometimes TMV singles are awful — the butchered ‘L’Via L’Viaquez’ breaks my heart. “The Malkin Jewel” is a shorter Volta song, (for them) and it’s intensely addictive. Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s threatening growl is just barely controlled; you know you’re going to get some serious Cedric Belting, and as ever, deliciously murderous lyrics. [Other TMV song topics: kidnapping, umbillical things, a taunting of ravens etc.] Here we get a glorious: “When all the traps in the cellar go clickety click/you know I’m gonna set them for you/and all the rats in the cellar form a vermin of steps/you know they’re gonna take me to you.” As a Volta fan I think “Ah yes, a vermin of steps, of course. Is that like a necklace of follices with sabertooth monocles?” But knowing the concept behind the song isn’t necessary to enjoy it; in fact it’s too early to really understand, as lyrics are still being puzzled over as to who is who in this storyline based on Solomon Grundy (both the nursery rhyme and comic characters). The Malkin Jewel is my favourite kind of Mars Volta This.
[10]

Iain Mew: This has exactly the unconventional structural approach that is to be expected from The Mars Volta, including plenty of disorientating two-songs-playing-at-once rhythms and a keyboard onslaught which arrives late but makes up for lost time. That’s something that I tend to dig, but it’s actually the sneering rat-a-tat chorus where “The Malkin Jewel” really excels and some of the rest sags a bit.
[6]

Anthony Easton: You know how some English Rockers playing at being American become so real that they might as well just move to Memphis and pretend to be Elvis or Flannery O’Connor? Mars Volta makes me wonder what happens when they are already American, so they can’t play house with any amount of verisimilitude. It’s just constructing something on wet sand, so it collapses, right?
[2]

Alfred Soto: It takes a certain set of skills to record a piece this disjointed, inconclusive, spiky, and gross. Lest my words be construed as compliments let me remind listeners that there’s an organ solo. 
[2]

Brad Shoup: Though this tones down the Volta’s trademark witless patchwork thrash in favor of appreciable dynamics, one could still play Prog Bingo with the text. I’ve got “taffeta,” “bivouac,” “harlot” and “lilac” for starters. How can such cool dudes have stayed so far from fun for so long?
[5]

Zach Lyon: The MV continue to write music within their own little locked box, which is also where they keep their adoring fanbase and their collection of albums recorded before 1983, when time stopped. It’s a cool-looking box, but I’m not about to spend an entire week trying to decode the puzzle that opens it. Not sure what any of this has to do with Michelle Malkin.
[2]