Snarl!

[Video][Website]
[6.50]

Jonathan Bogart: The frank sexuality — and hooray for unedited versions — isn’t nearly as important as the emotional exhaustion she conveys with rare skill. I could wish for a more dynamic or inventive arrangement, but that might just be gilding the lily; there’s a lot to be said for straight-down-the-line R&B.
[6]

Alfred Soto: No change from 2011’s winning sound: she’s mastered a tremulous near-hysteria which on rare occasions flirts with bathos but often delineates the travails of a woman for whom desire and jealousy entangle with Proustian complexity. She defies words-per-melody-line rules too. And she ain’t getting an R&B radio hit with this title.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I love how no one is quite convinced — the sexuality so powerful that what one is good for you, and what one wants desperately, and then its not one time — the whole list of potentialities, where failing becomes bragging. The crack in her voice suggests that it is an either/or situation. Although she doesn’t give a reason why the relationship should stop, she gives a dozen reasons why it should continue. 
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: The point, of course, is that they’ve been fucking in pretty much every permutation for years — the stairs, the floor, the college dorms — that nothing is remotely over with, and that whether it “works” is thus moot. She can’t decide whether she’s seducing, haranguing or luxuriating; I bet they classify saying “this is a bad idea” as foreplay. Eh, whatever: screw on, kids. I hope the sex is more coordinated than the track.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Our beloved Earth isn’t lowing for more hate-fuck songs, but thankfully, Ambrosius recorded a hate-to-fuck song. And it seethes! Jazzy chords land like dropped shoes and linger for a token post-orgasmic waiting period. She sings without sea legs, so maybe we’re supposed to see her texting someone from the bottom of a glass. An admirably bleak portrait, but not one to linger on.
[5]

Iain Mew: That title would be one to build a song around in any form, but delivered as it is by Marsha Ambrosius as equal parts confrontional and tragic, it’s particularly powerful. 
[7]

We love her jacket at least…right?

[Video][Website]
[3.38]Pete Baran: I get a sense that this kind of anthemic mid-tempo track which may have previously hidden on the album has been legitimised by Rihanna’s success in this area. And while Rita Orr may just be a Primark Rihanna, these days that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Enough to get your lighter out, not enough to hold it in the air for the whole track.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Who wants to bet “Rocstars” (as in “hey there, _______, turn up your radio”) was the name management picked out for Rita’s fanbase before “Ritabots” happened? None of the writers know the difference between light and fire, but that works somehow: this inspiro-popstep hybrid really does sound like the soundtrack to waving lighters then burning shit, or at least posing that way. In that metaphor, Rita’s the oxygen: necessary, but imperceptible.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: The near-subliminal reggae rhythm does its job of providing the spiritual authenticity that everything else – from her singing to the generic inspirational lyrics to the assaultive blares of the music – lacks.
[3]

Iain Mew: The scale of everything is so excessive that it betrays a lack of confidence. That chorus might not be ginormous enough so here, have an airhorn on top of it! You like reggae and/or Hard-Fi? You like the electronic swizzle bits that go between brostep drops? Have some huge attempts at all of them, on top of each other! The cumulative effect is unfocussed bordering on wearying, but Rita powers through it all in a way that comes closer to suggesting there might be a point to her yet than anything else has so far.
[5]

Anthony Easton: I want a longitudinal, clinically secure study, funded by a government agency, that will tell us once and for all if this kind of inspirational pap is effective in getting anyone to do anything.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Homiletic overkill causes rickety structure to collapse.
[4]

Will Adams: Any innate personality “light” Rita may have has only been filtered through shards of Rihanna– or Jessie J-stained glass. For those keeping score, “Shine Ya Light” uses the former, but you could have figured that out from Rita’s opening deadpan, “Hey there, rockstars.” But with hooks this dull and production this threadbare, this charisma gap is the least of her worries.
[3]

Brad Shoup: Every moment is an anti-moment, hours of uninspiration distilled into 3.5 minutes that only the hardiest of marketing goons could wrap a smile around. I relegate this to two weeks of beds during the third hour of The Herd with Colin Cowherd.
[0]

Why didntcha love him?

[Video][Website]
[5.71]

Iain Mew: The shuddering bass is great. Everything else hits an uncomfortable half-sleazy note that never convinces, from the non-committal swearing to terrible lines like “I’m on that shit that you can’t smell” and “bring your body baby, I could bring you fame”. He doesn’t even sound like he believes in them himself, but doesn’t do anything interesting with the idea of being a guy just running with lines either.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: It’s tough to remember with all of the diminishing returns on subsequent albums and how so many other artists have taken their style into interesting new directions, but The Weeknd’s House Of Balloons is a great album.  “Wicked Games” does a solid job of showcasing what made The Weeknd sound so exciting a year and a half ago when they appeared out of the digital ether – the production is all shadowy gloom, always on the verge of tripping into an even darker place than it’s already in.  Abel Berihun Tesfaye’s voice sounds great, and the chemical-obsessed characters in “Wicked Games” seem more complex, unlike the characters on the next two Weeknd albums who just sounded like misognyst assholes on drugs. 
[8]

Anthony Easton: It’s too long, but the self loathing and lamentation, moaned out over an unstable background of exquisite beats and even more exquisite pain is a wrestling match between eros and pathos, drawn out to a hip breaking tie. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: A freshly scrubbed version of a track recorded when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House, “Wicked Games” actually has more resonance now that Frank Ocean and Usher have raked in dough with their better realized “dark” R&B. The scrubbing adds no sheen to Abel Tesfaye’s pinched emotional reach though. 
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s a Weeknd song, an old one at that, which means a few things automatically apply. The track seethes and crunches like something off Mezzanine. Abel’s fucked up on falsetto and prowling for sex that’ll end in tears. Someone’s playing someone, although sussing out the dynamics is as useless in music as in life. (Pleading like this can only come of repeated rebuffs — but no, that’s what he wants you to think.) The formula’s so precise there can only be minor deviations — in this case, the chorus being a cockblock.
[5]

Brad Shoup: I know this is an artifact of the heady, pre-rubbable GIF days of 2011, but its callow spellcasting still fizzles. Could it be a stylistic choice? He’s putting his fame and bank accounts up as collateral; I suppose he may not have much in the way of either. “Let me see you dance/I love to see you dance,” sneers Mr. Weeknd, in full RKO villain mode. Tack on his hammy handling of the F-bomb and it’s something sad, but only so far as this broken-beautiful dragger was even conceived.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: I’m uncouth enough to not be sure what being “on that shit that you can’t smell” is, but whatever it is it’s doing him a world of good, bringing his music into sharper focus and giving his singing an externality that puts his everpresent neediness into an identifiable social context. Oh wait, it’s cocaine, isn’t it?
[6]

A song about one of these, no doubt.

[Video][Website]
[5.71]

Iain Mew: Drippiness over house piano which, electronic flourishes aside, sounds like Take That the first time around, and not one of their good ones. Even the rap, often a highlight of even mediocre K-Pop singles, adds little and they think that “boom boom boom pow” is so good it’s worth doing twice.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: I like a lot of the details of this — the house piano, the way they turn “dazzling” into a three-syllable word, the rapid-fire trade-off on the rap — but they don’t add up to a strong or significant whole.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Was this commissioned solely to fill out “Express Yourself”/”Born This Way” mashups?
[4]

Anthony Easton: This is not dazzling or shiny. The whole thing is kind of dingy but not in a deliberately grungy way–sort of like a machine that once was beautiful and new, but has been used extensively and not carefully for a few months. 
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: A few weeks ago, I saw two young women in Harajuku minding their own business when the chorus to “Dazzling Girl” started playing from a nearby truck advertising the new SHINee single.  The pair looked at each other and exclaimed “SHINee!” before chasing after the moving billboard to snap some photos.  It looked like the intro to a 90’s boy-band music video, which was appropriate seeing as SHINee’s people have studied up on that time in pop.  “Dazzling Girl” isn’t far removed from “Sherlock,” but it does everything it needs to, which is give each member time to display their personality and serve up a catchy chorus.  As long as they keep hitting those points, Japanese women across Tokyo will be chasing after their advertising trucks for a long time.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: “Dazzling Girl” passes the “has a good beat and you can dance to it” test with flying colours and throws in enough surprises to be a little more than just that: the quasi-rap bit is a highlight, for starters.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Here’s a key component of pop: the will-to-third-base of adolescence, envisioned with a manic grin. The sentiments are silly, the terms of endearment stale. But the baggy piano is a virus, and the melodic bursts like short daggers.
[9]

Do I hear grime supergroup?

[Video][Website]
[5.29]

Will Adams: If I heard this in a club, I would alternate between fist-bumping to Ms. D’s hook and laughing at all the fools who, like Wiley, Skepta, and JME, were awkwardly skanking around the party, explaining their jewelry to undoubtedly uninterested women, and moaning about not being able to Tweet a picture of the proceedings. But was this really meant to be a vehicle for schadenfreude?
[5]

Anthony Easton: Love the ayayayas here — onomatopoeic sound of the year? A few good lines, a solid growl here or there, some interesting reported details, doesn’t hang together or move towards an apex as much as it could, but all of those are forgiven for the chorus. 
[7]

Alfred Soto: A percussive loop at the 1:50 mark, with the ayayayas fading to black, is the sort of impressiveness that I want to see on a Bieber track. The steel drum intro isn’t bad either. The Wiley rap is pure Cancun Hilton Hotel poolside band though.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: That steel-drum opening is so great that the fact that the track turns into generic bosh is more disappointing than usual. Bonus for a middle eight that scrambles expectations, but while the hype is a lot of fun, it could stand to sound a lot less like Calvin Harris.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The chorus is a null item, as is the steel drum approximation, but the details are great: the Jesus piece that’s actually JME; the telephone chain that gets everyone in; JME’s reluctant, sober attendance. Actually, no one from Ms. D on out really seems that thrilled to be in public, but the reportage is much appreciated.
[6]

Pete Baran: There is something about Wiley’s flow which is starting to sound very samey to me, and I wonder if he has also realised it, because as on “Heatwave” he is a bit player on his own track. But there is an interesting bit of reverse engineering here: Wiley, JME and Skepta are the guest rappers on a fake Shakira song — but it’s actually a Wiley track. It’s not a bad fake Shakira song, but the focus is lost in all the guest verses which aren’t all guest verses. Six for the fake Shakira, minus one for conceptual confusion.
[5]

Iain Mew: Technically, this is vastly superior to “Heatwave”. Ms. D’s chorus sounds like a powered up version of that one and actually fits into its surroundings, and Wiley actually sounds like he’s spent more than a few seconds coming up with his verses. Problem is, he’s not that impressive, caught at an awkward half-way between his previous modes and almost disappearing as a result. The way that in “Heatwave” he embraced stupidity and its obvious half-arsed nature actually ended up really charming. The only charm in “Can You Hear Me” is provided by the guest players: JME, sober, girls around him, acting like he’s drunk and having a good time, and Skepta paying tribute to him via jewellery.
[4]

Here to tell you how fond they are of this single: a bunch of men!

[Video][Website]
[7.29]

Patrick St. Michel: The first minute of this song is an excellent introduction to Angel Haze for anyone who hasn’t gotten smart to her yet.  She laps the beat as her pace quickens, and then shifts into a laid-back flow that sounds just as good as her rapid-fire stretches. The beat should be the highlight of this, but Haze’s delivery overpowers it as she sneers at everyone around her. Get familiar.
[8]

Iain Mew: The beat’s combination of stony finality and occasional burbles of uncertainty is great. Angel’s quick fire inventiveness over it is something to behold all the way through. There’s still one show-stopping moment that stands out, though, because “she come from an island or a desert or some tundra shit” is seriously, inexplicably amazing.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Money is all she’s after, of course. Fake shit is shit. But she trampolines off those tropes in one particularly motormouthed stanza: she’s a tracker, a cheetah, and faster like a pre-teen boy in the church with a pastor. Every other verse gives us a intonation to savor, a vowel to linger over. She’s a match and then some for the spare piston beats. Play loudly. Play it over and over. 
[8]

Anthony Easton: “Like a pre-teen boy in a church with a pastor” made my jaw drop, the great line about the tractor and green made my head bop, and I was actually sort of shocked when she mentioned diarrhea. All of this and the first hip-hop mention of tundra in perhaps forever… all of this, spit out with the fury of an AK-47. 
[8]

Brad Shoup: The track’s appeal is exclusive to the triple-time flow she’s previously deployed in small doses. And if dumb jokes — doo doo and kid-diddling! — approaching a sonic boom were enough, “Look at Me Now” would have been a 12. “Werkin’ Girls” can’t boast an element like Diplo’s sonar bleeps. Instead, it offers boxes falling off the warehouse shelf.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Her hyperverbal, hyperactive flow nearly gets the better of here, density standing in for complexity. But there are still enough angry religious references and left-field trash-talking to make for a solid Angel Haze song.
[7]

Will Adams: The production of “Werkin’ Girls” has a bracing acceleration that matches Angel Haze’s own crescendo. Booming percussion, cello strikes, and a skeletal xylophone keep up with Angel’s rapid pace changes. I wish it continued for another five minutes to see the intensity mount even more.
[7]

Irish act breaks out, breaks exactly even with TSJ…

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Pete Baran: Every three years I delude myself into believing I could make some electronic, usually after listing to an old Orb album. After fixing up a bassline and playing with the latest free online sequencer, I probably have three vaguely interesting rhythms and tunes weaving in and out of each other. Then I think it doesn’t sound like anything I want it to sound like, but if maybe I sang badly over it, it might sound a bit moody and like real music. If I had the patience and maybe didn’t give up after two days, it would probably sound a bit like this. I’d bin it cos I would hate it.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: It’s probably unfair of me to punish the song for being far more dynamic than I first expected it to be (I would have adored a minimal electronic burble throughout). Then again, once the guy started singing I knew it was over.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: Conor O’Brien’s voice is the obstacle to getting into “The Waves,” his delivery sounding like someone speaking to you while resting their head on your shoulder.  Get over it, though, and you’ll find a song built on something resembling Morse code that builds up to a climax worthy of the song’s apocalyptic lyrics. 
[7]

Brad Shoup: A self-satisfied piece of literary alt-rock, simultaneously trying too hard and not hard enough (cf. rhyming “cemeteries” with “dignitaries”). Starts off like a Jamie xx production as heard down the hall, then buries the pleasant taps ‘n’ timbres in Digital Ash. For not knowing when to stop, this score and the gas face. 
[3]

Alfred Soto: The transition from Four Tet electronic murmurs to symphonic grandeur impressed me far more than the colorless voice trying to dangle conversations.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: I tried very hard to like Villagers’ Becoming a Jackal, it being a rare Irish breakout album, but all I could do was wonder how a) centuries of evolution made jackals so toothless and dull, and b) this was the triumph of 2010. “The Waves” starts out pretty enough, if still restrained; little pings aside, it’s not too far from Conor’s old stuff. The “Surgeon” climax, though, and its fritzing guitar and haywire-machine blips, is. Is everyone‘s game just being raised this year?
[7]

Iain Mew: I previously had Conor O’Brien down as a second-rate Bright Eyes who barely even had his own name, but this is different. His barely contained intensity and the disconnected piano combine for a tension that he draws out expertly. When the crunch inevitably comes it’s still a bit of a tease, only ever “approaching the shore,” but while he never shows the destination, the journey is worth taking in itself.
[8]

Dear celebrity overlords, wherever you are, please let Taylor Swift date an xx guy. We need the breakup songs…

[Video][Website]
[5.62]

Patrick St. Michel: The new wrinkle for the xx here (and on most of Coexist) is Jamie xx’s infatuation with house beats, giving a song like “Chained” an ever-so-slight dance feel. The rest of the track is typical xx: lots of space for Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim to sing at each other. On the album and as a single, it feels a bit too familiar following the floating beauty of “Angels.”
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: The musical equivalent of lying in bed staring at opposite walls: an xx song, then. The doll house beat is Jamie’s indulgence, the details there if you’re looking (Romy changing addressees, “did I hold too tight” to “did I hold him too tight”; the exasperated sigh of a cymbal). Every lousy pairing is lousy in its own way, after all; they take it right to the anticlimax.
[4]

Anthony Easton: Guilty, whispering, angst-ridden. When he says “if a feeling appears,” the threat is that no feelings will emerge, or will be allowed to emerge; then, the set of rhetorical questions about what is gone and what is missed just pile on the desperation.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Generating discreet tunelets is their game: puddles of sound in which the melancholy doesn’t get enough time to marinate. Just when I’ve had enough of “We used to get closer than this,” a New Order guitar solo interferes in the right way.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: The thing that makes it easy to fall in love with one xx song can also make it hard to love any other xx song: once you see the trick done, it no longer surprises.
[6]

Iain Mew: Songs by the xx are so reliant on a connection to their atmosphere for their power that they tend to go one of two possible ways, either stunning or barely noticeable. The guitar like “Intro” rushing to get somewhere is the former, the rest of “Chained” the latter.
[6]

Will Adams: It’s three minutes of mumbling over a lightly skipping beat. I really can’t see how I’m expected to respond with anything but glazed eyes and a gaping mouth.
[4]

Brad Shoup: Just let me focus on the drums. Maybe with enough time I can pretend a micro-house banger is coming to erase the profoundly uninteresting tone poem at hand. Jesus, everyone: sometimes relationships just end. And sometimes you can sing so quietly you might as well just think.
[4]

DA DA DA DADADUNK DUNK DUNK DUUUNK DADADUNK DADADUNK DADADUNKDUNK…

[Video][Website]
[7.14]

Anthony Easton: I missed grime, and I like grime. I can hear the Caribbean in the noise of this, and his voice over the noise is pure London. That the lyrics are hyper-specific to place only adds to the ambiance; it makes the aggro music, the riddim toasting and the abrasive aggro butchness forgivable. I’m reading the new Zadie Smith novel, which tries very hard to do this; Smith’s lists, fractured narratives and circular rhythms have more to claim from grime or hip-hop than the modernist novels that she quotes and reviewers have picked up on, but sometimes one form does a better job than another.
[8]

Pete Baran: From the first five seconds you wonder if it can stay this good. Then about thirty seconds you are asking the same. About a minute in you think it has settled in to be slightly less awesome, but then you think the trebly tumbledown backing with sparse bass drops would sound incredible on a manky soundsystem. And the seventh time I played it through my manky stereo (broken tweeter) I decided it really is that good.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: That beat. That fucking beat, harsh and skittery like tumbling down an avalanche. It’s so good the vocalists don’t register for the first few listens; when they do, Takura’s overdrive of a voice registers before ostensible lead Max’s. (Let’s put it this way: when he talks about cougars, he sounds like he means 25-year-olds.) But let’s not quibble with greatness.
[8]

Alfred Soto: It’s one helluva meaty-beaty-bouncy beat, and it’s looking for an MC for something at stake….
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: The beat is blown-out pandemonium that would be challenging for most rappers to tussle with. Maxsta tries, but his rhymes about treating MILFs and cougars to meals sound lackluster next to the mutant brostep production. Instrumental only, please.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: I don’t know of a better music than grime for making me feel both assaulted and exhilerated: the density of this, especially as it builds towards the final explosion, with dubstep wub-wubs and party-rap airhorns, is magnificent. Particularly since it’s not dense all the way through: Show N Prove’s build and shift, with its skittering different sections, gives weight to what is after all a pretty innocuous pop tune.
[7]

Iain Mew: The beat trips over itself in delightful chaos, then pops off and back often enough to energise again each time, with Maxsta and Takura holding the fort in the meantime. When they join the sawing sounds in sentiment and break into “fuck off” too, the track reaches its full abrasive potential.
[8]

Life long after Eurovision…

[Video][Website]
[4.43]

Alfred Soto: Lena’s starchy tones and the insipidity of the acoustic guitar-drums-sparkles arrangement are chalk dust, not stardust.  
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Or: Florence and the Schlock Machine. The more you inflate this, the faster it sinks.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Generic shouty inspiro-pop with a twee edge — the only thing that livens it up a bit is her German accent, and there’s only so lively a German accent can be.
[4]

Brad Shoup: A genial cod-martial anthem in the vein of Ellie Goulding’s “Anything Can Happen,” adding a Target-commercial sense of chipper inclusiveness and ditching Goulding’s sense of the arresting phrase. The rhythm guitar is just that: an element of beat with a fantastically immediate timbre; it pairs exquisitely with the tomwork.
[6]

Iain Mew: Lena sounds much more settled than she did back on “Satellite”, both in terms of mental state and accent. The music setting is straight uplift and she can cope with investing all the dreams and stardust with meaning no problem. The arrangement is less impressive, though. It sounds like she ran out of time halfway through her shopping trip at the epic store, and the backing vocals and claps get a bit lonely.
[5]

Mallory O’Donnell: Her voice still sucks, but her material just keeps getting weirder and weirder. This one comes on like a showtune and ends (as you knew it would) in church. Like Florence and the Machine, but for an even whiter group of people yet to be discovered by science.
[4]

Anthony Easton: I remain uninspired by this, and I think it is supposed to inspire me. Even the hand claps fail to provide me with a boost to any level of ambition. Her voice is nice enough, though. 
[5]