Is this Schlitz?

[Video][Website]
[4.83]

Alfred Soto: With the rhythm guitars still ching-ching-chinging, Albert Hammond Jr. still learning Elliot Easton riffs, and Julian confusing a slur with a melody, the title is prayer and lament: had they livers enough and time this terrific minor band would have kept reminding us how and why their cultural moment vanished even when their songs aren’t terrible.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Ha! That classic Strokes dénouement: Julian drops a recurring phrase to the ground while the band hits the brakes. The tune screams farewell, but the lyrics are standard fast-life fare, only delivered with a formalist’s attention to melodic development. With everyone who flipped in ’01 having downgraded the debut to small stakes, it’s bittersweet to hear the band at last agree. But this is still one hell of a single. Crackerjack AOR solo, Moretti’s deft tomwork, and organ to make Tom Petty jealous. Will listen until nausea.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Well the retro-fetishism has moved ahead by a decade or so, and they seem slightly more competent in playing their instruments. Does that mean progress?
[4]

Crystal Leww: No, we’re not “livin’ too fast”. You’re just still stuck in 2001.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: The further away we get from 2001, the more the long arc of their career bends towards Weezer.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: Despite the constant singing about “livin’ it up,” this sounds like The Strokes settling into midlife, deciding they might as well be as Strokesy as possible for as long as they can milk it. That’s not a bad decision — the album’s a total mess, it would be tolerable if they phoned it in like this more — but “All the Time” makes the case that The Strokes have turned into a group the world shouldn’t expect exciting music from, just songs that warrant a new tour and t-shirt. You could also just play “Hard To Explain” again for a better experience.
[5]

I said everybody…

[Video][Website]
[7.50]

Patrick St. Michel: A break-up song that brings out some mother issues that also acts as a snapshot of an emotional breakthrough, complete with some great lines sprinkled about (“sometimes revenge is a choice you gotta make”). What makes it even better is how much fun Lambert makes this, especially when she amps up the intensity near the end.
[7]

Crystal Leww: This isn’t really a song about heartbreak; it’s a song about the way that women relate to their mothers and each other through private and public appearances. Despite her mother’s seemingly level-headed advice, Lambert explodes in the chorus, characterizing her mother as privately dramatic. Something becomes very apparent: the demure aspect of femininity is put on for everyone else to see just like all the makeup. I like her rejection of the bottling up of feelings (“Sometimes revenge is a choice you gotta make”). Lambert wants ladies to stop being so scared of what’s others think. Ladies, you deserve to do you, and he doesn’t deserve anything better.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I think I have heard this before, and the bombast may be her only signal, but she’s not polite, and she’s actively refusing demure Southern womanhood. For all the boys who talk about the rougher South, it’s refreshing to get a woman attacking something with no small amount of fierceness.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Lambert enjoys accentuating the dramatic in rural life — the arson in this song is, for once, metaphorical — but “Mama’s Broken Heart” doubles down on the caricatures of “Only Prettier” to create what is practically a small town burlesque, from its gossiping “barflies and Baptists” to its evocations of Jackie Kennedy “when Camelot went down in flames.” This is a performer who has always understood the importance of appearances far more often than she has evinced an interest in maintaining them, and her relationship advice in this chorus is draconian: “Go and fix your make-up, girl, it’s just a break-up.” The punkish rockabilly arrangement makes the gothic touches more delicious.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: “Mama’s Broken Heart” is such a well-written song that it makes the drama-magnet who can’t get over it seem if not sympathetic then at least entertaining. Co-writer Kasey Musgraves sings it well, but she doesn’t have Lambert’s ability to do unhinged and to savour the ends of the best lines. An almost punkish power-pop direction would suit Lambert down to the ground if she kept on doing stuff like this; why does she always wait ’til the tail end of an album campaign to unleash the big guns?
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: The most vivid and necessary voice in modern country speaks again. Her sarcasm about the hypocrisy demanded by restrictive social contracts is broad, but there’s a snarl in the guitars that makes me think of Joe Ely by way of Joan Jett, and Lambert’s performance — especially if you take in the video — is as punk rock as it is vaudevillian.
[7]

Alfred Soto: On its release sixteen months ago, Four The Record competed with Pistol Annies; now it’s got Ashley Monroe, Kacey Musgraves, and another Pistol Annies record in its sights. But Lambert’s list of how suburbanites run with the dogs tonight works much better freed from its host album, where it sounded rote.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Ace writing from Brandy Clark and the Musgraves/McAnally tandem. The chorus is more fun to hear than sing with, but as a dark-red rocker it’s so well-detailed that I don’t mind the revisionism. And Lambert delivers the refrain’s chiding with such bite you know history’s doomed to repeat.
[7]

It’s Friday! Everybody drink!

[Video][Website]
[7.00]Will Adams: Electro tango, but with some disco thrown in, as well as a gorgeous string fake-outro that plunges you back into the beats. It’s pretty exquisite. I want to structure a whole party playlist around this sound.
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: I’m never going to not enjoy tango-based dance music on some fundamental level, and these dudes have done a pretty good job of keeping their weird niche relevant since its early ’00s heyday. But there’s a big difference between sliding-scale relevance and being in any sense necessary.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Would be pleasant but forgettable if it weren’t for the dramatic build and ensuing strings-only moment near the end.
[6]

Iain Mew: Listening to this is like half-watching a familiar gentle comedy while you’re busy doing something else — it’s tempting to check out for quite long periods of time, but when you do remember to pay attention it’s easy to follow what’s happening and invariably raises a smile. It’s difficult to imagine them playing this and not having fun doing so (the puffed-up stride of those strings!), and it’s infectious.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: If Basement Jaxx were from Córdoba instead of Camberwell and were for some reason asked to jazz up the Come Dine With Me theme tune, you probably wouldn’t have this. But it’s hard to describe something when you have no real reference points, and this is a song (piece?) that really doesn’t give much of a handle to the unaccustomed. Obviously it doesn’t feel completely abstract, but all that’s really clear is this: it sounds quite nice. That and that the bassline sounds a bit like “Owner Of A Lonely Heart.”
[7]

Alfred Soto: Trevor Horn would have sold ABC to a sweatshop for these strings, electrofarts, and piano stabs — oh, that piano.
[7]

Rebecca A. Gowns: The deep glitchy (but simple) beat draws me in, then the other pieces come in: disco strings, bongos, cafe jazz piano, Romani violin, all borrowed shamelessly. Put together by Bajofondo, the effect is not so much haphazard as it is friendly! And that persistent glitchy sound keeps it from sounding too Starbucks-world-music-lite.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Weirdly, the spare, precise intro sounds like it was mistakenly placed there. Better to start with the disco string flourishes and dispense with the EQ’d humming early, yes? My desire for sumptuousness is betraying me.
[5]

Anthony Easton: Dance music, abstracted and extended, can become art music. Dance music, when left outside of the places where people dance, can become ossified. This attempts to work out what Dance music meant, and what it means without effort, but with a beauty that moves between the seamless and the jagged — the tension between disonance and assoance like two dancers across the floor.
[9]

The prodigy returns or something…

[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Brad Shoup: Earl’s skill, like Ghostface’s and DOOM’s, isn’t in wordplay per se, it’s in elision: paring the linking words, trusting the images to land like lasers in exhaust ports. It’s like an Aesop Rock track you can actually listen to with people. Non sequiturs, buried allusions, describing the tricks while he’s performing…  he’s trying so hard to dazzle without breaking a sweat, and I’m dazzled. It’s OK, Tyler: RZA isn’t that great on the mic either.
[9]

Anthony Easton: A masterclass in referents (the referent and the referer working in concert), metaphors, floating and ambiguous language. Anxious, unsettled, and incredibly clever. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: His bit in Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” was Earl’s best to date, and he tops himself, snapping vowels while Tyler growls support. 
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: Nothing here is a revelation as much as a reminder. After spending a long time trying to capture past glory, Tyler, the Creator stumbles into the role he was always meant to play in Odd Future — hypeman rather than main star. His solo songs often try to hard to titillate and end up tedious, but when he’s helping his friends out as the walking hook on “Whoa” he’s in his element (and on video, dude makes great faces). He’s smart enough to let Earl Sweatshirt — always the most technically gifted of the lot — take the spotlight as he effortlessly flings out lines about legit manga and Quidditch. It’s the sort of rapping you want to hear over and over again to catch all the details.
[8]

Crystal Leww: Earl is chugging along rapping about the things that teenage boy rap nerds think is cool: engaging with rap tropes with an Odd Future sneer and referencing rap history and other rap artists. His articulation is really clear, and the way he delivers his words is pleasant but one-noted. The beat is okay, but I could do without that high pitched squeal and the mostly bored/stoned sounding whoaaaaas. Tyler is… here. He mostly shows up to announce the return of the aforementioned Odd Future sneer and spell out GOLFWANG too many times. Once is enough; the amount of times he does it here is inexcusable.
[4]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Tyler and Earl sound just like Dame Dash and Cam’ron on “I Am Dame Dash”: the former in loud-mouthed fuck-you-pay-me mogul mode, the latter sleepily arrogant and dizzyingly word-hungry. Just like “I Am Dame Dash”, “Whoa” is about reminding the listener of the birth of a dynasty (“that old fuckin’ 2010 shit”, the queasy floor-swallowing production) whilst parading the wealth the dynasty keeps bringing in (hilariously, “a quarter million offa socks”). And just like “I Am Dame Dash”, it’s a welcome reminder that super talented, super rich kids get caught up in mythologising and let the damn song fly over your head, leaving small traces of technically-pleasing syntax and brio behind. For Cam, “Downtown/Novi took him/we called Dukie” were words he could crunch away at; Earl turns “hunt for clues/more food” into a spluttering, mysterious passage.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Earl’s stoned-logophile rhapsodizing is addictive, if reminiscent of earlier psuedo-profound stringers-together of abstract imagery for the sake of an overstuffed rhyme scheme. Tyler, meanwhile, is getting too old for his fake-ass provocation to sound as if even he cares about it.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Earl’s syllables have become even denser and more arcane since his synonymous 2010 debut, which wouldn’t in itself distinguish him from other underground wordsmiths dedicated to layering signifier upon signifier to the point of incomprehensibility. Sweatshirt distinguishes himself with his astonishing mellifluousness — he weaves bulky syllables with even bulkier entendres into a butter-smooth stream of late-adolescent tetchiness. “Pissed as Rick Ross’s fifth sip off his sixth lager,” he raps, as though the tongue-twisting were effortless. “Known to sit and wash the sins off at the pitch alter/Hat never backwards like the print off legit manga.” It’s this talent that caused some of of us to dive deep into the most pungent couplets from his early career, and, truth be told, Earl hasn’t yet figured out how to make lyrics as striking as the likes of “hurry, I got nuts to bust and butts to fuck and ups to shut and sluts to fuckin’ uppercut/It’s OF buttercup; go ahead, fuck with us” now that he’s grown too old for such noxiousness. Still there’s plenty here to enjoy, and “Whoa” also benefits from Tyler’s pop instincts, even if the spelled-out chorus is irritating as well as catchy in this case.
[7]

That’s not Jake Johnson…?

[Video][Website]
[4.88]

Patrick St. Michel: “I’m tired of being clever/everyone’s clever these days.” This song begs to differ.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Deschanel’s thick-as-syrup voice needs no echo or girl group backdrop to remind us that she (and him) can offer their mysterious audience little beyond novelty. Joseph Gordon-Levitt wouldn’t listen either.
[3]

Anthony Easton: M. Ward is a really talented songwriter; Zooey Deschanel has a more limited set of skills, but one is that she is a genius at a very specific kind of physical comedy. Both have a certain sense of where their demographic lies. Sometimes the talents work together, for something nakedly commercial enough to be interesting. This is not one of those times.
[4]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Zooey’s doing a weird thing with her voice on this song…? Sort of more of a belt? Kinda like she had some classical training between 2008 and now. It’s not entirely pleasant, because it’s caught between a jazz-Broadway belt and the silly airy voice that she relied on for a while… it sounds like your aunt doing a great job at karaoke?? Anyway, whatever this song is it’s not great, but it’s certainly endearing.
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “I’m tired of being clever/everybody’s clever these days” sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the lyrics to “Never Wanted Your Love”, as though it’s a reassuring statement from Zooey Deschanel to the listener — Hey, we just want to give you pleasant ditties, straight up. Don’t worry yourself about how our new stuff’ll sound or if it’s more “mature” or “complex” blah blah blah. Just bob your head and imagine you’re on a horse-drawn carriage when the strings come in, there’s a good boy/girl. And although I rolled my eyes, I bobbed my head along in time. Being clever isn’t everything, I understand.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Rather dark lyric for such a strenuously winsome song, no? It’s the classic contrast trick, and it can work great — this is essentially “Lovefool,” orchestrated — but here, it’s more like finding She & Him’s limitations.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Whatever Ben Gibbard’s next full-length project, the critical dissection may be positively Swiftian. What if Deschanel’s beating him to the punch? Sunshine pop hides medicine the best. I love the overexposed strings and the meaty, laconic guitar lines. I’m not nuts, as ever, about Zooey’s flopsweat twang, since it obscures her winning — and I don’t mean this pejoratively — amateur vocal navigation. But the track works itself into quite a lather, and New Girl is the best show on TV, so.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Perfectly pleasant retro-pop orchestration decorating a surprisingly affectless central performance. I’ve come to appreciate Zooey Deschanel’s abilities as both a comic actress and an emotion-generating performer (which is different, I think, from being a great dramatic actress), but her delivery here sounds more like a songwriter’s demo than the classic pop the instrumentation is aiming for; even the subtle country twang reads more as an odd choice than a fully-conceived part of the performance.
[5]

The collaboration you didn’t know you were anticipating and you still might not be anticipating now, I don’t know…

[Video][Website]
[6.70]

Iain Mew: When I was a teenager my family had the internet, but for a long time it was only on one shared computer with a dial-up connection which was slow, unreliable and had to be abandoned if someone wanted to use the phone. My burgeoning online friendships, and more, were mediated through arrangements to talk at specific times that could be disrupted by any number of things. “Telemiscommunications” is actually about telephone calls, but it still throws me back more than a decade to MSN outages, feelings of butterflies waiting for emails that never came, and anxious waits for siblings’ turns online to be done. Imogen Heap’s list of missed chances and almost connections joins with Deadmau5’s gloomy glitching to perfectly capture the mixture of banality and heartbreak that ensued. Even more so when Heap goes into all-out emotion in “If we could win just one small touch” and “Did I tell you I loved you today?” and the sound maintains a simultaneous distance. I love this song more than anything else I’ve heard from either act and am intrigued by the cover’s “&” rather than the “ft.” that Gerard Way got. “Telemiscommunications” also brings to mind another downbeat electronic song featuring a telephone, “This is the Dream of Evan and Chan”, which was of course the starting point for The Postal Service. On this evidence, if Deadmau5 and Imogen Heap were to similarly extend their collaboration I would be delighted.
[10]

Will Adams: I try to call home every few days. But classes get in the way, another email appears in my inbox, and soon I find myself with the terrible realization that I haven’t spoken to my parents in nearly three weeks. When I find the time, I call my home phone first, and when no one answers, I call my mother’s cell phone, and when she doesn’t pick up, I’ll try my father’s. Sometimes when they answer, and after we trade the how-are-you-I’m-fine formalities, they tell me that they’re on their way to the airport or a business dinner and they have to hang up, and the half hour I had blocked off in my schedule shrinks to two minutes. What a strange situation: technology makes communication incredibly easy today, but it seems just as difficult to just talk to someone. In “Telemiscommunications,” Deadmau5 and Imogen Heap amplify this tension, engineering a track that itself sounds like it’s breaking up: clipped percussion, grainy synth pads, and murky chords. The frustration with these crossed wires tumbles into alienation, further discouraging conversation. Imogen’s cracked voice swells as the song approaches the final chorus, eventually collapsing in the devastating climax: “Did I tell you I loved you today?” It’s repeated over and over, with the waning hope that the message will get through, and whether I could have done more to ensure that it did.
[10]

Anthony Easton: I think that Deadmau5 is one of the more consistently interesting new electronic music artists, and the bed of repeating sounds resembles water in a blackened cave. The problem is Imogen Heap’s voice just sits there, not working for or against the sound. 
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: Imogen Heap has done the whole snippets-of-real-life-turned-to-lyrics thing before — see the family Thanksgiving words on “Just For Now” — so it isn’t surprising to hear her tackling cell phone conversations. Like most of her music, it teeters between earnest and awkward (the thing is called “Telemiscommunications,” geez) and ultimately just settles in the middle. Deadmau5’s production, sparse and glowing, is easily the best element here.
[5]

Rebecca A. Gowns: This is quite nice. I’ve heard other things from both of these artists and I tend to not care for them, but this collaboration is solid: ethereal, minimalist, but not holding back.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Words, words et cetera… my bad convos usually feature one party doing all the talking, or canyons of pause. Once Heap moves away from whisper, I can stop thinking about accuracy (or that title). The backwards buzz is an excellent substitution for leaking silence, the piano decay the best approximation of inevitability. Somehow, when Heap asks “did I tell you I loved you today,” it’s really, really heartening. Like, alternate-history heartening.
[8]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Imogen Heap has always appeared overly mannered as though she overthinks emotional connections as much as she shares her emotional reactions to them. Her opening stream-of-consciousness recital of a back-and-forth conversation is a primo example of this. On one hand it sounds overly studied, as though Heap is going at lengths to describe an emotional ritual she has little experience in. (Remember how Tommy Wiseau awkwardly depicted male camaraderie in that tuxedo-football scene from The Room?) On the other hand, this fussed-over over-thinking gives her performances a certain edge, as though the listener is privy to a woman looking wide-eyed and on the edge of an emotional fallthrough. The awkwardly-titled “Telemiscommuncations” offers both sides of Heap, hewing close to irritating for-the-sake-of-it wordiness (e.g. “come back to horizontal islands”) and loveliness (the multi-tracked closing moments) from moment to moment. Deadmau5 recognises his guest is something of an original and smartly stays out of the way, crafting a minimal ping-pong sombre beat, letting Heap approach it in whatever way she sees fit. It’s a Deadmau5 track free from any dancefloor considerations, choosing to simply be an Imogen Heapified emotion-piece with all the pros and cons that come with the territory.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The trick was finding music commensurate with the impact of Heap’s heap of breathy, broken images, and Deadmau5’s broken piano chords and Amnesiac-era percussion crackles commensurates fine; but my tolerance can’t extend beyond impatience with Heap’s rhetorical questions.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: “I join the queue on your answerphone, and all I am is holding breath — just pick up, I know you’re there,” Heap sang 11 years ago (christ). Presumably he’s picked up since then, as has Heap that topic; but Deadmau5 isn’t Guy Sigsworth — he may in fact be the sonic opposite — and his twitchy gloom, though moody and unexpected, isn’t a Brian Eno sample. It’s not as deep as it thinks it is, and it lends itself to cheap interpretations (everyone knew those guys in high school who’d, like, post on forums about how Imogen Heap was the only woman they listened to? Right? All I’m saying is, deadmau5 probably at least hung out with them), but it’s remarkably subtle. I’m just having trouble picking up a chorus.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: It’s Laurie Anderson calling — on pay as you go, pay as you go — she said not to bother.
[5]

TWO FOR TWO!

[Video][Website]
[6.71]

Edward Okulicz: TSJ has a target to cover more Big Freedia songs than songs by Drake. It’s symbolic, arbitrarily picking an interesting artist just on the periphery of what gets critical play over a boring artist who’s everywhere. “Feelin’ Myself” is itself a good entry point to an artist who is herself a good entry point to another world — two minutes and thirty seconds of infectiously repetitive, invigorating and hectoring noise that simultaneously means nothing but feels great. You get different fanfares and samples to give you variety but Freedia’s reassuring fierceness pulls it all together. It’s not prime Freedia but the beginning of  this wider acceptance of this joyous relentless style could well be here or not far off.
[8]

Anthony Easton: This doesn’t reach quite as far as it could; there are some great details — the boxing bells, the snare lines, those “ohohoh” bits — but mostly it’s Freedia by the numbers.
[6]

Brad Shoup: While desperately checking Sissy Nobby’s YouTube channel for new videos, I settled for gorging on some leaked tracks. Freedia’s there, in “Dusty Money”: that venerated “gin in my system” line, 10 (!) years old at this point. She’s done the rounds from NPR to Pitchfork, but catchup’s a long way away. As usual, “Feelin’ Myself” is a suite of sorts, designed for the show (“Gonna Fly Now” is hoary everywhere except a live throwdown). The sequencing and synthbeds are a pop/indie olive branch, as is the lack of lyrics about dresser deals. But the kinetics are unparalleled. We’re still working on her terms.
[8]

Alfred Soto: A sucker for stutter-hooks, I’m surprised this track offers a two-note synth bass line as an additional goodie. Where is Freedia anyway?`
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: A high-energy song that also knows how to use the Rocky theme just right – don’t draw it out, but use it to hype up what comes next.
[7]

Crystal Leww: Big Freedia might also be the only person who can make a “Foxy Vixen Ring Fight” video and have it not seem exploitative. All the girls look super happy, and the fact that they’re using Sock’em boppers definitely helps. She might also be the only one who can pull of the line “I like a lot of pepperonis on my pizza” without seeming silly. A lot of this can be credited to Big Freedia’s energy and confidence. She’s amazing, and “Feelin’ Myself” puts out positive vibes all around.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: She’d have to do something totally crazy to score less than a [6] — like say record a duet with Mumford & Sons — but she’d have to do something I haven’t heard before to score more than an [8]. So.
[7]

It’s the 40 Hottest Bears in Tech!

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Sonya Nicholson: Funnily enough, Lee Hi – Survival Audition Kpop Star second-place finalist, bringer of Adele to Korea – is the same age as these two middle school girls.  Her debut EP is actually really solid, but her company unfortunately picked the most blandly upbeat song on it as the single.  I hope that doesn’t become a trend in Kpop.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: I went to K-Pop Night Out at SXSW this year, an event mostly hyped up as being the first time a Korean pop act – represented by f(x) – played the festival AND the state of Texas. Accordingly, most fans and media present were there for the pop group going on at 1:30 in the morning. Yet the show, which was partially funded by government money, was trying to dispel a long-standing notion that became even more inescapable during last year’s Psy-clone: K-Pop isn’t an accurate description of sound. Thus, K-Pop Night Out also featured punk, psychedelic rock, balladry and more as a way to educate folks that K-Pop encompasses a lot. Not many people paid attention to anything besides f(x). So I’m thankful for someone like Lee Hi, who boasts a sound very different than the “Gangnam Style”-“Gee”-“I Am The Best” pyramid most Western media folks only know but is signed to the same label as heavyweights Big Bang, 2NE1 and, yeah, Psy. Even if I think her music thus far – “It’s Over” included – sounds just good, I’m glad stuff like this exists as a way to show how varied Korean pop music actually is.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Sort of cocktail jazzy, sort of a bit rockish (in the light use of that phrase), mostly competent, but deeply steady and not really interesting. 
[4]

Iain Mew: I am disappointed to find that the chorus starts “deulli deulli” rather than “delete delete”, because that seemed like a clever and modern way to introduce total finality. Luckily Lee Hi does a good enough job on the chorus to sell that anyway. The rest is more song, less showcase compared to “1, 2, 3, 4”, but I’m going to remember the video and its G-Dragon bear (G-Bear?) for longer and more fondly than any of it.
[6]

Will Adams: Lee Hi’s voice is smoky and emotive, but it deserves more than stale 12 bar blues and a copycat synthetic sax.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: There’s a perfectly palatable song in here, but it’s obscured by a near-fatal flaw: the backing. It creates the same kind of dissonance as when people in the 80s tried to make 60s-referencing tracks with the tinny production prevalent at the time, like Mari Wilson’s “Just What I Always Wanted” or The Maisonettes “Heartache Avenue” (both A+ bangers nonetheless, especially the latter). Instead of “classy”, it just sounds quite cheap, at best like something from a low budget children’s party album that no-one will ever buy, or the demo track you might accidentally start on a keyboard in a school music lesson when you’re actually looking for the “DJ” sound effects and rave noises.
[5]

Crystal Leww: This watered down Christina Aguilera circa 2006 thing is cute, but it doesn’t really do much for me.
[4]

Brad Shoup: What I would’ve paid to hear Don Fagen butt in.
[4]

A Diane Warren ballad, where “Diane Warren” is a genre, not a person.

[Video][Website]
[4.73]

Scott Mildenhall: The BBC have really missed a trick with this one. If they were looking for a blonde, female singer in her early sixties who has experienced considerable success around the world for their 2013 Eurovision entrant, then, well, they’ve succeeded. But they could have had it so much better, were they somehow able to convince Agnetha to return to the stage upon which she made her name, and in her home country. It would have made perfect sense. Yes, in “Believe In Me” they already have a nice piece of somewhat outdated, string-laden schlager, but not one as assured or majestic as this.
[7]

David Moore: I’ve been near-obsessed with Agnetha Fältskog since nearly a decade ago picking up her greatest hits and vaseline-lensed covers album My Colouring Book, with which I have spent nights singing along, shaking my head “no” mournfully to no one in particular, drinking red wine and getting misty. Here we’re in overblown Celine ballad territory, complete with a big key change into the chorus…in the first minute! Soggy as hell. Will go to bat for it.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The last time she graced the Billboard Hot 100 was with a Peter Cetera duet when Ronald Reagan was president, and she chose a song as if Cetera still mattered. With the thick blocked percussion and limp acoustic riffs from a contemporary “American Idol” production, Agetha faces a steep climb already, and the melodic progression of the verses lead us to expect a choral lift…which doesn’t come. One of the most unhinged vocalists in pop deserves better than Stevie Nicks castoffs.
[4]

Brad Shoup: The skittery synth riff sounds like a fourth-gen Xerox of a Young Money track. And Fältskog is rather uninvested, but it’s understandable; when you’ve got such a diligent Wikipedia editorship, why show up? 
[3]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Where “Cut Copy Me” is this year’s case example for how to transfer an older singer’s voice onto modern pop sounds, this one shows how it could have all gone wrong: lack of commitment-to-execution, jarring production, plodding pace. Gallant, meet Goofus.
[3]

Crystal Leww: With the exception of the very out of place synths, this somehow sounds more old-fashioned than anything Agnetha was doing with ABBA back in the 70s. There’s a sheen in her voice as a result of the production, but the lyrics seem to suggest emotion. That disconnect ends up not working.
[4]

Will Adams: The key changes tell me that this is convinced of its ridiculousness, but the barging synths tell me that this is very serious in its bid for radio airplay. In 2008.
[4]

Anthony Easton: There are some electronic squiggles here and there, which place this in recent times, and there is a slightly nasty edge to some of the lyrics, but the genius of her work has always been a complete open joy — the production epic and triumphant over lyrics as simple and iconic as anything that has ever been produced. The idea of them changing, or crying, or not forgiving, or even dying, has a melodramatic oomph that suggests a late stage move into a new understanding of mortality. Extra point for how she sings “honey.”
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Skittering unease rubs up against more “traditional” songcraft, merges as well as oil and vinegar, ends up sounding surprisingly dated. The track, however, pleasingly retains that Fältskog brutality on the matter of failed relationships: “no forgiveness/no politeness.”
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Agnetha’s voice is, as it always has been, lovely and inviting, but what they’ve done to it (treatment and songwriting) to fit with this apparently modern style and sound is just treacle piled on top of sap. Doesn’t make much sense — her appeal as exemplified by the ongoing popularity of ABBA is in how execution trumps evolution. That grainy, farty synth preset over the ending is so undignified. Forget this, go back to the Villa edit of her 80s hit “Wrap Your Arms Around Me” and listen in wonder how much less dated that is.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: If I hear this as an Agnetha song, it’s great. If I hear it as a Little Mix song, it isn’t. Unfortunately, the synths toward the end settle that question.
[4]

HOUSER NOT A HOMER

[Video][Website]
[5.10]

Anthony Easton: 20 Other Places That Country Couples Can Fuck That Is Not the Back of a Pickup Truck (Because We Have Done That): 1) the crick, 2) the creek, 3) the muddin’ hole, 4) the duck blind, 5) the deer blind, 6) the changing room at the Bass Pro Shop outlet store, 7) a tent in the back forty, 8) a tent in the back country, 9) a tent in the backyard, 10) a tent in the back corner of Cabela’s, 11) a hayloft, 12) a haypile, 13) a choir loft, 14) the locker room of a high school gym after practice, 15) truck stops, 16) rest stops, 17) their actual gosh-darned bedroom 18) the Mobile Red Roof Inn off I-65, 19) a booth at IHOP, 20) a washroom at Shoney’s.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Shrewd of this bruiser to pivot around an oh-oh-oh chorus and chugtastic guitars, and despite the B-list Toby Keithisms he’s a horndog without panting about it.
[6]

Josh Langhoff: Houser stands astride his genre like… no, not Colossus… not even like that Superman statue down in Metropolis, Illinois… well, it’ll come to me. In his first #1 hit “How Country Feels,” he and his rough manhood were country itself, and he negotiated the hollers and hills of Girl’s body with rakish care, total Neruda shit. His album How Country Feels contains a neat four-song stretch where he and Girl personify music in various meta ways. Now he’s back, he and Girl occupy the night, the universe gauges time’s passage by their lovemaking, the crickets chirp the frequencies of their orgasms, and heaven itself nods approval. Lest I sound more approving than I actually am, I should also note that Houser’s album is too long, most of this stuff’s been done to death, and if you add a space to his name you get “Randy Ho User.”
[6]

Brad Shoup: OH MY GOD “you’re pretty enough.” Randy’s neg game is on point. And so is that 2010s pop-rock “whoa” thing. Shame about The Game tho
[3]

Ian Mathers: That veneer of “country” signifiers gets thinner every year, doesn’t it?
[4]

Crystal Leww: I don’t feel like any part of this should work, especially not the corny “oaaaaah!”s and especially not the line “tick tock, now we’re knocking on midnight”, but nonetheless, I am having a really good time listening to it! 
[6]

Will Adams: I didn’t think One Direction’s country move would come so soon.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s usually the women who get dismissed as pop-country, despite everyone sharing songwriters with everyone else and their crossovers aimed at least a decade ago, when pop was more pop-rock. (Kara Dioguardi writes a lot of country these days; Ryan Tedder could be next.) Here’s a corrective: check the big crashing drums, the whoa-ohs, the places where it almost turns into “TiK ToK” or “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” Unfortunately, spotting these was more engaging than yet another truckside tryst.
[5]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Runnin’ Outta Moonlight” needs a lot more in the vocal hook department, falling on flatfooted nothing lyricism about trucks/lights/snooze/zzzzz that lay bare Houser’s songwriting limitations and leave his vocal performance feeling stilted. Thank God Houser and his Nashville-industry hitmaking machine came together like Voltron to made the music interesting, crafting a piece of studio-glossed Nashville pop in the process. “Moonlight” verges on the skeletal at moments with its anthemic-rain-flying-off-the-snare-drum-HDTV-demo-in-slow-motion rhythm section: delayed guitar licks fade away, leaving plenty of open space for Lonnie Wilson’s playing to r-e-v-e-r-b-e-r-a-t-e. Elsewhere, it’s quadruple-tracked Housers bellowing “whoa”s or drunk-on-sparklers guitar solos that step up to the plate, momentarily grasping the anthem status Houser’s songwriting can only hint at.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: I’m just enough of a masculinist 80s boy to respond viscerally to a Mellencampian “whoah-oh-oh” even if the specific content surrounding it doesn’t do much to justify the reaching-for-the-sky bravado.
[6]