Someone’s emoting, kumbayah.

[Video][Website]
[4.86]

Brad Shoup: She found the sentiment, but she forgot the song. This is a draggy waltz, forgettable but for the guitar solo, which takes a big angry bite out of its surroundings.
[3]

Anthony Easton: Smooth, and slightly worn, I wasn’t surprised when I learned it had been around since the ’80s, with a good version by Pam Tillis floating?around. It might work better as a duet, and the video suggests that Pickler thought about adding someone else. All of that said, it seems a little soft here, the production a bit too gauzy, and not nearly as effective as it could be.?
[5]

John Seroff: Lyrically and musically, this matches up pretty closely to Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.” How you respond to that sentence should determine your expectations; for me, that’s a firm “if it’s on and I can’t change the channel, I can manage.”
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Professional songwriting, professionally performed, but I wonder what Ashley Monroe or Hope Sandoval (to give a spectrum) would do with this.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Pickler’s voice wrings more meaning (and a fair whack of tenderness) out of the chorus’s requests to her lover than the verses’ sweeping look at undefined nobodies invented for the purpose of stories barely started, let alone finished. It’s not just the harmonies, though they’re nice. “Someone somewhere tonight is tasting their first kiss,” but all I can taste is poshlost.
[4]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Less lament, more a fuzzily-minded sentimental realization of — whoa dude — How The World Works.
[5]

Alfred Soto: 100 Proof didn’t merely confirm Pickler transcended her pedigree: it was as warm and well-observed as any country album I’ve heard in the last two years, and often better. Here she eschews precision for projecting vulnerability over generalizational banalities. The arrangement — strings delayed until the last set of verses, the male harmonies — compensates.
[6]

Alternative name and slogan for the Roomba, anyone?

[Video][Website]
[6.33]Scott Mildenhall: Their last single was one of the best of the year, so this is a little disappointing. The move from the fairly frenetic to the strikingly sparse is presumably deliberate, and as well as presenting that variation “Dust Clears” still sounds and looks like it came from the same band/art collective/thing as “Mozart’s House,” but it’s not half as fun; “interesting” only gets you so far. Clean Bandit have the potential to be very exciting, but this works best only as an extension of a showcase.
[6]

Alfred Soto: A dubstep ease with space, cocktail piano, and a gitano melody make for a beautiful idea to listen to.
[7]

John Seroff: Rigorously mannered electropop that doesn’t want to wake the baby. Pretty but a tad slight.
[6]

Anthony Easton: This is so clean that you could do cocaine off its mirrored surfaces, proven by how he sings (without irony, or with all possible irony) that terribly wonderful line about shifts in the paradigm.
[8]

Iain Mew: Really clever, a bit too clever indeed. For all its pretty string arrangements it gets a bit much like an ineffectual Hot Chip album track, but Noonie Bao’s “I realised that the situation’s going nowhere” cuts straight through enough to save it.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: A breakup song, of sorts, between the robots who’ll go on to sing “The Game of Love” a second later and the girl who sings “if it didn’t hurt so much, you know I’d give you it all” while half-frozen and quantized, performed as glitchy future pop by someone who can’t get out of bed. The idea’s compelling enough on paper, but as a track, I just wish Richard X or Pharrell produced.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Is this “Somebody That I Used to Know” for Disclosure fans? The boy robot’s not very scary, but his voice has a weight to it. (The piano has none. Also, no flavor.) Points for the string figure, an escapee from the screen shrunk to personal size.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: The payoff isn’t all that special, especially when the minimal parts sound so intriguing. Still, those icy bits do enough to make this a good listen.
[6]

Mallory O’Donnell: Classy and energized bit of bubble-step disco rendered anonymous and annoying by the autotune-masquerading-as-vocoder. Did you sincerely not get the memo?
[5]

Return to CookieFelt Mountain.

[Video][Website]
[6.70]Edward Okulicz: The arrangement reminds me of a more organic “Lovely Head” — still their pinnacle — and the use of voice is as inventive and ear-catching as anything else they’ve done. Had this been Goldfrapp’s first single, it would have pre-emptively made sense of a lot of the genre-hopping that characterised their first four albums. As their most recent, it’s a testament to the skill they’ve shown throughout.
[8]

Daisy Le Merrer: On “Drew,” Goldfrapp are going backwards through their own discography, gradually sliding from Seventh Tree acoustic minimalism to Felt Mountain dramatics, proving the thematic unity behind their genre-skipping albums. They don’t include the electro-sexiness of Black Cherry, though, but I also hear some the airiness of Head First. Goldfrapp have always been great at self-presentation, so they probably were bound to get into self-mythologising (or at least self-reference) at some point, and they’re doing it with the same flair.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Seriously? This enervated, drippy thing is a single? They paid money for those strings?
[4]

John Seroff: I’m torn. Part of me is drawn to the gently dreamy and theatrical James Bond chansonesque charms of “Drew”; a more cynical part can’t help but be reminded of Matt Besser’s “Everything Can Be a Musical” Bjork impression. This is something of a Beaujolais Nouveau: light, clean and pleasant but with little depth and not much legs.
[6]

Iain Mew: “We might as well melt into Sunday.” Gosh. Did you find “A&E” beautiful but just a bit too energised and hopeful? Goldfrapp have just the song for you, and just enough bass string hits to stop it from collapsing under the weight of its listlessness.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: If someone heard Seventh Tree and commissioned the musicians for a big-budget film, you would get this. Sometimes big budgets pay off.
[8]

Brad Shoup: In the interest of boosting my last.fm artist count satisfying an aesthetic itch, today I’ve spent a couple hours binging on movie themes. I love the classic, Blockbuster-Era Hollywood score for its remove, for believing grandiosity belongs on any human scale. The right cloud of strings and brass becomes a giant’s caress. And that’s what’s here: music for conjuring solitude, a tin roof for a day-long rainstorm. Rolling Silvestri strings (or are they Williams’s?) send Goldfrapp’s perfectly resolving sigh of a melody breaking upon the beach again and again. Imagine a Bond theme written for a dying archvillain.
[9]

Scott Mildenhall: Goldfrapp seem to be in perpetual flux between electro and sort-of-folkiness, often with astonishing results, as their all-killer-no-filler-save-for-the-new-ones singles compilation attests. What it also attests though is that when, as here, the coin lands on “folky”, the best (“Lovely Head”! “A&E”! “Happiness”!) still come with a pop sensibility; a tune, decidedly not as here. At times it just feels like the least eventful ever Bond theme; very pretty, but not particularly compelling.
[6]

Will Adams: A stale puff of a song, made staler by unnatural-sounding guitar arpeggios and string hits. I’m not opposed to letting computers play the instruments, but a song aiming to sound as pretty as this wants should at least try to be human. Even then, though, “Drew” is a bore and a chore, meandering for four and a half minutes without any payoff. I know Head First was stuffy, but did anyone really want another Seventh Tree?
[3]

Anthony Easton: Perfect summer music — in the glacial coolness of melting ice through the veins of the listener sense, not in the drink and party and dance sense. Alison Goldfrapp’s formal melancholia continues to rest west of Nico and north of Cohen, which is lovely.
[7]

It’s Nerf or nothing!

[Video][Website]
[4.78]Britt Alderfer: Here’s your criminally underthought late-summer anthem of 2013 (please, no). I found myself enjoying the ringing tones of the intro, but as soon as Caleb Followill started singing I was like “ugh” and that was that. He could dial it down several notches and still sound like someone was pounding him in the kidneys.
[3]

Anthony Easton: For Allman Brothers-lite, the Kings of Leon sure know how to string together a fairly catchy melody.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The title is accurate: Caleb Followill soaks the rickety song in bluster and pomp. C’mon, guys — you gotta do better if the Australians are gonna reward you.
[3]

Iain Mew: There’s a lot to like here, especially the burbling guitar and a sound which hits the new wave/new rock crossover spot in a way that “Sex on Fire” was too excited to manage. However, I’m trying to imagine a way in which someone could sing a chorus as stupid as “I’m a supersoaker/Red white and blew them all away” and not have it ruin a song and I’m struggling. Caleb Followill’s puffed-up attempt at being casual definitely doesn’t cut it.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: A red-white-and-blue supersoaker spewing banjo-tars and Followill yarls all over sentimental girls. God bless America.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: It would be lot easier to get behind these stadium/festival shout-alongs if every single one of them didn’t sound like Kings Of Leon were fitting in as many innuendos as they could into each number. “Supersoaker” has a lot of lines like that — the title alone probably isn’t referring literally to a water gun — and it takes away from the anthemic-ness the band are trying to get across with the music. Still, it’s tough not to get behind “Supersoaker”‘s chug and it’s a good hook. Bonus point for pissing off Wavves.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Ragged-making rhythm work from Caleb Followill, with a vocal approach to match. It’s a toe-tapper in the Pete Yorn mold, one of those slightly scuffed rockers written in some alcoholic thrall. It’s not anthemic — thank God for that — but neither is it tired, just bleary.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: The chorus is actually about as good as that of “Use Somebody” but dare I suggest that if you’re going to pick a toy whose name carries a little snicker-worthy sexual subtext, that you actually play with it? I’m feeling this weird longingness, not empowerment, in those wailed long notes. Plus it’s not as if the rest of the song does anything. Also is it too late to record a B-side called “Hot Wheels” to go along with it?
[5]

John Seroff: Pleasant enough for guitar heroics, but I have the sneaking suspicion it’s going to really piss me off when I’m forced to listen to frat boy nation singscreaming the chorus out the door of every bar ever. Consider this score cautiously optimistic; should this become 2013’s “No Rain,” please recount me as a 4.
[6]

Game recognize game.

[Video][Website]
[4.50]Patrick St. Michel: It isn’t. This is Max Martin pomp joining forces with whatever Chad Kroeger contributes, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”‘s idea sewn up with the last Lavigne single (with Radiohead references whited out, just so nobody does a double take at the hipster line). This is pop, and it sounds really good at points. The rock ‘n’ roll, meanwhile, comes from two places. This song nabs a few ideas from “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a subtle tribute that’s nearly negated by the lyrics. It’s as if Kroeger rewrote his band’s “Rockstar,” but removed the cynicism in favor of teenage naivety. Which, well still sounding dumb, is what Lavigne wants her image, here’s to never growing up and all. Unfortunately, that refusal also mars what could have been a really great pop song.
[5]

John Seroff: I imagine this is what bronies think rock ‘n’ roll sound like. Joan Jett wept.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Of course she deserves recognition as a Joan Jett heir, but she refracts her birthright through several layers of vocal filtering, toothless power chords, and terrible lyrics (for one, Jett doesn’t care whether she is your motherfucking princess). She rhymes “bad reputation” with “wrong generation.” You had a right to remain silent, ma’am.
[4]

Will Adams: An improvement over the previous single if only for a more committed vocal performance. But committed does not equal good, and while the hook and the title is sure to troll someone out there, it still sounds ghastly. Both she and the track — garish and cluttered, but without charm — seem to think the only way to convince is to be AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE. I blame Chad.
[5]

Anthony Easton: There is an essay to be written about how P!nk transferred into proper inspirational music from pseudo-punk roots, and how Avril attempts to work that pattern and fails, but that would require more work than this might be worth.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: Everything changes. Avril Lavigne and her haters are probably all bored as hell with “I’m so punk!” “No, you’re a stupid pop girl!” — so now it’s “I’m so rock and roll!” The villains, meanwhile, aren’t the valedictorians in preppy clothes but Max Martin’s hipsters. (Is this a thing? Do hipsters really rule high school now? Or did Max just get stood up once by Bethany Cosentino?) And Avril Lavigne’s long since become one of those acts who caters less to radio than to her increasingly insular fanbase, which explains why she’s written her second consecutive defensive single, the multiple callbacks (“motherfucking princess,” “I’m with you”) and the way this sounds like the capper for a 20th-anniversary arena tour. And the worst change of all: Avril and Chad wrote her best chorus melody since “I’m With You,” but it’s buried under the noise of the times.
[6]

Daisy Le Merrer: On first listen, I had to check my headphones were plugged in and the tinny guitar sound didn’t come from my shitty work laptop speakers. This kind of “raise your booze in the air” riff usually sounds a little bit fuller. But this is Avril, and she’s not singing about how she loves rock’n’roll, she’s singing about herself, and how she does anything she wants. What she wants, here, is to upstage the riff. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do it through charisma but by mixing it down. That’s cheating, IMHO.
[3]

Brad Shoup: Future Grantland will, no doubt, publish a piece entitled “Avril Lavigne Is Our Last Rock Star”. I say this cos she’s been flogging the teen revolution for a longer-ass time than I ever would have expected. She might outlast us all. This being Avril, “motherfreakin’ princess” is just a stroll from “hipster bullshit,” and the track features more voices than a spelunking party. This being 2013, there’s a desperate plea to keep listening to your local I Heart Radio affiliate and the pneumatic hiss of synths receding before the acoustic breakdown.
[5]

David Lee: In the context of servicing Lavigne’s continued efforts to channel Veruca Salt, it’s not surprising that this is jam-packed with obvious homages to brat pop artists and rallying cries, including her own. You know what is surprising? Chad Kroeger had a hand in this. Yes, the person responsible for heading a pop act that churned out a lot of constipated, post-grunge sludge has aided in the crafting of a carefree “Pour Some Sugar On Me” redux. Who am I kidding, though: Max Martin is clearly the head nerd here. He supplies the snotty pop tropes with the glitter-spewing booster rockets they need to transcend their roles as accessories to image construction. Nothing’s new under the sun, but when it sparkles this brightly, who cares?
[7]

Edward Okulicz: I love Max Martin, but there are times when all the Max in the world doesn’t come close to Mutt Lange.
[5]

Are they for real?

[Video][Website]
[4.00]Anthony Easton: Miss Jackson has a solid pop culture history, which this extends and warps, in interesting ways. As does their use of the phrase back door. Extra point for the heyheys, and for the handclaps.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: A slightly less forceful version of that one Fall Out Boy that came out earlier this year. Minus one point for being a little too much like a single that was perfectly fine.
[4]

Tara Hillegeist: Performing the same moves executed so crisply on Save Rock & Roll as if they were recorded on shoddy garage recording equipment does little to hide the hollowness beneath them, you know.
[0]

Alfred Soto: Fall Out at the Disco? The Panic Boys?
[3]

Brad Shoup: Whatever, we could use another rock band cribbing from Kanye’s 2010 playbook. These nasty boys (plus Butch Walker, the Rick Rubin of malls) relegate Lolo and her Jackson connection to a Victrola treatment. Urie saves the meaty part for himself, a Stumpish flow without the awkward idiom-making. I’m looking forward to his discovery of New Jack Swing.
[7]

Will Adams: I would deem this indistinguishable from Fall Out Boy’s recent work, except one group has good hooks, and the other doesn’t. Guess which side “MISSJACKSONMISSJACKSONMISSJACKSON (are you nasty?)” falls on?
[3]

John Seroff: Don’t be fooled by the chorus; the Jackson most closely referenced here is not Janet but Michael, by way of “Dirty Diana.” There’s the same self-centered and wronged little boy morality play, the same unrelenting and satisfying teeter-totter of melody, the same mad crescendo of guitars and syncopated semantic satiation of the title paramour. It’s all compulsively listenable and re-listenable and re-re-listenable and so on until I realize I left it on repeat an hour ago. Given the rich tradition of musical Miss (and Ms.) Jacksons out there, it says a lot that Panic! can hang with this storied crowd, packing little more than real dumb Fueled by Ramen fun. More please.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: So when can we start calling a certain subset of dudes’ obsession with R&B signifiers (especially the ones with nastiness) what it is: ironic racism? “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark,” lit up and smelling like a garbage fire.
[0]

Because we’re never not covering people out of Ladytron…

[Video][Website]
[7.12]

Katherine St Asaph: Helen Marnie singing like icicles shattering over a Daniel Hunt tundra: ignore the credit, this is a Ladytron single, and those will never not be good. (My gut insists the Reuben Wu / Mira Aroyo counterpart would be better, though; maybe because the Mira songs on Velocifero were the best, the grittiest; maybe because I prefer underdog vocalists, or maybe just because I look more like her.) The verses say less than they think (“a heart explodes every second on the street” is a fantastic opener, but I’m not sure anyone decided how literal it was) — but that was always part of the Ladytron sell, and it hardly matters when the first chorus is a blend of “Weekend” and Patrick Wolf’s “Together” and the second is the sort of wistful epitaph that makes you think, while it lasts, that Marnie’s voice and sequencers were invented for. Extra point for the vocal and guitar sighs.
[9]

Edward Okulicz: Of course chilly synth-pop with Marnie’s vocals is going to be good — you people have heard Witching Hour, haven’t you? “The Hunter” is as frosty and wind-swept as anything off that record, and it’s only the more interpersonal lyrics (“dry your eyes, friend”) that give it the sheen, the impression of additional warmth. Underneath that veneer of tenderness, Daniel Hunt’s production is an endlessly-stretching, magnificent abyss.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Tuneful and undistinguished, Ladytron remind me of twentysomething nights in so-called indie clubs. Almost as tuneful and undistinguished, this single by their songwriter is the electronic equivalent of the tuneful, undistinguished things that her mom’s generation would have enjoyed played on acoustic guitars.
[4]

Ian Mathers: If you told me I’d like Ladytron less if they started emulating the high-gloss wing of synthpop more, I’d have looked a little askance at you. This is half of Ladytron, admittedly, and Marnie’s voice does go fairly well with the weightless, pristine production. But personally I prefer that voice working slightly against the grain of the music (as on Witching Hour, where they tapped into a bit of shoegaze), and here the result doesn’t feel ethereal so much as it does remote, harmless, something you can’t quite reach or be reached by. Sounds pleasant enough, though.
[6]

Madeleine Lee: It seems too obvious to call this Ladytron defrosted, but the warmth here is palpable, beyond even the relatively human Gravity the Seducer. It’s there in the lyrics, which shift away from the external (describing you, directing you) to the internal (describing me, asking you); it’s there in the instrumentation, as the guitar gradually cracks through the layers of synths until it washes over the last refrain. The production is still wall-to-wall, but the walls are there to keep you in, not out.
[9]

Iain Mew: In the verses, Marnie never quite makes it clear whether she is playing the hunted and the hunter as two different characters or one conflicted one. The song has a cold, inexorable momentum that makes the goodbye inevitable, though, and by the chorus it’s all hunter. Going back to the verses, though, “oceans of empathy” is a neat self description. She knows what she has to do, but she sounds like she’s both convincing herself and trying to make it as easy as possible for the other party.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Marnie swoops to the waters and hovers for a while. She’s got an unaffected, conversational tone; the pitch included “pristine vocals,” but what’s here is quite affecting. But the framework is so standard: the sketch of drama, but no sound-pictures like that initial descent.
[6]

John Seroff: Not to be too glib about a track that I actually enjoy, but it’s 35 years later and the only thing disco is doing different is slightly slowing down “From Here to Eternity“? File under: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It.
[7]

If you think the lyrics are gross, imagine the boardrooms…

[Video][Website]
[2.40]John Seroff: LMFAO globalism as a crass vehicle for multi-millionaires to become multi-multi millionaires through product placement, recycled beats, co-opted culture and Pitbull.
[1]

Edward Okulicz: Priyanka Chopra as a global pop star should be a no-brainer. She is ludicrously attractive, moves well and sings passably. Any record label with an eye on star power and the ability to project money from demographics that doesn’t try to make her huge isn’t doing its job. But she wrote this, and if she merely wants to reference a bunch of holiday spots over a song that surely has no use other than to function as a delivery device for more Shitbull verses and fodder for leery white people’s vaguely colonialist wank fantasies, then what’s the point?
[2]

Brad Shoup: Wikipedia claims the singers and the songwriters are two and the same. Pair their self-posterization with RedOne’s most synthetic soca-beat and you’ve got a prime example of gamblers pushing a short stack.
[3]

Will Adams: Priyanka’s team have decided that the only way to break her stateside is to work the obvious angle and reduce her to some beguiling foreigner. The resulting song features a similar lack of effort: the unfinished pre-chorus, RedOne exhuming one of his beats from 2010, and no work in defining what the fuck it means to “feel exotic.” Pop music doesn’t need this.
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: What Dr. Luke and Max Martin are to American top 40, RedOne and Pitbull are to ambiguously global pop, the sort where Mumbai is interchangeable with Cuba, interchangeable with Rio, interchangeable with a cruise ship. It’s a lucrative if inherently questionable market, but to the Western music industry this all codes declasse, and as a result RedOne gets a disproportionate amount of second-stringers (again, to the Western market) — and shit from critics. (Hey kids: “Just Dance” was 2008, and no, RedOne hasn’t sounded like that in years.) Not that “Exotic” says much in their favor. All the processing they’ve got doesn’t make Priyanka Chopra a singer, and all the second and third and Pitbull verses can’t make this fill out its endless runlength. And then there’s “exotic.”
[2]

Crystal Leww: “Exotic” is not a compliment. It’s a word to otherize, tokenize and differentiate women of color and often introduces a White Dude Savior component to any sexual interaction that it’s used in. This also has the added bonus of being horrible in another language, with the Hindi backing vocal proclaiming “when I saw you, I knew that this foreign dude had convinced this brown heart.” So not only does it appropriate “different” sounds, it utilizes them in the worst way imaginable. But it gets even worse! Not only does it condone the fetishization of South Asian girls by white dudes, it also plays into the exotification of others in the global South by South Asians by shouting out Cuba and Rio. Stop that, Priyanka; white people are looking at you.
[0]

Iain Mew: Rohin Guha has done a great job of addressing the complexities of how “Exotic” presents Priyanka Chopra, so I won’t go over them too much. But I can see Pitbull having taken this on primarily so he can say “Miss World & Mister Worldwide,” and the song becomes more enjoyable if I imagine him as the personification of the horrible compromises Chopra is facing. Meta tension provides enough oomph to enliven the first couple of the song’s zillion choruses, something RedOne isn’t up to.
[4]

Anthony Easton: The false dichotomy of art and trash has been fully refused in a majesty of stupid beats, late capital decadence and what might be an example of semi-ironic self-Orientalizing. Extra point for the line “Until Cuba’s free I can’t go.”
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: You aren’t tricking me — don’t care who is the artist before the “ft.” here, this is pure Pitbull nonsense.
[2]

Madeleine Lee: Nothing’s really wrong with this song, I guess, except that the idea of a dance floor of people singing “I’m feeling so exotic” and meaning it makes me want to throw up.
[2]

Not quite “Take That,” is it?

[Video][Website]
[6.60]Iain Mew: I’ve completely resisted the One Direction contagion to date since I haven’t appreciated the appeal of any of their songs. This one has got me. Partly it’s that for once it doesn’t sound half-finished — the power pop energy of the chorus and its concept extends across the verses as well. The interjection of “HOOW!” is no “ERNGH!”, but it does a job, and building the slapdash into the narrative works even better for the sudden dissolve and collapse of the memories of the song in question. That’s not all, though. Sometimes songs work for coincidental personal reasons, and in this case a detail about the girl included solely to make a joke throws me right back to being 13, at a school disco and dancing with a girl all night to the best song ever. That one didn’t go “oh oh oh yeah yeah yeah,” but serving up my own memories so effectively is a quick route to emotional connection.
[8]

Alfred Soto: A change of pace, industry watchdogs will call it. From the Pro Tooled precision of the rhythm guitars and “Baba O’Riley” piano to the vocal drops, this stands as a better example of modern chart pop than the two Songs of the Summer boasting the Neptunes’ drummer. The hubris is cuter than Harry Styles.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: The very latest in Guitar Hero riffs, self-conscious meta, and a narrative that’s “On and On and On” levels of willful gleeful stupid. (“Her daddy was a dentist, she said I had a dirty mouth” is at least as good as “I said, ‘Who are you to talk about impending doom?’”) What could be missing? Oh, the hook.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: This is far from the best song ever. It lacks the constant energy building up to a big release come the chorus that One Direction’s best songs have had. Rather it sort of just shuffles along to a hook where their voices sound a little bit like Adam Levine. But it’s hardly the worst song ever, either. It’s mostly pleasant, and the big bridge adds in just enough drama.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Not quite the standard One Direction fare — this one uses its crunchy guitars to form much more of a hip-and-booty-shaker than even their most fun singles up to this point. It works well though, because “Best Song Ever” itself is a lot closer to my idea of the best song ever than the half-memory it describes.
[8]

Anthony Easton: The chorus on this is super tight, and the line “she said that her name was Georgia Rose/And her daddy was a dentist/She said I had a dirty mouth…” just makes me laugh. And this sounds like a gender-switched Taylor Swift, which is nice.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Thanks to this handy site it’s apparent that approximately 11 girls were given the name Georgia-Rose in England and Wales between 1996 and 2000, making them old enough to inhabit the teenage wasteland of “Best Song Ever,” if not to be the girl at its centre. With those numbers in mind, though, surely she wouldn’t be that hard to find online, unless she was lying about her name — something that’s obviously not the case; that would shatter the impression that One Direction only mix with Good Girls from Good Stock with dentist fathers. That teenage wasteland, though. Their seeming tactic of sacred cow-baiting (The Clash, The Undertones) might seem like fun and games now, but you only have to look at Busted to see how that kind of thing (guitars) can be a gateway drug to landfill indie. It is fun and games now (the highlight: “I think it gooooes”), but when the fifth series of The Big Reunion stars Joe Lean jing jang jonging alongside The Twang and The Pigeon Detectives, know who to blame.
[7]

Brad Shoup: At long last, a worthy tribute to Point Break’s “Freakytime.”
[8]

John Seroff: Between the song’s crit-bait title and barely serviceable charms, it’s tremendously tempting to beat this mediocre trifle a bit harder than it deserves. But as an over-calculated stab at 3OH!3 for the junior set, at least there’s nothing at play that deserves a scathing.
[4]

Ian Mathers: As someone who has primarily experienced One Direction second-hand, or even third-hand, it’s weird trying to explain why they’re so likable; I’m not even sure if I actually like them so much as I’m enthralled by the writing of the people I know who love them. All of which means I’m the guy who’s seen dozens of GIFs and analyses of those GIFs before ever hearing the song. The song itself is perfectly good, a worthy successor to the great lineage of songs about other great songs, but it’s not even that it’s Not For Me (One Direction is for everyone, you can get anything that you want), it’s just that it’s kind of surplus to requirements. Isn’t that one of the possible hallmarks of a really really great pop act?
[8]

And we won’t be enthusiastic…

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[5.33]John Seroff: I know it’s hardly the only song to put so much weight on that simple hook, but I can’t stop hearing “I Won’t Be Long” as a gloss on Cathy Davey’s “Little Red,” and not as an improvement at that. A disappointing degree of Beck’s current era of radio-friendly projects, this new single included, feel more like a soft shade of gloomy idea than a fully-developed answer. I much prefer the less accessible but more puckish experimentation of Sound Shapes, Song Reader, or Record Club to this recent run of wan, forgettable adult contemporary.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Everyone’s going to absentmindedly sing something else over this: for me it was “see my name, see my name on the wall…” It’s the chords, but also the spacey, drifty quality. Which can be rather pleasant, for what it is.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Whenever Beck slips into his spacesuit and floats in a most peculiar way through the cosmos, he sounds like an idiot or worse. Ten years after Sea Change persuaded fans that he was more poignant being serious, he’s at it again, with the faintest of pulses.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: Beck’s planning on releasing an extended version of this, too. It has its moments (the channel-hopping middle) but, man, not nearly enough going on here to warrant five minutes, let alone more than that.
[5]

Brad Shoup: See, it’s funny cos the main version is over five minutes, and the extended version is nearly thrice that. It’s blissy! Hard-rubber bass and clipped guitar push the chords, and once that starts to wear, some bog-standard synth flutter is added. There’s also a strange edit around the 3:00 mark, as if Beck couldn’t join two takes at different tempi. The best part is next, as clarion guitars twinkle sour and sweet in the Echoplex, the kickdrum does a hushed death metal tribute, and vocals drift away. This would all be very nice — not to mention a fine hint for Daft Punk’s next LP — if it weren’t for the man himself, who is 50/50 with the nonsense and just abysmal at the straight stuff. (Sea Change was… not good, y’all.) Luckily, the titular sentiment is more or less foolproof, though I wish he’d fooled around with it more.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Beck’s best talent is not mimicry, and it is not bricolage (though he does both things very well, and often in conjunction; this is an excellent example of that) but a kind of over-reaching distance. In fact, I wonder if this inability to fully commit without personae might explain the effectiveness of his theatrical gesture. Extra point for the fade out coda.
[7]