That’s it for The Singles Jukebox this year. Thank you to everyone who suggested songs and apologies if we didn’t choose yours. Thanks more generally to everyone who has commented, reblogged, or just read the site during the year and helped to make doing this so enjoyable.

To close things off, here is the final list of our 30 top scoring singles of the 2013. You can also check out (almost) all the songs that made it above 7.00 on this YouTube playlist. We’d love to hear about your favourite singles of the year in the comments.

1. Paramore – Still Into You [8.33]
2. Meek Mill – Dreams and Nightmares [8.30]
3. Kendrick Lamar ft. Drake – Poetic Justice [8.11]
4. Mariah Carey ft. Miguel – #Beautiful [8.00]
5. Kanye West – Black Skinhead [7.92]
6. Disclosure ft. Eliza Doolittle – You & Me [7.91]
7. Sakanaction – Music [7.90]
8. Fiona Apple – Hot Knife [7.89]
9. Temi Dollface – Pata Pata [7.88]
10. Ivan Dorn – Nevospitannyy [7.86]
11= Hot Natured ft. Róisín Murphy – Alternate State [7.83]
11= Within Temptation ft. Tarja – Paradise (What About Us?) [7.83]
13. Charli XCX – What I Like [7.82]
14. Jessie Ware – Imagine it Was Us [7.78]
15. Melt-Banana – The Hive [7.75]
16= Omar Souleyman – Warni Warni [7.71]
16= Omawumi ft. Remy Kayz – Somori [7.71]
16= Sarah Jarosz – Build Me Up From Bones [7.71]
19= Intocable – Te Amo (Para Siempre) [7.67]
19= f(x) – Rum Pum Pum Pum [7.67]
21= Gerardo Ortiz – Dámaso [7.57]
21= Maria Magdalena – Cada Vez Mas Cerca [7.57]
21= Sharaya J – Smash Up the Place [7.57]
21= Titica – Don’t Touch Me [7.57]
25= Betty Who – Somebody Loves You [7.55]
25= Bflecha – B33 [7.55]
25= Disclosure ft. AlunaGeorge – White Noise [7.55]
25= Pet Shop Boys – Love is a Bourgeois Construct [7.55]
29. Drake ft. Majid Jordan – Hold On We’re Going Home [7.54]
30. Miranda Lambert – Mama’s Broken Heart [7.50]

We will be back in January. Have a wonderful rest of the year.

And from Moses! Meanwhile, Patrick’s little Edward Snowden act here has nothing to do with the visit from the Jukebox Secret Police he’s currently receiving…

[Video][Website]
[6.29]

Mo Kim: Musically and thematically, “Goodbye 20” shares much with last year’s “22” by Taylor Swift, but where “22” embodies the weightless joys of young adulthood, “Goodbye 20” embodies the burdens. It only takes one line to kill our buzz: “My 20 has gone, I have done nothing.” Swift sings about breakfast at midnight and falls in love with boys who look like bad news; Kim considers dropping out of the school she, like many Korean students, has worked a lifetime to get into and works odd jobs just to have some spending money. Yet the song resists gloom and pitches itself in an interesting place, somewhere between Kim’s down-to-earth ruminations and instrumentation lifted straight from Red — whimsical guitar strums, peppy synths, and marching band drums. The reason it works as well as it does is Kim, who humanizes the friction between the ideals and the truth of adulthood, what everybody tells her versus what it’s like to experience it herself. Her earthy, unaffected voice has never sounded as emboldened as it does here: refusing to be swallowed, navigating through the noise.
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: I don’t know if I’m revealing too much about the inner workings of The Singles Jukebox here — we have e-mail chains! — but this song was presented to us with the sentence “Because Korea needs its own Taylor Swift, too.” That acoustic guitar and Lim Kim’s voice lead me to believe this would be true, but then the chorus blew up into this big colorful pop hook and I had my doubts. Then I went into cultural-discovery mode and found out that 19 is the equivalent of 21 in America (i.e. you’re an adult! Get loaded!). So I don’t know about you but that makes 20 a lot like 22. Oh, but Lim Kim reminds me way more of the 20-somethings I knew (including me) than Swift’s breakfast-at-midnight party kids — “When your 20, you’re always the youngest adult,” and “I thought a breathtaking love would/as if a new world would open to me,” with one key word at the end — “stupid.” “Goodbye 20” isn’t an ode to that happy, free, confused time, but a kiss off to naiveté.
[8]

Brad Shoup: An astounding amount of backstory here, and not all of it makes our narrator sympathetic. And yet, when she asks me how 20 was, it’s like we’re on my parents’ porch. This absolutely puts me in a particular space. The intro reminds me of Henna Chevrolet commercials; the chorus is all VH1 blocks of Vanessa Carlton and Michelle Branch. And then there’s the text, assured and blinkered in all the resonant ways, withdrawn when it’s not reaching out. And when she snaps at someone trying to fucking touch her? I trust the tingles in my collarbone.
[10]

Will Adams: Verses from a cellular service commercial, chorus from 00s era pop-rock album track. What to do? “Don’t fucking touch me!” Nice try, but bleeps won’t make me interested.
[4]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: An utterly pleasant and polite slice of Whatever drifting over the ears and into the aether. Dramatic highpoint — a bleeped out “don’t fucking touch me” i.e. the height of toothlessness.
[2]

Alfred Soto: While it boasts the discovery of fresh emotions that distinguishes the best teen pop, the pieces don’t quite work: the synth is rather ugly, the percussion thick and uncertain. Stopping the track for for the aural equivalent of looking at the camera strikes me as a glib gesture too.
[4]

Iain Mew: With its gloriously bright chorus, “Goodbye 20” is a world away from “All Right” in mood and sound. The two share one smart bit of writing, though, in their repetition of irritating questions Lim Kim is being asked. It doesn’t take until “don’t f#$@|% touch me!” to get the pressure and disillusionment she’s suffering from, not just because of how expressively she sings the verses but because the needling of “how about your 20, girl?” says it all.
[8]

And from a different Joshua, a band without a song on the Catching Fire soundtrack…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Joshua C.: How fitting is it that a band called the Civil Wars is torn apart by creative differences? It’s a good thing that they left us with this before going on hiatus though; it’s awesome. This song is “Barton Hallow” on steroids: where that starts with the two of them singing in unison, here Joy Williams sings the verses alone with occasional backing from John Paul White. (They did not want to be in the same studio together when recording, apparently.) This is Williams’s song, no question. Her voice, along with the production by Charlie Peacock, gives the song its urgency and emotion but prevents it from going overboard, as other musicians would let it. (Seriously: For every breakup song like this there’s a thousand Evanesci and Nickelbacks that SING EVERY SYLLABLE LIKE THEY’RE BEATING YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH A CONSTIPATED-SOUNDING BASEBALL BAT.) Even when all hell breaks loose in the climax, with the pounding “Kashmir”-esque drums and gritty guitars, the Civil Wars manage to keep things beautifully simple. It’s almost as if Ethan Johns and Rick Rubin joined forces. Really, it’s a shame that the rest of this album wasn’t as great as this opening song, because if it was we would certainly have a classic on our hands.
[9]

Brad Shoup: ‘Tis better to have lost than to’ve loved, say the Civils, and I can only take them at their word. It’s quite a setpiece, and it gets my pining for some CMA act to go full gothic country-metal. Obviously the drums must enter, and when they do, it’s just a bit of squinting away from a slack black metal kit. Though my kvlt dreams are lost, what didn’t get away was a mixture of “Wanted Dead or Alive”, “Oh Daddy,” and “The Thunder Rolls,” so really, I get her complaint.
[6]

Crystal Leww: This is melodrama that borders on the line of corniness, but I can appreciate the sentiment behind the phrase “I wish you were the one who got away.” Sometimes at the end of a toxic relationship that went on way too long with someone way too wrong, the trope seems more appealing than the reality. Joy Williams moderates her volume effectively; her voice cracks in all the right places here. It’s a shame that they’re no longer together, but I hope that Williams, who did seem to do press for the album, continues to make music. 
[6]

Anthony Easton: I keep thinking that the histrionics (emphasis on history) of the Civil Wars are not earned, the drama is more Branson dinner theater than anything with gravitas, and its Hunger Games baggage doesn’t help this impression. They are more technically skilled than the Mumfords, which is something.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The Bon Jovi of mandolin jammin’ come alive with this slice of amplified quivering sensitivity. That fans could get better tunes and singing with character from your average country song depresses me a bit.  
[4]

Mallory O’Donnell: The alternately spare and dense tickle and churn of the music is capably forceful. But if you’re going to employ a title this cliché, you need a twist far more clever than “I wish you were…”
[5]

Will Adams: A heaping portion of Sturm and Drang served to two people who don’t know what the hell to do with it.
[4]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Like Low with hooks, a gentle and sad mope that strains until it brings up the fire in its belly.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Every generation gets an Alison Krauss. Sometimes they get one who sounds a little like Mary Margaret O’Hara.
[7]

From Joshua, chiptune-tinged nu-disco from Kazakhstan…

[Video][Website]
[6.78]

Will Adams: A timeline of my thoughts: 8-bit plus that ’90s house organ tone? Brilliant. Fat drums to give the disco some heft? Yes, please. Funk guitars? Of course! Charismatic vocalist to helm all of this production? Right-o. Massive chorus? Wait, where’s the massive chorus?
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: A spirited electric slide through a Kazakh disco, with enough hookiness to copyright its chant-worthy title and enough spirited eccentricity (Game Gear noises, Justice-style clipped low end) to mark it Blog-Pop Champ of 2010.
[7]

Brad Shoup: A roller-rink jam with the ambient arcade sounds baked in, “Kim Ushin?” glides in on a turn-of-the-century chillout bassline, which then gets turned inside-out to match the disco strokes. The result is something that could hail from the Gangnam District, minus the vocal garbling. It’s relentless.
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: It’s tempting for me to read too much in the fact that this is Kazakh, and search for an Asian influence in the gloss or delivery of this. It might be made more interesting if there were one–as it stands, this is neither more nor less exciting than any other boilerplate Mediterranean disco song since the Bronze Age. But would I dance to it in a wine bar in Malta? Yes, yes I would.
[5]

Iain Mew: Girls’ Generation’s first Japanese album in 2011 featured several new tracks produced by Japanese producer STY. Two of them, “The Great Escape” and “You-aholic,” sounded like disco pop built in part on top of the sounds of ancient home computer equipment. They were good, but I wished they’d carried through on that sound more — more of the blunt sounds! Bigger tunes to contrast to them! A couple of years later and almost certainly unrelated (good luck finding the production credits without knowing Russian), “Kim Ushin?” delivers what I wanted and then some: swishy disco with a massive chorus, powerful singing, and a production which carries more of its percussive machine loops beyond the intro.
[9]

Patrick St. Michel: Not sold on those verses, but that chorus delivers a lot of squiggly electronic goodness and 8-bit bloopery.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: “Delia Smith style, you know, Psychedelia Smith, we just chuck it together and mix it up and see what happens.” So described the lead singer of Raygun (imagine a set of Hoosiers matryoshka dolls; they’d be the smallest) his band’s avant-garde attitude to music as he tried to launch them on a late night TV programme in 2009. Of course, he was ridiculed, but wasn’t he on to something? “Kim Ushin?” is such a well combined melange of sounds that it can only be described as Robin S-ton Blumenthal, 8-bitsley Harriott and Nigella Rodgers together baking something resembling a Madeon (madeleine). Just a shame the repetition of the title causes it to end up tasting a bit samey.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Like my belly after half a Christmas cake and a liter of eggnog, the pleasure of excess does not exceed the painful consequences. 
[4]

Joshua Smith: Earlier this year, for reasons I don’t fully understand, I binged on just about every pop music video from Kazakhstan I could find on YouTube. By the end, I was left knowing hardly any more about the scene than when I started; nobody’s writing about this stuff in English, and Google translate helps with the few Russian comments, but not the Kazakh ones. So without much context I’m forced to draw my own conclusions, for example, how Kazakh pop often has in common with Russian pop production that seems intended more for headphone listening than a night at the club: a lot going on without becoming a dynamic-range-compressed mess. Or how it shares with that other, much more familiar K-Pop an affinity for boy bands and girl groups (Zhanar is herself currently a member of a group called KeshYOU) as well as a tendency to freely mix and match every form of pop music from the past half-century (note the New Jack Swing of the KeshYOU clip and the chiptune-disco of this one). Plus, sometimes a Central Asian folk instrument I’ve never heard of will show up in a song. Ultimately, these characteristics tick a lot of boxes for me, and “Kim ushin?” is the type of creative, well-written song that’s interesting no matter where it comes from.
[9]

Joris Gillet delivers us some Dutchmen with no plausible American counterparts to speak of…

[Video][Website]
[5.67]

Crystal Leww: WE SAID “NO DRAKE”.
[2]

Iain Mew: I got a taste for the cadences of Dutch rapping during the 2010 edition of the Pop World Cup, so I’m happy to get reacquainted with The Opposites. “Sukkel Voor de Liefde” (“Sucker for Love”) has them as disillusioned kings of the club brooding over the emptiness of fame; the brass blare that sounds like an emotional catch in the throat helps to make it better than the tempting description “Dutch Drake” would indicate.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The brass is so greasy that the whole track slides on it into some kind of hermetic meta-disco.
[7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Over opulence both brass’n’brash that recalls DJ Khalil’s late-noughties work (namely Drake’s “Fear”), a pair of Dutch bozos talk about fame, bad bitches and de diskotheek in vapid flows and voices. You won’t pity a damn thing.
[3]

Brad Shoup: Clicked this in the browser with “Dusty Money” going on Spotify… holy shit. Spring for the symphony, y’all. Other than the rasping trumpet intro, the orchestral touches are dabbed gently: flute and strings paired and employed as rhythm, the strings breaking free for Twan’s verse, the horns joining after for a little jaunt. Mr. Probz is little more than an interlude, but his lower register and melodic sense wrap things nicely. It’s not pitiable, it’s thoughtful.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Boy, does this want to transcend horn sections! It almost does. Credit the demotic force of the rap-singing.
[6]

Josh brings us the runner up to Idols West Africa, because we always like the runners up more…

[Video][Website]
[7.71]

Iain Mew: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, good evening” — that’s a hell of a GET ON WITH IT opening, and indeed Omawumi being up to the tricky task of sounding as impatiently urgent as the beat is the biggest triumph of “Somori”.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: SORRY CAN’T STOP BODY TALK LATER.
[10]

Josh Roberts: This song wouldn’t work half as well as it weren’t so over-energetic. So much of this threatens to be offputting — the Auto-Tuned whoa-ohs in the background, that thing where she name-drops both herself and her producer at the beginning, the (rent-a-)rapper who adds absolutely nothing to the song that Omawumi couldn’t handle herself — but it just isn’t. The way that Omawumi effortlessly drops every word over that relentless beat, she’s earned as many unnecessary flourishes as she wants.
[8]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: This afrobeat jam clacks and clatters along to a surprising degree, staying on its feet in the meantime, cutting drums short and piling on the instruments (Rhodes keys and guitars and, hell, why not some Auto-Tune). A bundle to take in and uphold — it joyously (and inevitably) fumbles to a close, the seams of its countless polyrhythms showing.
[7]

Zach Lyon: For a song to be so dominated by the personality on the throne isn’t a bad thing in this case, but I’m still way more interested in the teeny promo song clip that plays at the end of the video.
[6]

Anthony Easton: One of the most exciting things about pop this year was how brilliant the African influence in Black American spheres was, a returning and a branching out, in a Pan-African mode that lacked some of the problematic politics that marred the 1960s and 1970s. I cannot imagine that this was accidental, and the remixing of imagery and sounds here are as smartly trans-global as Matangi (but perhaps just a bit more fun).
[8]

Brad Shoup: I love the line “you must be hungry”. It’s like a motherly putdown. I’ve already deployed “song-length taunt“, but this would figure prominently in a list of songs that mock those who won’t dance. Omawumi jukes sweatlessly from boasts to callouts while the percussion circles our poor sitter and the guitar pulls faces. A fantastic slice of naija pop that uses club touches for enhancement.
[8]

And from Abby, a French hip-hop power ballad (?) (!)…

[Video][Website]
[6.29]

Kat Stevens: During a week of frequent trips to the local hypermarche for Breton cider, tins of compressed meat and live crabs (selected by one Hazel R of this parish, who as the gite’s resident ostraconophobe was ironically the only person willing to execute their boiling, watery fate), this song was in frequent rotation on SKYROCK FM, one of two music radio stations the hire car could pick up. It lodged in my head firmly enough that I sought out the video when I got home. It’s very rewarding — Gims is being emo up a mountain, but unlike many popstars he remembers to wear appropriate outdoor weather garments! There’s even a trusty Diefenbaker to keep him company. The tune is certainly pleasant enough to soothe the nervous motorist unused to driving on the right — thanks to its Robert Miles-esque properties I didn’t crash the car or kill anyone on the priorite a droit roundabout! Go me!
[7]

Abby Waysdorf: I tend to describe this song by the video, because the video is exactly what the visuals for this song should be — Maître Gims extending his arms dramatically on top of a mountain, on a deserted tropical beach, thumping his chest in the desert, singing to the camera in black-and-white rain. “J’me tire” is exactly that kind of song. It’s all emotion and melodrama, and yet there’s a kind of sparseness to it as well, with the prominent echo of the snare drum and slender guitar riff. Even in the bombast of the chorus the focus is mostly on Gims himself and the insistent almost-growl of his voice. It’s subtle for such a dramatic song (which I guess is right on trend), and it works. “J’me tire”‘s grown on me since I first heard it in May, and as it wound its way to my residence in the Netherlands (my friend says that French songs end up Dutch hits after the Dutch get back from their summer vacations to vacation parks in France, but it arose well into October), it’s become an entrenched favorite. Sometimes you just want to scream on top of a mountain.
[8]

Brad Shoup: That see-sawing guitar figure reminds me of nothing more than soundchecks; why it’s shorthand for deliberative interiority is beyond me. Might as well sample a roadie slapping the snare. Just get me to the chorus, where Maître Gims’ milky, vibrato-free roar summons real existential affront.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The guitars bewitch: a couple of notes plucked and echoed behind a cloud of harmonies. The platitudes ring with force.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: The lyrics are a bit self-aggrandizing and self-pitying (“si c’est comme ça, bah fuck la vie d’artiste”), but at least they’re passionately sung, rather than boredly declaimed. I’d like to hear Gims over a more adventurous backing track, but this one at least makes clear the depth of his intentions. One to watch.
[6]

Will Adams: When Drake half-sings about the trappings of fame, it’s uninspiring at best and nauseating at worst. Maître Gims, on the other hand, has a powerful voice that conveys the emotion more convincingly. Unfortunately, it’s being delivered over a watered-down rehash of “Love the Way You Lie.”
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: He’s got a great voice, a hell of a stage presence, and effective if straight-down-the-line emotional shorthand. If we could only do something about that cheap, grooveless beat.
[6]

Derek brings us a song from a pixelated band that no one chose to compare to Gorillaz…

[Video][Website]
[6.89]

Derek Gazis: When I hear “dance-pop by a virtual band,” I imagine something bouncy and energetic. While “Jenny” is indeed musically upbeat, the lyrics express a sense of longing and frustration. On one hand, it’s nice for a song like this to have some emotional weight behind it, rather than be completely devoid of meaning, as one might reasonably expect from a group whose members have names like Goldie Foxx and Dyna Mink. But at the same time, music like this shouldn’t let sentimentality get in the way of its fun. “Jenny” achieves a good balance in this regard. With its quirky instrumentation (the accordion parts, by the way, sound like “Stereo Love”), driving beat, and that “forget those amigos” line, this song never takes itself too seriously, and that’s a good thing.
[7]

Iain Mew: As an exercise in filling a track with synth accordion and steel drums and still managing to make it sound icy, “Jenny” is a massive success. It’s helped by Cherry’s extraordinary vocals being so constantly emotive as to camouflage any heightened feeling. As a tale of wanting more than friendship from your best friend, it’s so far from believable that it feels a little exploitative, but maybe that’s letting the other aspects of the group’s artificiality get to me too much. Certainly it’s one of the most intriguing things I’ve heard in a while.
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: There are not enough steel drums or zydeco accordions or explicitly spurned BFF queer desire in pop music — perhaps even less in the digitised hands of virtual creatures — but somehow, the virtual creatures Studio Killers exist. And while their character design is definitely in need of a Mikudayo-esque upgrade, “Jenny” cuts through the imagery gimmick and cuts deep. The steel drums and zydeco touches hint at a tropical liaison that stays in the protagonist’s head, their friend off romancing with a man. The music creates subtext and sets a scene; the words simply add extra detail, movement, animation (if you will).
[7]

Anthony Easton: Where this pulses and speeds up, I wish the music would smear a bit, be a bit less crisp. I like it well enough, but it might be a bit too precise as it is. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: With an intro hook that evokes Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For” and a rather gormless steel drum sweetening the EDM clichés, it’s up to the singer to embody this sisterly valentine, and she kinda does; sneaking those lyrics into Eurodisco is a conceptual coup. 
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Had you told me before listening to this that it’s a Euro-dance number anchored by an accordion line, I would have been biting my lip in anticipation of something horrible. But Studio Killers make this work! I’m mostly surprised at how high the stakes are — it’s not just about locking down a lover, it’s about convincing a friend (one’s best friend!) to risk everything for romance — but also how that damn accordion actually makes it all the more dramatic.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Starts by gaslighting, then pivots to low-key terrorism. It’s wonderful. Dig how the singer disassembles her friendship and reconstructs it on the highway to Dude Town. Dig the whispers of Jenny-Jenny-Jenny; someone’s going to have a long weekend. The accordion riff — overused, so I’d thought — becomes downright piratical. When it’s combined with the steel drums, it’s breathtaking. There’s power in this play, but there’s also desperation.
[9]

Scott Mildenhall: If you put together the accordion strains of The Wanted’s “I Found You” with the strains for accord in Jason Derulo’s “The Other Side” you should have a very good song; instead you get Inna’s “More Than Friends”, just about satisfying but little more. Studio Killers, the cartoon band behind one of 2011’s very best singles, introduce steel pans, and finally the equation is complete. Almost. They’ve a blinded destructiveness — “I wanna ruin our friendship” — to go along with their ebullience and wist, and the dimension added with the presumption that preferences are prohibiting just poses the question: why is the imposition of gendered boundaries such an untapped resource in pop?
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: Actual score may vary from 0 to 5 to 10 depending on time of day, mood of listener and level of lager inebriation. None more Dutch.
[6]

From Angela, our second catch-up to Kelela…

[Video][Website]
[6.78]Zach Lyon: Hey, this was my second choice for Amnesty so here’s me eating my cake. “Bank Head” is still the only song on Cut 4 Me that I really love, but it might be because it’s the only one I’ve listened to on headphones. This is a lie-in-your-bed-in-the-dark-and-listen-with-headphones-on-repeat song, like so many, and it only took me one listen to decontextualize it out of “dance” and “R&B” and “pop” to realize it — not to say that those aren’t great headphones-in-the-dark genres, they just don’t usually require it. I only need two hooks: the chipmunk line that comes in surprisingly late in the game (in the full cut, at least) with good reason (it’d sound so tacky otherwise!) and the landmine note in the starting/background melody. That ugly, flat note that disrupts the whole song before it even starts and then gets pounded into the foundation. These disparates harmonize and then there’s guest Kelela, whose vocals might sound nuts a capella, who instead meshes so well with the high end and the low end that she comes off subtle.
[10]

Angela O.: Equal props to Kingdom and Kelela for the end product here. The song feels alive — the lyrics come from that deep, dark place that we’re most scared to show to others, and the beat mimics the heart palpitations that happen when your fear of opening up is fighting with the urgent need to do exactly that. I love the point where the song hesitates — as if it’s debating whether it’s going to reveal all or maintain the status quo – and then lets loose completely immediately after. The three-word summary is “soulful club banger” – a.k.a the only music I’ll ever need.
[10]

Will Adams: The artist most recommended to me this year on the grounds that they were “right up my alley” was Kelela (if you must know, the second-most was Lorde). That I’ve been so ambivalent toward her puzzles me; what am I portraying in my musical choices that suggests I would love this? “Bank Head” solves nothing. It meanders, spitting out dark drums that don’t knock as hard as they should, while Kelela follows suit. It’s pretty, but that’s it.
[4]

David Turner: This is Kelela’s first year of success. A Best New Music designation, stellar live performances and being championed by Solange Knowles: short of being on a Drake or Kanye album, those are pretty solid markers of having made it. But I gotta be the hater throwing shade again. A nice voice, a barely-there persona and lacking production is not music worth championing, or worth even getting mildly excited about. But Kelela, keep shining like a lamp, because I’ll happily be wrong when you make that winning single.
[3]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Surges along with a tinge of faint danger in Kingdom’s prog-trance main synth, barely moving until the bridge — “it’s all I dreamed of,” Kelela repeats over and over, the drums turning into claps and disembodied vocal snatches, something like being stuck in freefall. The beat drops, but the vibe is the same throughout “Bank Head” — it’s impressive how little Kingdom’s production changes its movements beyond slight wriggles. Kelela doesn’t just add texture, she keeps this beat on its feet. It’s accommodating for her, rather than the other way around.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Smooth and layered, almost sweet as a trifle but more complicated, but once you hear the lyrics or fully absorb that voice, it becomes completely lethal. Extra point for the oblique and hidden/esoteric reading of Whitney.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Click click click, occasional boom, falsetto all over the place. For almost five minutes this collaboration takes root and won’t metamorphose into anything other than it is. Wearisome but impressive.
[5]

Brad Shoup: You never want to get outpointed by your vocal squiggle. Kingdom sets his drumrolls on each other’s heels, practically daring a collision. They add froth to the track; Kelela is heavy cream, spending so much time navigating the melody through her lower register it almost reads like an avant-garde play. Still, those handclaps sound awful impatient…
[5]

Mallory O’Donnell: Post-rave rhythm and blues positively bleeding with atmosphere. All the elements are balanced and correct, all the levels check. Almost too perfect. Rarely do a relatively unmodified vocal and an electronic backing track fit this sweetly and severely together. And if you liked this, there are at least five other songs on the Saint Heron album that are even better.
[7]

From reader Allen, a Japanese dance track…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]Allen Huang: “I Feel Coke” was a watershed sloganeering success in the mid-80’s, welding with three English words the boom of the bubble economy with the syrupy sweetness of Coca-Cola. A big part of this success was slogan’s jingle, a transcendent City Pop masterpiece employing the tropes of the genre to their maximal, capitalist effect. The song instilled the semblance of emotion — “I Feel” being the active words — into a thorough concept. And, with the passage of time, the song has become genuine, tinged with the nostalgia of its time more so than the thirst for a beverage. In the same way, Seiho’s “I Feel Rave” is a slogan, a unifying cheer for this new wave of Japanese producers. Though it’s his most conventional composition by far, “I Feel Rave” transcends its relative simplicity by being unabashedly, genuinely triumphant (the water “drop” sonic pun never fails to put a smile on my face). In a medium rife with compartmentalized presets and pre-optimized software, Seiho and his comrades continue to “feel” and continue to ensure their music does as well. One hopes in twenty years, kids will nostalgically bumping “I Feel Rave” while watching montages of well-dressed millennials having a cheesy good time.
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Kat Stevens: I should know by now not to be gullibled into listening to unremarkable songs because of their amazing titles.
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Alfred Soto: I played with keyboard presets in 1986 too.
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Iain Mew: Is the big build up to the sound of a watery splish meant as an aural pun on the word “drop”? Between that and the suspicion that sped up vocals really want to go into space, man, “I Feel Rave” has a touch too much of the prankster about it for me to really feel anything but lightly amused.
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Patrick St. Michel: I pretty much stopped dancing this year. Whether it’s because I’ve gotten old and boring, none of the live music I heard was particularly aimed at my feet or I just got self-conscious, I could only muster some awkward white-boy bobbing when seeing Disclosure live — and I loved that set. I am lame as heck going into 2014… but I did have one last hurrah. I’m going to put my biases out here — I think Seiho is one of the best and most important artists in Japan right now, and I’ve been following him since 2011, when I lived in Osaka. I’ve seen him play all over the country at this point, and I’ve interviewed him before. This year, Seiho and a bunch of artists on his record label were invited to play this big dance event in Tokyo. They weren’t on the huge stage reserved for like, Boyz Noize, or anything, but they got a decent little side stage all their own. It was fun! Seiho himself played last, really late at night, and his set drew out a bunch of other musicians and writers and people I know. And it was a fantastic set, the best I’ve ever seen from him. He ended with “I Feel Rave,” and it was ecstatic. Everyone recognized those opening vocal skips, and once the beat fell in everyone…including me…really started moving. Everything felt so united and friendly, and everyone was so happy…I don’t know how you sing along to the voice on this song, but we did. And right after that bubble-sound popped and the music rushed back in — we went fucking wild. I haven’t really danced since then, and maybe that’s because nothing since has given me the warm feeling “I Feel Rave” still does.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: A touch more sluggish than I’d like it to be but fascinating all the same, a collection of online bass music tropes amalgamated into three minutes. Seiho presents: weirdo Tumblr-kid ethereality, seapunk (a water drop as percussion!), neon-streaked EDM builds’n’drops, cut’n’pasted fantasy-scaping vocal samples. “I Feel Rave” places itself within the ongoing minimalism/maximalism debate on the path of dance music, explicitly calling back to rave culture whilst pushing that very term into wifi-heavy information overload. And finally, the elasticity of online identity in a year of Catfishing: the artist’s Japanese origin shows us the internet’s worldwide spread of musical trends and innovation, although his mononymous handle lends him a certain glimmer of online mystery.
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David Turner: “I Feel Rave” is a [10] name. What more could I ask from life, but to feel rave? To get the rush of being at a 2am concert where the combination of neon lights and clothes might make me wish it was 1993. But this isn’t very rave. Needs more rave. More energy. More everything. If you want to feel rave, click the video and listen to one of the dozen hour long nightcore mixes that are recommend.
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Brad Shoup: These sorts of transformations tend toward a nimble product, but Seiho’s fashioned a sluggish hulk. The higher and lower voices do a Tweedle-do-si-do, awkwardly carving competing trajectories. Sped up, you could maybe produce a rave. Here, it’s a hammy wink.
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Scott Mildenhall: At various points the vocals on “I Feel Rave” converge to sound like they’re saying “I feel puke.” A subtle tribute to the coexistence of dizzying highs and dizzied lows in the something or other et cetera? Or just an indication that the real fun to be had with this song lies in trying to work out what they’re actually saying? He-Man! Email! And the bit where they respond emphatically to Noel Edmonds’ relaying of a generous offer from the banker. The higher-pitched of the two strongly recalls Scooter, and accordingly reminds that while all this skittering can be alright, their version of rave is so much more.
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Mallory O’Donnell: In a more enlightened world, in a more enlightened DJ bag, this exists right alongside “I Feel Love” and “I Feel Space.” In the world we actually live in, somebody is gonna take a lot of mushrooms and throw up on her girlfriend. Somewhere in the middle, Trevor Horn eats his heart out.
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Will Adams: Those synth washes! Those chopped vocals, strung together in that melody! It’s not so much for raving but slowly rocking back and forth, wrapped in the arms of someone — a long-time friend, your lover, or whoever you just met at this festival. It gets away with its deceptive title by being so gorgeous.
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Katherine St Asaph: The problem is exactly what you think it is: there is already a very good song of a similar title, which makes you feel both love and rave, and this isn’t that.
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