InB4 collaborations with Son Ribs, Son Tennis Court, and Son White Teeth Teens…

[Video][Website]
[6.56]Patrick St. Michel: Considering this is a “reimagined” version of a song from Son Lux’s last album, it is mighty tempting to see this as a clever bid at expanded attention given who comes after the “ft.” here. Somehow, though, Lorde manages to make this update even more unsettling than the original, her more direct, monotone delivery out-goosebumping the original’s more generic swirled vocal version. She fits in wonderfully among the horn blasts and twisting structure.
[7]

Brad Shoup: The original was performed as desiccated cabaret; the addition of Lorde evokes the image of a swamp monster, slowly roused. Those wheedly pings get doubled with fingersnaps, and they become stars blinking out. But the biggest bang comes after a fumbled false ending: prog ascension erupting into blackout shredding. It has almost nothing to do with the text, or Lorde, or even the concept of relative difficulty. But it’s fun.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Have you heard Neneh Cherry’s Blank Project? This track has similar percussive manipulations, garnished with mid ’90s Mitchell Froomisms like horn honks. The best tracks on her debut showed Lorde comfortable as found sound; here she burnishes her cred.
[7]

Iain Mew: Son Lux gets the potential in Lorde’s voice for creeping unease, and from there he does make it sound easy, setting up the space for every sqwark and sad whistle to sink in deep before a deliciously dark blast of noise to make explicit the doom it was all headed towards.
[8]

Rebecca A. Gowns: It’s lovely to hear Lorde’s voice being put to good use. Her timbre is husky, yet also paper-thin; it doesn’t have the ethereal nature of Dolores O’Riordan, nor the power of someone like Fiona Apple (i.e., more mature voices and suggestions of Lorde’s own possibilities). Yet, as it is now, it’s got a good lazy way about it, which is refreshing to hear, at least, in this age of hyper-production and precise coaching. Give that voice some simple lyrics to float, and back it with the more sophisticated production capabilities of Son Lux, and it’s a dream — I feel like I’ve been transported from the eye-rolling diary entries of “Royals” and “Team” into a lush netherworld swamp. Here’s hoping that Lorde will discover more magical environments for her voice to travel to after this one.
[9]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Lorde has a Grammy now and photobombs Taylor Swift’s instagram these days, which is a roundabout way to say that she is a successful pop star. What is forgotten after hearing and puzzling over and debating “Royals” the first few thousand times is just how stark it is — a skeletal teenage sneer that aligns financial emptiness with sonic emptiness. It echoes where others rattle, an unusual sound on Billboard. Son Lux is a collaborator to practitioners of just-off artistry: genre filmmaker Rian Johnson, the avant-rap label Anticon, geographical freak-folky Sufjan Stevens. Lorde snuggles amongst these collaborators with her performance on “Easy”, a mumbled chillout track performed like an uneasy howl. It overstays its welcome, but as feel-bad background music it does its work. As another act in Lorde’s upending of pop star convention, it’s pretty damn interesting.
[6]

Anthony Easton: The jazz noise this is brewing hasn’t been avant since Ayler in the ’70s, but it is a beautiful example of that kind of racket. Lorde has decided her voice is not having a voice, pushing through the avatar until it explodes into an ingratiating strangeness, layering the rest of the music into something genuinely ambitious. I am excited for her next move.
[8]

Megan Harrington: During U2’s Boy tour, the band would frequently encore with songs they’d already played in their setlist, a gesture likely born of a combination of limited catalog and keen narcissism. The last minute of “Easy (Switch Screens)” is an encore of the previous three minutes. It’s one thing to regurgitate in front of an audience cheering for more. It’s another entirely to elaborate on a song composed of loops with — oh, another loop.
[3]

Will Adams: The horn stabs fill the space created by the clattering drums, and the wheezing organ rounds out the dank atmosphere. It’s a beautiful backdrop for Lorde’s croak, suggesting not a what-could-have-been had her snappier beats not been eaten up; rather, it promises a darker tone for future work. However, the song doesn’t cover much ground, lumbering for too long until stumbling into its amazing ending.
[6]

We will name him George, and hug him, and pet him, and squeeze him…

[Video][Website]
[6.29]

Brad Shoup: I was hanging at a friend’s house yesterday evening, and we got to talking about the disappearance of sweaty alt-rock/grunge from the cultural consciousness. My host did some time in the Midwest emo/indie scene before the turn of the century, and still it didn’t occur to me to talk about the undercurrent of pop-punk, punk rock, and hardcore that outlasted its lauded big brother. “Bones Exposed” has the hammer-ons and the harmonics, the scorched-earth approach to breakups and vocal cords. It nods to the clatter of death metal. Austin Carlile leans on his heels for a half-time pop-style chorus. There’s even a crappy orchestral imitation that cheaper bands will deign to. It’s still remarkably twerpy, though, like a meathead with a baby face.
[7]

Megan Harrington: It’s my opinion that when rock returns to the mainstream it will be in the form of metal. These riffs are standard issue, the opening chord progression particularly could come from any of Pearl Jam’s more hard rock tracks (though I am thinking of “Blood,” specifically) and the straight-sung chorus is trademark Linkin Park. That leaves the double-time drums and the scream-sung verses as the only acquired tastes and they might hold increasing appeal for the character central to one sort of Great American Novel.
[7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Once upon a time, crossover thrash and hardcore became sharper edged and more attuned to metallic sensibilities. By the late noughties, the atonal cross-genre meddling from bands like Integrity and Shai Hulud led to a rediscovery of melodic Swedish death metal, and melodic metalcore became A Thing. Metal Hammer coined a term for the most commercially successful acts playing this strain of metalcore: the New Wave of American Heavy Metal. (Before you ask, metalcore is a separate thing from melodic hardcore, and yes it’s always been this confusing.) By the end of the noughties, the melodic chorus/Eurometal riff/open-string breakdown formula was running dry, and the shakily-assembled musical movement had witnessed its commercial peak. Of Mice & Men are a throwback to the mid-noughties metalcore bands that kept labels like Ferret and Solid State flush in zip-up hoodie revenue: paint-by-numbers, no surprises, a systematic mosh device. We’ve been here before. That’s okay — everyone needs their soundtrack to punching walls. It’s a shame that it’s just so boring.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: Hardcore taught me to love screaming and Flocka taught me to love a big dumb riff, and “Bones Exposed” is proper fuck-the-club-up music. This is pretty new for me; I read Steinbeck as a teenager, which means I preferred Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to The Great Southern Trendkill. (That’s one way to narrativize it, anyway.) Thank god I’m an adult now and can understand how much fun tantrums are. Still, I remember my days as a punk kid, and those great scene godfathers Blink-182 always made such fun of the heavy-metallers. Maybe that’s why I’d like this even more if it were thirty seconds shorter.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I love how expansive and aggressive this is. Though there is a small amount of melodic vocals, the guitars just incinerate it. Actually, a little worried about his voice with the scream/growl. 
[8]

Josh Langhoff: “A CUT CANNOT HEAL UNLESS YOU LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!” We need more momcore! Just imagine the extreme renditions of “YOUR FACE WILL FREEZE LIKE THAT!!!!” or “MY EARS CAN’T HEAR THAT WHINY VOICE!!!!” The latter unfortunately proves untrue during the chorus of “Bones Exposed,” in which Man reflects passive-aggressively on broken-togetherness, almost like Casting Crowns’ more sincere take in “Broken Together.” (OMAM seems like one of those bands that aren’t Christian but lots of people wonder whether they are.) Nice procession of riffs, and I like how Mouse keeps roaring behind Man’s caterwauling, but ultimately THIS IS NOT REALLY SOMETHING I NEED TO HEAR AGAIN!!!!
[5]

Alfred Soto: It stutters and sputters and spits and starts at key moments, the guitars kamikazing off the vocalist’s cliff. When it ended, I wasn’t sure what I’d heard.
[6]

Spring? Must be time for another syrupy sakura song…

[Video][Website]
[6.78]

David Sheffieck: Slowed down by about 20 per cent, this would be a great pop song. As is, it’s the sonic equivalent of an energy drink: absolutely the most brilliant idea, as long as you’re willing to forget about the inevitable crash.
[7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Sakura Appareishon” is not the most manic that Dempagumi.inc have sounded so far. This lacks the cocaine boost sonics that made last year’s “WWD II” such a gonzo delight, sticking for the most part to Technicolor synth patterns. Where “WWD II” barrelled through ideas with air-punch determination, “Sakura” feels comparatively level-headed, rooted in the everyday. This works for the song’s graduation theme — it’s hard to be bittersweet about the future when you’re zigzagging and frantic.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: The last Dempagumi.inc song the Jukebox covered went for overload and ended up something interesting: loud, fast and surprising throughout. In reining that in slightly, “Sakura Apparition” just seems to go on a bit. The twists are no way near as exhilarating, nor unexpected. In something less in-your-face, they actually have something more tiring.
[5]

Tara Hillegeist: DPG barely hide their desperate need to be liked and showered with attention behind their aggressive vocal-emoticon barrage, their deluge of fumbly grammar and the blatant falsity of their cutesy elements. The trick is how this slimy, often unnerving, fake nakedness more accurately displays the experience of living with acute social anxiety — delivered, as the biographical pitch will tell you, by former shut-ins united in their dreams of popcult domination — than any other to its intended audience. They expect to be dissected from the microscopic level upwards, and position themselves facing the world with an obviously performed naiveté towards self-display. It would be wrong to assume sincerity comes from the places it normally comes from, with a mind towards art that functions like that. A more insecure, they-like-us-they-really-like-us?? take on “Young Alien Types“? I’d say it runs closer to “Genocidal.” This is fake as hell; if cuteness could linger like a hungry ghost, it would be maybe half as inescapable.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: “Sakura Apparition” is a clever bit of two-way marketing. As Dempagumi.inc have attracted just enough attention outside Japan to make money signs flash in management’s eyes, it serves as an international introduction — they spell out who they are (literally), shout out homebase Akihabara and cover a lot of spiritual bases by singing “God, Buddha and Mr. Rabbit.” Domestically, it’s a seasonally appropriate “sakura song,” typically a song released to coincide with kids graduating from school and people changing jobs. Those cash-ins, though, are usually drippy and depressing ballads. Dempagumi have no time for that — whether its because they all allegedly come from typically nerdy backgrounds (one member saying she was a hikikomori) or just because being needlessly sad stinks, they zip all over the place here. Whereas other J-pop acts practically scream I AM SERIOUS, they are playful — imitating grocery store clerks, shouting out “justice!”, or taking a break midway through to pretend it’s summer festival season. “A nonsensical documentary/that’s the fantasy we grasp at,” captures it well, though not quite as solidly as the constant invocation to “dance.” And here, they spin away from the idea that the best times have already passed, instead throwing caution to the wind and embracing ambition (this is the first Japanese song since “Invader Invader” to be so determined in itself). What Dempagumi sells here for everyone is the idea tomorrow can bring personal happiness: “I’ll brighten up your future, it’s a cinch!” Don’t mind if I do.
[9]

Iain Mew: The translated lyric reads amusing, affirming, and heartbreaking, but for all of its million musical ideas the song bogs down the feeling more often than it makes it soar. I’m not used to this kind of multi-movement song sounding both so comparatively slow and so restrained at the same time. It’s ear-catchingly unusual, but it’s a peculiar approach that leaves the group’s voices all too exposed.
[4]

Anthony Easton: I wonder if Dempa does wellish among the North American geek circuit because it’s self-conscious, heavily mechanized oddness is the kind of orientalist weird-for-weird-sake that people who think they like Japanese culture claim for their own. Sort of like this SNL skit. It does force the question, what is J-Pop now?
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: The way Dempagumi.inc’s voices interact — overlapping, interrupting DANCE DANCE DANCE Is the onslaught of national and regional motifs — “Japan,” “Nippon,” interjecting, reinforcing — reminds me of early hip-hop, Run-D.M.C. perhaps, or Beastie Boys, where OH MY GOSH, time for a key change! “Yamato,” “Akihabara” — an example of enthusiastic patriotism or mere branding? the vocal components combined to create a unified whole that was precision-crafted to sound effortless, and, PANTSU PANTSU PANTSU in this case, completely chaotic. time for another key change? Except this really is chaotic, barely hanging together, yet that’s why it can break into a video game interlude because why the hell KEY CHANGE! not? And fizzing from the freneticism is this marvellous sense of hope and joy bye bye! like we really might — Dempa, and me, too — be ready for whatever the future SAYONARA! will bring. HAI! HAI! boardthisship, don’teverforgetus.
[9]

Brad Shoup: It’s in the air, I guess, but the word that comes to mind is “athletic.” Hearing the churning percussion and bear-down disco beat, the singers’ Chris Pauline navigation of a complex, bunched melody line, and the sideways tonality of the bridge, I can only imagine the drills in practice. And yes, it holds together as a pop tune, pushing forward with nary a wasted step.
[8]

In our inaugural podcast, we talk #SELFIE, Soko, Shakira, Iggy Azalea, Eurovision 2014 and Young Thug. Your hosts are Jonathan Bradley, Megan Harrington and Edward Okulicz, with Abby Waysdorf.

Download it here  (MP3, 0:46:58, 19.0 Mb)

A higher quality version (MP3, 53.75 Mb) can be downloaded from the following mirror: [Sendspace]
Here’s what we played and talked about

We cram sexy down your throat!

[Video][Website]
[5.71]

Anthony Easton: The whistle that starts this introduces a level of excitement that is hinted at but not delivered at by the rest of the song. The carnival ramps only half way, whispering if you want to go faster. Lopez’s verses roll a hip, but fail to shake the ass. Martin’s voice suggests some previous heat, but is now just lukewarm. All of this adds up to a stew that just fails to congeal. I am disappointed. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Why these loudmouths get the lines and energy is beyond me — the lines barely scan anyway. Not like Jennifer Lopez shows much charisma; she still sings like she pressed the “affectless” preset on a Casio.
[3]

Megan Harrington: I am so relieved to find that in the stylish post-apocalyptic dystopia of “Adrenalina” catchiness is still at a pop premium. 
[8]

Brad Shoup: The guitars are so tiny, I don’t know why they’re here. But I’m digressing from those Bahian drums, promising import only partially fulfilled. Wisin’s vocal doubling — let alone those sections where Lopez piles on — adds resonance, and Martin’s getting a head start on his inevitable yet still inexplicable creaky wisdom phase. Really, it’s all transporting except for Wisin’s rap. Don’t run from Lopez!
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: As promised, three minutes of pure adrenaline burst. Sadly, the track lasts four.
[6]

Mallory O’Donnell: Wisin’s served up something a bit more rhythmically compelling than your average crossover banger, with lots of good bits that get lost in the too-rapid shuffle of the tracks’ many interesting parts.  J. Lo and Ri. Ma add nothing to the party but the stiff whiff of obsolescence. 
[4]

Edward Okulicz: It’s “The Cup of Life” rebooted for 2014! Brazil, here we come! Wait, it’s not? It should be! Wisin’s syllables spray everywhere like the’ve come out of a busted food processor. J.Lo’s tastes-like-chicken vocal was born for this kind of anonymous hook singing, I’ve kind of missed that in-hindsight super-brief period when Ricky Martin was going to be the biggest pop star in decades, though that might not survive more exposure than he has on this. There’s a Spanglish version because Americans prefer total nonsense using words they know (that’s not what adrenaline is, you guys). It’s a headache because it’s a party and everyone on the planet is invited and they’re all bashing on drums. Fun seldom sounds this oppressive, but it just about works.
[6]

Rich, plummy, elegant. Pass that Merlot.

[Video][Website]
[7.17]

Brad Shoup: I’d like more people to own up to just crushes. It’s not always love, sure, BUT. Anyway, the keys try their best to anchor MNEK, but the projection is powerful and pretty, flipping through negations so quickly that whatever situation he’s trying to depict becomes an existential fog. In a great way, mind.
[8]

Alfred Soto: MNEK’s rich, plummy tone recalls Luther Vandross, and like the greatest R&B balladeer of the last thirty years he’s got an erratic song sense. But what “Don’t Call This Love” lacks in crinkles it compensates in sound: the snaps, the full-bodied keyboard, MNEK himself.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The snaps are out of this world, and the call to false love works through the eros/agape split in ways that seem genuinely new. The novelty may come from his rich, understated elegant voice. 
[9]

Megan Harrington: I deeply despise the electronic fingersnap beat — I can tell we’re not supposed to immediately identify it as synthetic but it’s basically as bad as using the Garageband metronome for percussion. Call me crazy, but this could use the Lanois touch! MNEK is more than halfway there on his own, isolating his voice so it sounds like it’s ringing out in an empty room and using only a soft, sparse, and sterile keyboard arrangement for elaboration. Lanois would add live drums. 
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: One of the great things about MNEK is that there’s every chance he’ll realise this shares a title with Leon Jackson’s better-than-it-seemed bid for Bublédom. He seems to have a strong interest in all kinds of pop music, reflected in an adeptness at so many sounds and styles, underpinned by a voice that might even eclipse Jackson’s. This is sadly more Voice than X Factor, but that he can make even that so compelling is emblematic of his talents.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: The song’s so clear about what this isn’t while fuzzy enough about what it is that it could be any kind of romantic entanglement, ill-advised or otherwise. But if the music reeks of Love Song Dedications, MNEK’s voice gives the song more than a hint of palpable doom that would rule it out of being something to request for your girlfriend on Valentines’. Unless you’re the sort of person who might hide a swarm of bees inside the dozen roses, of course.
[7]

But she sure can nod towards the past.

[Video][Website]
[7.33]

Alfred Soto: Borrowing a melody from “Dilemma” but given a twist in the Mary J. Blige “Be Without You” shaker, “Can’t Raise a Man” limns a familiar situation: impatience with the asshole boyfriend whom she can’t leave. But Michelle can’t sing a lyric without embodying it — without bodying it. Straightforward, devastatingly so.
[7]

David Sheffieck: I love the way this manages to feature K Michelle telling the listener what to do with her boyfriend yet never comes off as condescending or shaming – two pitfalls that seem so easy to fall into here. And while the production could maybe stand to push things into more interesting territory, Michelle’s voice is captivating enough to carry the song itself.
[8]

Jessica Doyle: The only line that rings false to me is “every day he’s a different dude,” as my experience with such men — similar in content if not in style — is that he remains distressingly similar from one day to the next, one month to the next, one loan conveniently forgotten or defensively put off (why are you being so difficult?) to the next, and the race is whether he can get your expectations low enough, bit by filed-off, silent-treatment bit, before your patience runs out. As for the rest of it — my daughters are both under age 5; if I start playing this for them now will they absorb the message in time?
[7]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Like “VSOP,” K Michelle’s production team digs into a hit via a classic (Nelly via Patti LaBelle). Also like VSOP, I’m a total sucker for it. The “ah-ah-ah-ah” refrain is the only bit of weakness, like a temporary filler they forgot to replace with something more professional. The rest of it is total head-bobbing arm-waving melismatic-belting fun.
[8]

Brad Shoup: In retrospect, it was no “Dilemma” at all, really.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: This song’s glib, and I won’t comment on the helpfulness of its advice, but K Michelle sounds like she’s giving it to you from a place of hard-won wisdom. And really, just as I’ve heard the odd woman I know talk about a relationship fixer-upper, this is nicely timed. Weirdly, the next time I’m in front of a campfire, I kind of want to sing that chorus as a call-and-response thing.
[8]

Our Sound of 2020 roundup continues with some rock progeny…

[Video]
[4.75]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Killers covering U2 with shades of Thom Yorke in the vocals: it’s harmless. The titular imagery gets at the song’s impenetrability — it’s so banal that it becomes impossible to care about anything being sung. Most exciting is the notion that people find Inhaler’s singer to look like Chalamet or Healy. What are their thoughts when they learn he’s Bono’s son?
[5]

Ian Mathers: I was just going to make a joke about how this wasn’t my preferred direction for them after Pablo Honey and then I noticed this is Bono’s kid, and now for the very first time (even though I’ve seen others make the comparison before) I can actually hear the midpoint between early Thom Yorke and early Bono, and now this song feels cursed to me.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: I assume Inhaler understand by this point that if you put Bono’s son up front as your singer, he’s gonna get compared to his father. And you can definitely hear some of Bono in Elijah Hewson; he’s also got a little Jim Kerr to his voice, and, in fact, “Ice Cream Sundae” has some Simple Minds (pre-Breakfast Club) in its DNA. Unfortunately, there’s some Coldplay in there as well, and like a lot of Coldplay, the primary problem with “Sundae” is that it just kind of sits there, with no propulsion. It’s perfectly fine, but nothing about this makes me want to return to it.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Keane covering Kid Cudi is definitely a move. This is so big and cheery, like synthesized sunshine pop. Occasionally — as a display of difficulty — they add some digital scramble before bursting through it. Not sure we needed that; even the relatively plodding verses show control.
[6]

Tim de Reuse: The Killers, but significantly younger. The Killers, but all feathery and manicured and with a vocalist who sacrifices their party-hard energy for a distinct-but-unoffensive delivery. The Killers, but with fancy packaging and fewer calories.
[5]

Iain Mew: “Easy as an ice cream slipping out of your hand into the dirt” — vivid and relateable imagery. “Easy as an ice cream sundae” — sure, I guess, for how it scans, to be more extra, and maybe for some kind of easy like sundae morning resonance.  “Easy as an ice cream sundae slipping out of your hand into the dirt” — ???. To me ice cream sundae immediately suggests a glass and a spoon and sitting down to eat, and research seems to concur. Who is holding that above the dirt? Inhaler’s central simile is broken and misshapen. Like their choice of a frozen version of the sound of 2005, I guess it was an honest mistake.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: There is already much to unpick in the quote “there was a lot of music from Manchester in the ’90s, and the whole Britpop and Oasis thing. Every kid who’s 16 and sees that goes, ‘I want to be in a band’”, before it is even attributed to the son of Bono. Maybe if Noel Gallagher hadn’t written a song called “Live Forever,” the world wouldn’t be in this position, but he did, and those youths who valiantly eschew Aitch for RKID still have an outlet and, quite often, a record deal. Effectively, when Tony Blair invited Noel to Downing Street (along with half the Chipping Norton set) recursion was ensured; hence this being a thinly disguised Blossoms song, which is no bad thing.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Getting serious over synth-pomp about sundaes is some serious drive-thru-postal shit. 
[3]

And we’re just as happy as they are…

[Video]
[6.17]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: “Early” sounds anonymous, like music for mornings spent lounging in living rooms; Jafaris exudes the effortless nonchalance of Noname, Crookes sounds like an actual no name. They sing with little desire to sound convincing, but it’s fine: their contrasting vocal rhythms tell enough of the story, and their romance will move at a pace they find comfortable.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The arrangement sounds early. Quiet piano daubs, rustling snare hits. Percy and Crooksie’s cadences are jittery and foggy, their tones nervous and hushed. Possibly they’re each on their second cup. Things start to swell toward the end; strings achieve a properly romantic size. Then the wave breaks.
[7]

Ian Mathers: Wow, the production here somehow feels like it earns that slow bloom/blush/flourish into lush gorgeousness during the last minute here; the rest of the song is good but that coda where everything melts around the repeated, glowingly joyful “I can’t believe it” is worth waiting twice as long for.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: A subtle, lightly bouncy track whose production, like a stone going downhill, gets bigger as it approaches each chorus. Crookes has a nicely airy voice and Jafaris provides a solid rap, and weirdly, this feels like trip-hop. Is it time for the Morcheeba revival?
[5]

Joshua Lu: The relationship being sung about here is supposed to be in its early stages, but the casual bickering that goes on between Joy Crookes and Jafaris gives off the impression that this is a bond that’s been fostered for a long time. They’ve given up much to be with each other, they’re ride-or-die for each other, they can’t believe they’re with each other. This all seems deliberate — they do seem like they’ve fallen for each other too early — but the further this affection is pushed, the more facetious it comes across, and I don’t know if I can believe it either.
[5]

Alfred Soto: I’m all in for “feckless” in pop songs that burble like Billie Eilish in a cool mountain stream. Keep burblin’. 
[6]

But we’re feeling moderately okay with some Eurodance!

[Video][Website]
[6.12]

Anthony Easton: Such pure Francophone cheese, it makes me forgot how much I hate Montreal in the middle of election season, even if she is from New Brunswick-cum-Ottawa. It’s also good to know that Ottawa sleaze doesn’t need to be bureaucratic. 
[7]

Alfred Soto: The electronic gypsy hook — violin filtered through Nicki French sequencers — is the year’s most striking, and I especially love how Martina sounds like she says “abattoir” at one point.
[7]

Megan Harrington: This is, in every way, a jersey dress sold at Forever 21. With sequins, but not in an allover pattern. I was set to send a get well soon card to Canada, but after nine or so more listens I realized “Danse” was subverting my every expectation. The opening French refrain (“I want to dance with you again”) repeats a full bar later than I’m conditioned to hear it, there’s a little synthesized accordion bit that is completely at odds with the otherwise strictly by the book EDM, and Mia Martina is (and I say this appreciatively) a Kesha level singer. This dress is so you and it’s only $12.95. 
[8]

Brad Shoup: Mia’s still a wisp, even when the track is a bit more insistent. Dev’s caught what she has; I recall her saying “husby” and “Rio Grande,” and that’s it. This is probably more of a historical curiosity: future musicologists may mark this as the moment the saxophone-hook tank was finally drained.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: I’ve never been one for accordion-tinged Europop (even when it’s not European), which has irked me ever since the days of In-Grid, but it turns out that a bit of cheek/chic kitsch and it can be pretty catchy. It helps that it leans on other tricks — the piano, the trancey breakdown before the chorus, the adorable insertion of French.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Technically dated — “Mr. Saxobeat” via “Where Have You Been” via “Lady Marmalade” and related Francesploitation — but there’s so much, too much going on: Dev’s crinkly-conversational voice a foil to crinkly-processed Martina, synth accordion and synth sax stabs and synth piano, about four styles of vocal adlibs. It’s charming in the way dutiful radio hits often are.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: This is curious: a Canadian singer seemingly so enamoured with Romanian dance-pop after covering “Stereo Love” that she enlisted two top Romanian producers for a couple of tracks on her album returns, sans any Romanian input but with the sound, or an approximation of it, intact. Dev’s already done similar, and better; Romania itself has tons of times, rarely as limp as this.
[5]

David Lee: An obvious mashup of “Calabria 2007” and “Danza Kuduro.” It’s the kind of music that I would enjoy if it were pouring out of a pizza place with its door propped open at 2am, serving as my temporary life soundtrack while I wait outside, in the heavy July air, for my friends to hail a cab. Disposable mood music that lingers until the queasy throb of tomorrow morning takes its place.
[5]