In which Becky solo dances.

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[6.43]

Crystal Leww: “Shower” grew so much on me last year, and by the end of the summer, I couldn’t avoid putting it on my summer playlists full of unbridled joy. Similarly, the effect of “Can’t Stop Dancing” is not immediate, but I just looked up and realized I’d been listening to it for half an hour. It’s a little too slow to be an immediate dance floor bop and not quite slinky enough to be for dark corners of the club, but “Can’t Stop Dancing” still sounds like glee that can’t be contained within a stationary body. Becky G plays the role of a girl who is not desperate, who is not charming, who is not even necessarily flirting. She is patient and simple, here to have a good time and maybe wait for the dude who is makes her heart march faster. This patience makes sense: her transition to pop star has been slow, and I like that there remains the slightest hints of urban influence still. The diet-rap “again now, spin around now” keeps this sounding unmistakably like her instead of any one of these girls who are trying to make something happen.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Isn’t this a little old for her? No, not that — New Age vocalise.
[3]

Mo Kim: She’s always been a girl in two worlds, fashioning her own space out of both. She begins as a 16-year-old girl from Inglewood, taking the work of one of her musical heroes and spinning it into her own generational tale of multicultural heritage and endless ambition. When she sings to the DJ to “play it again,” she’s in the streets, bringing together the sacred teenage tradition of driving down Los Angeles freeways with the faces and stories of her own community–not a hyphenated identity but fully Latino, fully American. Every song of hers celebrates the progress she has made: “From the back but we in the front now,” she raps on “Can’t Get Enough,” playing The Little Engine That Could against Pitbull with scraps of Spanish woven into her poised rhythmic escalation. Summer comes and so does she, proving that she can take even singing in the shower and make it something worthy of Fourth of July fireworks. And now we’re at “Can’t Stop Dancing,” another in a long line of impressive singles from this young woman. She has never sounded as in control as she does here: every chorus erupts into that indelible “Ay-ay-ay” hook, the percussion propelling everything around it forward. She sings for you not to let go of her, but we all know who’s really in control. She darts in between verses, doling out directions like she’s commanding this space. But the song’s crowning moment is the bridge, a hushed twelve bars where she dances around lush guitar strums and handclaps. This is a moment of congregation, every reference point converging in one quiet happy ending for the girl in two worlds. This is her coming-of-age. She has arrived.
[10]

Jonathan Bogart: The song was probably written with Rihanna in mind (no shame, so have many other songs, both better and worse) but her delivery of it, and the way the impacts that would be forceful under Rihanna’s steely direction are blunted here — the gauzy, loping beat, the smoky guitars, the ay-ay-ay-ay-ya-heys delivered with a warm smile rather than a Will-to-Party — push her firmly into Nelly Furtado territory.
[8]

Alfred Soto: It’s not “Shower,” but the lust and concentration still register, thanks to Dr. Luke’s use of discreet and discrete acoustic strums. “Your mind is going places I can feel” is right.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: Deliberately both specified to the tropical sensation, and ambiguous to the point that I’m not sure if you’re supposed to dance or fall to sleep to it (that’s not the bad thing). Becky seems purposeful here and engaged, but doesn’t seem interested to push the song. That one ridiculous trilling adlib showcases more joy than in a song about how somebody can’t stop dancing. It’s languishing here, and it seems a shame because these were all good elements.
[5]

Brad Shoup: When she says “spin around now,” that’s when the track shuddered into stillness. You probably knew that the Elle Varner track is more conducive than this grimacing dancehall pop.
[5]

Not so fond of quavering and wisps.

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[5.11]

Patrick St. Michel: I was expecting a radical reworking but…the end result is so slight as to be way more surprising than any bass-heavy freakout the Ultra Music association hints at. The only really notable change is that the beat has picked up a little and the vocals are a little muffled. Otherwise, it manages the exact same vibe as the original — a relaxing sunbeam of a song that does its job before whatever is scheduled next come on the radio. 
[5]

Mo Kim: I’m pretty sure I heard this song five years ago on a road trip. There was a booth at the rest stop where bootleg disco compilations were a dollar a piece.
[4]

Anthony Easton: The horns and handclaps are always welcome, and this is exquisite in its execution, but I was hoping for more noise and less twee precision. 
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: *holds up a sign from the bleachers* “EVEN IF THE CHEERLEADER IS COOL, YOU SUCK. AS A FAN OF AUTOTUNE I’M APPALLED AT HOW YOU USE IT TO DISTRACT FROM YOUR SINGING. PLUS, THIS WEIRD SOFT-ROCK EDM SHIT IS GROSS. IT SOUNDS LIKE TOTO. I BLAME DAFT PUNK FOR THIS TOO. I HOPE YOU PULL ALL THE ACLS IN THE WORLD. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.”
[1]

Scott Mildenhall: Wavery syllables are the delicate distinctions of a delicate piece, creating an almost fragmented melody in the chorus that lightly brushes against the open and unobtrusive beat. Jaehn has tweaked little to reach that gentle juxtaposition, but all that was needed for short-term indelibility.
[7]

Luisa Lopez: Like a little cloud rolling by and just as harmless. The joy of a simple song sometimes comes when it opens the door for a moment on all the other things it might have been, and here that’s when those horns lose themselves for a few measures in such rapidfire bliss that they turn into the verse.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: “Minimal coupé-decalé?!” was my first thought before reading up and learning it was a German remix of a two-year-old Jamaican pop-soul song. The original vocal is slightly more winsome if only because less digitally altered, and the original track is certainly more energetic and conventionally paced, with a sax solo right out of the mid-80s, but there’s something so attractive about all the empty space Jaehn leaves in the mix, the way he lets the horn wander out lonely over the beat, that puts me in mind of late-90s pomo-lounge acts like the Januaries.
[8]

Brad Shoup: A pop-punk topline delivered idly and contemplatively, with the trumpet to match. Shame that the rocksteady’s gone though. But what’s left is something more interior: the sound of someone happy looking over the nighttime ocean.
[8]

Will Adams: What a hack job. The bass and piano are playing different harmonic progressions, the mixing is unbalanced, and dance music is somehow rendered soporific.
[4]

Letdown!

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[5.20]

Mo Kim: I believe in music because I believe in its power to heal. With great power, though, comes the great responsibility of acknowledging that recovery is a hard fucking journey and “stay strong” means nothing when you say it with all the empty bravado of a script. “Fly” works because it draws strength from fragility instead. Maddie & Tae are the two friends sitting quietly by your side, grasping at the right words to fill raw wounds. Their harmonies soothe like a breeze on a bee sting, a band-aid tucked over a bruise; the band takes time with the familiar build from one guitar to an orchestra swelling in solidarity. This song has been done many times before, but it rarely soars like it does here.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Be suspicious of those who hailed “Girl in a Country Song” but have no time for this. Where Maddie and Tae’s last single was about girls in country songs — i.e. fictional characters — “Fly” is for girls in country towns, looking for solace from worse problems than chafing bikini tops, and more in need of big-sisterly ballads than industry parodies. Like early Taylor Swift, “Fly” is composed of hushed symbolism — the dirty dress, the heart a mess — whose meaning any girl older than 11 and younger than 18 grasps instantly. The melodic curve of the chorus is past familiar, way past cliche, and the run on “fly” no less familiar than it was the last time I heard it — but they take off and land lightly, without their radiomates’ Southern-bro bombast, and the high harmonies (see “lonely”) are genuinely pretty. I suppose you could stretch to find this cynical, but Maddie and Tae were girls not long ago, and amid so much actual cynicism reaching the sisters of the girls I grew up with, “Fly” comes off different: the theoretical girl-positivity of “Girl in a Country Song” put into heartfelt practice.
[7]

Luisa Lopez: It feels unfair to hound an artist with their first single when they’ve moved on, but the drop from “Girl in a Country Song” to “Fly” feels like a crack on the head. Not that kindness is somehow less meaningful than disdain, but kindness like this sounds empty, not even beige but off-color white, just a cluttered floor of easy sounds and things that were once a good idea.
[3]

Anthony Easton: I am disappointed at how generic this is, considering how witty and well-constructed their last hit was. I suspect “Girl in a Country Song” will be best thought of as a one-hit wonder. 
[3]

Alfred Soto: Poignant because it was true and hilarious, “Girl in a Country Song” capped an excellent eighteen months for female country singers. “Fly” leaves no stone unturned in its mission to be as conventional as possible, from its fiddle hook to title metaphor. Reba McEntire might have said no thanks.
[5]

Iain Mew: The instrumental fills do quite a bit of emotional work, even if they’re very close to Taylor Swift’s “Begin Again”. That comparison highlights all the problems though — “Begin Again” is full of specifics and storytelling; “Fly” has a neat metaphor, but nothing to give it any emotional stakes.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Much more thoughtful and clear-eyed than an inspirational country song called “Fly” might be expected to be, it still never quite gets off the ground.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: How you gonna fly when your song never bothers to get more than a few inches off the ground? “Glide”, “Hover”, “Drift”, “Sorta kinda go for it and just never get around to it, because who really cares, it’s just this song” are all more suitable titles. “Fly”? I don’t know, might be overselling it a step.
[2]

Edward Okulicz: Corny as anything, but Maddie & Tae infuse the song with enough lived-in aw-shucks country wisdom and youthful teen-pop earnestness to make it work. It’s a solid [6] elevated by care and believability.
[7]

Brad Shoup: I can’t stop hearing “Bleeding Love,” and it’s actually the sweetest part here. Turns out sometimes it’s not in the climb, it’s in the trudge.
[5]

Slinky!

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[6.38]Jonathan Bogart: The world needs more anti-party songs from people who could conceivably be the life of the party.
[8]

Mo Kim: As slinky as a nightgown. A$AP Ferg’s verse plays into a troubling dynamic of boy instructing girl, but this is so gorgeous that I’m still tempted to dance over the implications.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Boy, do I wish more songwriters wrote lines as straightforward as “I don’t really wanna dance and I hate most of these songs,” and A$AP’s massaging and attention sounds more affectionate as a result. God knows I can use more songs about men and women pissed off about not being home for sex time, with or without tongue-click percussion.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: While the beat is a nice slab of retro-funk with odd little tweaks on the instrumentation, isn’t it a little early for Elle to deploy this kind of single? I mean, if she wants to get hit with the Chrisette Michele curse of “I am going to be hexed into doing hooks for The Roots in order to pay the bills ’til the end of my days” then go for it. Also, Dee Ferg re-emerges with Kendrick’s flow (courtesy of Rent-A-Center) and more “REMEMBER THE 90s” memes.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: “We coulda stayed home and watched Martin,” A$AP Ferg notes, after hearing Varner kvetch about the party she regrets showing up for. And she herself says “I know I shoulda stayed my ass at home,” but apparently her girls pushed her to get out of the house “for a minute.” “Is this a party?” she keeps asking, while the bass runs like classic Kool & the Gang circa ’77 and someone endlessly hits a wood block. Meanwhile, “Don’t Wanna Dance” will just make you wanna step with your boo; this is the epitome of the phrase “midtempo groover.” From Varner’s delivery — she sells every word — to Ferg’s note-perfect bridge, to the track itself, this is utterly perfect.
[10]

Iain Mew: Elle Varner plays worn out and maybe a little drunk, but also exuberant in a way that goes with the velvety music to suggest that she’s already home and happy in her mind, dreaming her way out of the party and taking us with her. That A$AP Ferg’s less glamorous but loving picture of what she’s coming back to gets the same luxe backdrop tops it off nicely.
[8]

Will Adams: Then just go home. With virtually no indication of what’s keeping her there, Elle Varner goes from sympathetic to repetitive by the second scene-setting verse. A$AP Ferg pops in to give some non-advice (“You don’t listen, now you singing this damn sorry song” — yes, that’s great: waste our time telling us what we already know), we get another pouty chorus and end with more ad-libs of regret. If it’s any consolation, listening to “Don’t Wanna Dance” is about as exhausting as being at a shitty party, so two points for accuracy.
[2]

Brad Shoup: The joke, as always, is that the track wants you to dance. And so does Ferg, who sounds like good company for a night in but not so much for a song where Varner’s supposed to be single. Great basswork, nice Gaye percussion clops, and some killer countermelody on the electric bells. But mostly I’m glad she finally wants to sing.
[7]

Sturdy!

[Video][Website]
[6.88]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s 2015, and the machinations of musical history are such that Giorgio Moroder is a producer who right-here-right-now is putting Foxes on his album. Kylie is a more credentialed choice, but her recent work highlights the same issue latter-day Moroder has: with so much disco and now disco-revival, the line between ersatz and classic, inspired and retromaniac — between emotive abandon and bearskin-rug-louche ’70s — is a blur. Is that Sarah Brightman-esque descant buoyant or schmaltzy? The question is the camp and the point.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: I mean, Kylie makes sense, right? Nobody else has that sort of “dancefloor” serviceability and a reputation for being reliable, to my knowledge. But perhaps it’s Giorgio chasing after what he believes to be what works that keeps this song so unadventurous and uninteresting. It’s so indebted to the concept that Daft Punk have helped him (with those obnoxious talk-box squelches! You’re a vocoder man, Giorgio!) when people have adored and been in awe with him long before that. A shame really, that he’s playing up to the version of himself that he thinks people want him to be.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Inevitable — in 2002 or 1989. Not 1986, though, when Moroder’s infatuation with power chords and F-15s led to Top Gun. Both are way past their peaks. Although Minogue is the most consistent post-disco artist whose work I don’t much play, Moroder is the great disco producer whose last great song was a Phil Oakey collaboration, which means I have nothing at stake in this infectious second tier number. When Minogue’s buoyant squeak harmonizes with a distorted guitar and a rubberband riff that for all I know ended on the cutting room floor during the recording session for “Get Lucky,” every paunchy gay man in Courtyard Marriotts worldwide gets frisky. Watching the world wake up from history indeed.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Swear to God, this is the formula Daft Punk needed: the synths provide the gentle backwards tug, the vocal bass croaks like an obnoxious party guest, and Kylie… well, Kylie may never die. Smart move to subtract the croak when she uncorks a cloudy coo, but it’s an anchor otherwise.
[8]

Anthony Easton: This might be my favouite Kylie song in years, and the return of Moroder is always welcome. It is not self conciously nostalgia, but has a kind of baroque historicism, that is heavily aware of both disco and its children. Extra points for how squelchy and crunchy it is, even more extra points for all of her ooooooooooohs. 
[10]

Jonathan Bogart: Neither of them have any surprises left at this stage in their careers; any popwatcher could guess what this song was going to sound like — helium robo-funk — from a distance of fifty paces. So the pleasure is in the details: the fatness of the synth-bass squelch, the foursquare songwriting as straight down the middle as a Madonna castoff in 1992, the precision whirling of the wordless high bits, still as trusty an illusion of ecstasy as they were back in 1977.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Album track. That’s not a negative in itself — Kylie has had some great album tracks recently — but this has nothing arresting about it, not lyrical, not vocal, not musical. It therefore fails the litmus test of being easy to imagine played on the radio, and if anything the most memorable aspect, the belchy electrogrowls, grate. The Giorgio Moroder comeback remains intriguing and exciting, but this is just passable.
[6]

W.B. Swygart: Sturdy. Kylie spends large stretches parked in the high notes, which (to these ears at least) makes her sound oddly like her sister, conveying excitement largely by getting a bit squeakier. Those bits of fourth-wall breaking she’s so good at aren’t in evidence at all here; it’s all straight, smooth and totally agreeable, without ever setting its sights anywhere beyond that.
[6]

Spooky!

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[7.27]

Scott Mildenhall: When Susanne Sundfør told of how “you gave me my very first gun” with disconcerting wooziness a few years ago, she didn’t commit or admit to any shooting. It seemed ominously disingenuous, but perhaps it wasn’t. Why shoot anyone when you can get them to do it themselves? Lesser vocalists could not carry this off. Sundfør is an all-too-present spectre on the brink of anger, better encountered deranged than enraged. All around is absurdity — actual gunshots! — but such vocal suppleness more than legitimises it, enabling an unrivallable performance. She’s on a mountain with a storm-blue sky, she’s alone in a capacious church; she’s coming up the stairs. Strings are concealed like incidental music and whole layers of sound merely overlook her, because everything is played out from the centre, and she does so to a T.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: My favorite Susanne Sundfør track is the excellently titled “Knight of Noir,” off The Brothel; “Delirious” finds her promoted to vengeful vassal, surveying her tract of synthesizers and the men who’ve had the blissful misfortune of being within eyeshot, emphasis on “shot.” If you’d asked me around last album, I’d have said her voice is too reedy-plummy to go full pop; but now she’s done it, and would you be the one to tell her no?
[8]

Anthony Easton: I like when singer-songwriters move away from just the piano or acoustic guitar and put everything into an atmospheric/orchestral direction. That her voice doesn’t come until almost a minute in, a minute that sounds like something you would test a late-’60s hi-fi with, is almost as exciting as those Abbey Road infused strings at the end. I can’t wait for the house remix, for how much this flirts with disco. 
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: You’re grabbing up a box of popcorn out of your friend’s hand, dodging flicked Junior Mints when the movie is ready to start. Susanne is here, with a voice that sounds like the spiral curls of a maiden who raises animals on a farm, while she is surrounded by the sorts of sounds that sound like the cattle led on assembly line getting murked off like out of Albini’s “Cables.” Unfortunately, the frenzy is so apparent that you can’t really be sure if it was Susanne or that mysterious other who started it. You just know that all bets were off, and everything fucking blew up, and you had to stand up and say, “That was raw!”
[8]

Alfred Soto: The LucasFilm LTD introduction is a red herring, but it adds an extra minute to a midtempo dance number with decent sequencer, excellent doomy string section, and dumb vampiric tropes. Who knows? Chop off that first minute and begin with the “victim #1” chorus and you would have had classic gothic dance histrionics.
[6]

Mo Kim: The first minute promises much, a vengeful voice rising over the ashes of burnt violins — but then it’s all thrown away for a retread of “Like A Prayer.” There are intermittent moments of danger and discord, like when the percussion rattles off a series of gunshots, but every time this is about to deviate into something interesting it retreats back into familiar territory.
[5]

Iain Mew: What could possibly justify this much build-up, stretched out tight? “I hope you’ve got a safety net ’cause I’m gonna push you over the edge” as line one more than answers, but the cleverest thing about “Delirious” is that it never quite takes that plunge. Instead it’s a high-wire journey, swaying like it could go any way but never knocked over by too many epic elements at once, even with all the strings and vicious drums at various points. It’s a match to the uncertainty of the lyrical conflict, which Sundfør plays brilliantly, every bit as believable as the vengeful aggressor or the wronged party.
[9]

Kat Stevens: Intriguing THX-meets-Roygbiv intro; murderballad melody dodging all over the bloody place; ticka-ticka momentum. On paper the ingredients are great but in reality it’s just missing a bit of charm.
[6]

Will Adams: It’s journey of a track, from the cinematic opening to the spiky synths to the harmonic modulation, but its extended songwriting is in need of more structure. Sundfør commands each section; as a whole, it doesn’t quite hold together.
[6]

W.B. Swygart: So: this could benefit from losing at least a minute to 90 seconds from its runtime, there’s a couple too many layers of meringue for its own good, it suddenly runs out of road at around the fourth or fifth “delib-ur-ett, done with intent,” and I’m fairly sure “repent” isn’t a noun. But god, the way Evil Laura Cantrell sings the title, the way it starts at the base of the spine then spirals up the vertebrae and out – the damn drama, as she pivots, swoops in and out of the spotlights, gazes from the windows, addresses the masses from the balcony, swivels, then straight down the lens: “I-am-not-the-one-hol-ding-the-gu-un.” *DUHNUHNUHNUHNUHNUH* The flaws get more obvious with every listen, but the thrills do not fade at all. You both know you’ll be back.
[8]

Josh Langhoff: Sundfør sets “Blank Space” malice to “Edge of Seventeen” throb and uses vocal layering strategies from both — polyphony to dazzle her hapless victim and big blocks of chorus to bowl him over. Sliding between minor keys, chiding “I told you not to come” right after chanting “come into my arms,” her intent (without repent) is clear. But I’m still not clear who’s holding the gun.
[8]

About time we covered him beyond Shoup talking about his Pazz and Jop…

[Video]
[6.00]

Alfred Soto: “Rub You the Right Way” was 25 years ago, and it still astonishes me: one of the most frantic Jam-Lewis productions, with Gill huffing and puffing and feeling and stroking yet unable to knock it down. “Behind Closed Doors” by comparison depends on a conventional midtempo approach. Gill rasps through a Pharrell-inspired falsetto that recalls the old baritone threat only after a couple minutes in. Welcome back.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: I am exceedingly happy that, thanks to the Adult R&B radio format, R&B stars of yesteryear no longer feel like they have to keep up with the kids, and can instead focus on what they do best: largely, making lovin’ music. I mean, really, can you imagine if Johnny Gill were making ill-advised records with Young Thug? Fortunately, instead we get creaminess like this slice of early-’90s throwback that could damned near pass for a Hi-Five or Phil Perry hit. Sumptuous. 
[7]

Jessica Doyle: I heard the opening beat, slightly menacing, and got so excited! Then it turned out that Gill chose falsetto for this one, and it comes out rather thin and uninspired. I suppose if he’d sung lower people would be complaining about a retread of “Rub You the Right Way.” Problem is, I was 12 in 1990, and “Rub You the Right Way” helped introduce to me the idea that a tension between lyrics and tone could itself be sexy. So from a purely personal perspective, all subsequent Gill releases have a lot to live up to.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Johnny Gill, aka the New Jack Dennis Edwards, is here over something that sounds gigglishly off-base. Gill returns to his post-Luther gospel soloing (and it ain’t what it used to be), yet his chorus seems peanut-brittle in strength. It’s the elephantine nature of those synth horns, the turgid quality of the piano hitting the bass, that keeps this lumbering and reveals the music’s metaphorical gut.
[6]

Josh Winters: If Toni Braxton & Babyface’s “Hurt You” was “Hold On, We’re Going Home” for the middle-aged set, this is their “773 Love.”
[6]

Anthony Easton: I only kind of like how soul-fried the production is here, and how the code (dancer, really?) is so loose a euphemism it seems more of a placeholder for historical memory than an actual thing. This is especially true when his fantastic voice under services the song. 
[4]

Brad Shoup: Not because of the falsetto itself — I hope not, anyway — but the way Gill inhabits it, the way it seems to exist outside of his body… it seems like transference. I can picture his lover caught up in his moment, because it’s her moment too. The track is a slow-motion leer, pounding in kicks and brass hums like railroad spikes. Love is a funny-ass thing.
[8]

And no mention of her actual short movie, for shame…

[Video][Website]
[5.38]

Alfred Soto: A couple of strums edge into Big Star “Kangaroo” territory; the rest is so well coiffed that it’s a wonder it wasn’t included in a 2002 alt-country comp taped to an issue of Uncut.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Marling’s songwriting and performing tics are so appealing to me that I feel a twinge of guilt every time I don’t love a song. This one half-works on the strength of her vocal characteristics (how she drops into speech a couple of times in the first verse is a Marling standby) but it doesn’t feel particularly compelling. Maybe I feel like a woman who has stirred all sorts of emotion over a career of incredibly deep, thoughtful songwriting can’t quite get her mouth or her ideas around “fucking”?
[5]

Mo Kim: “It’s kicking off,” Marling sings near the song’s peak: unfortunately it took her three-and-a-half minutes to get there. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: She’s got cultural capital, and she intends to spend it. Less of a hunter now than a game warden, Marling surveys the landscape she’s crafted: shaggy midcountry folk, the endless tuning and droning of post-rock strings, rock’s drive (here, mostly suggested by a vigorously brushed kit and a vicious cello), smirking self-reference. There’s no need to keep it concise, not now, maybe not ever, and she seems chuffed to just hang it all out.
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: It feels like five really corny songs jostling up against each other, bouncing up and down screaming “ME, PICK ME!”
[1]

Luisa Lopez: It’s a cheap trick but it’s a good one: playing that first verse in silence just long enough that the sound of the second comes as a surprise. (Like calling on violins to evoke the sound of birds.) But some songs do build naturally, sprouting from a wandering note then gathering speed and running til there’s no more land. This is one of them.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: The dry pomp of the backing suggests more drama and urgency than I can glean from her half-swallowed lyrics, which circle on themselves with the fragmentary repetition of an argument confined to a single head.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Laura Marling is perhaps our prickliest songwriter; her thorns are truly the best part of her. It’s not so much that’s she’s reclusive, but her music is; it’s so anti-confessional in a traditionally confessional medium. Like the prototypical titular short film, you’ve got to pursue her songs, study them like a language, meet her not just halfway but 90% (perhaps why so many critics called Once I Was an Eagle boring), and when you get there, half the time all you find is that her secrets remain secret. Her singing, as she’s grown, has matured from received folkie curlicues to an impassive snarl, so deliberately mumbled that all the lyrics sites quote the exact opposite of what she’s saying: I hear “I won’t try and take it slow,” elsewhere “just a girl who can’t play guitar” (which is factually untrue; she went electric for the new LP). In “Short Movie” I hear some shots at the media — the guitar line, for sure, maybe “they know that I loved you but they’ll never know why” given how much ink is expended — still! — on her and Marcus Mumfuck. Moreso, I hear her career-long struggles with reconciling worn-out realism with suppressed romanticism (the bridge, strings and reveries, is the sort of pastoral swoon I’d thought she only missed anymore), with despising playing savior yet ending up there time after time, with “[being able to] get away with only half the things I say” (great line) but inevitably saying the other half, let the mistakes fall where they may. As far as I can tell, “Short Movie” is an old mentor’s mantra (“life’s short,” I think? And we all know what motto that’s adjacent to…) Marling warps into rationale to rush headlong into future mistakes, to maybe-drugs (see: slurred lines; but it is “color drugs,” right?) and dalliances that don’t snatch souls. The steady build-up of the music supports this, but you still get the sense the narrator’s thought this over too carefully for abandon, too reluctantly wise to really swing from that chandelier, which is something I of course relate to bunches. But is any of this at all accurate? She won’t say. Barring some Rat Girl-esque decoder memoir, she may never. Therein lies the key, which unlocks no doors perfectly.
[7]

Five years on, we still kinda like her…

[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Jonathan Bogart: Mexico’s reigning queen of indie-pop (pace Venegas) returns from her sojourn in midcentury bolero reverie having learned a thing or two from Agustín Lara’s economy of melody and form. Her voice will never be anything but girlish, but her songwriting isn’t beholden to twee; and her refusal to settle for easy uplift makes her something special in global indie-pop.
[8]

Juana Giaimo: I could never fully enjoy Natalia Lafourcade’s twee style on Hu Hu Hu, and while she kept part of it in “Hasta La Raíz” — her innocent voice will always characterize her — she is now stronger, trying to reach that moment in which a breakup doesn’t hurt and becomes only memories of a happy time that couldn’t last forever.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Difficult to parse at first, thanks to Lafourcade’s banging against those staccato strums. Then the arrangement opens; that string section and her keening suggest a loonier stab at one of Beck’s Morning Phase‘s ponderosities.
[7]

Mo Kim: The translated lyrics suggest the speaker is traveling inwards: memories becoming jungles to wander through, old flames appearing in the sand and the sky. Natalia Lafourcade’s voice has the quality of mist slipping between the guitar and strings; but I can’t help but feel that she could reach more interesting places if the thump of the percussion didn’t lock everything around it into such rigidly-defined rhythms.
[6]

Iain Mew: With the glumly staid guitar and rhythm she’s set up, she doesn’t give herself the best foundation to build any appeal on. She can do it, though, and it’s the lilt and lift of her voice that gives it just enough magic to get by as much as it’s the eventual fantasy strings.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Upon extended listening, it sounds like a standard time signature made unbalanced by stringing arpeggio across the choppy, muted strum. Lafourcade’s meter is closer to her guitar’s: it searches, it navigates. The whole band forms the flying V behind her. The result is something more moving than howling against some upfront timpanis.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The lalalalala sounds are perfect, and the guitars are lush in the best way.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Gently buoyant, like a lot of Lisa Hannigan’s work; I don’t often find myself lately in need of this wholesome prettiness, but it’s nice knowing the breeze is there to catch.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: Modestly expansive, Lafourcade only gradually builds the yearn in her voice across a landscape that seems to stretch as she traverses it. In other words, the video should have her wandering across a big, lush field with no-one around, looking into the unplaceable distance. No smiling, but no looking sad either.
[6]

Finally, a proper Christian song title…

[Video][Website]
[5.09]

Brad Shoup: I don’t believe a word of this apocalypse. It’s like hearing NYC talk about snow.
[3]

Alfred Soto: What “pounding sound”?
[3]

Mo Kim: “You’ll be the moon, I’ll be the earth” speaks volumes, the speaker pleading a loved one to stay tethered to her. The music colors in her desperation with hints that this is not the first time she’s fought this battle. Megan James’ voice is drained of any light beyond a dim glow, while the rhythms shift under her feet like the tides of time lost. And that’s all before the chorus stomps in, a ghost of a piano melody laced between a crushing four-on-the-floor beat: it suggests an inevitability to this whole affair, that all of this is doomed to either begin again or finally, mercifully end. The emotional nuance is impressive.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: A few years ago Chvrches came off as a watered-down Purity Ring; now, perhaps inevitably, Purity Ring comes off as a slightly more clarified Chvrches. When Shrines came out I wanted to imagine entire worlds that sounded like it. “Begin Again” probably will sound OK on a mix two months from now.
[5]

Will Adams: Tinkling piano, synth pads used as bass, heavy kick, thin female vocal right at center; it’s basically a trance song slowed down to 90 BPM.
[5]

Juana Giaimo: It seems that Purity Ring has found a formula and are not planning to detach from it. A childish voice becoming creepy in a dark and minimalistic ambience worked with them on Shrines, but if I already thought that album was a little bit repetitive, listening to “Begin Again” doesn’t really make me excited for their new one.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: It’s kind of interesting how a lot of people went with Purity Ring’s impish “Libra girl in your math class who has braces and takes rubber bands to her tangled hair” charms and used them for a lot of lesser songs. But apparently they’re going into the game, sandblasting themselves into the pop shark frenzy. It’s honestly curious to hear how this band has grown out of their rough patches into conventional pop, and their songwriting has vastly improved. I can’t say that about a lot of their peers on 4 *coughs, chokes, and sputters out life force in the sounds of barks that resemble a noise like Grimes*… AD, but I’m happy to say that about these dorks.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: What made Purity Ring interesting was written right in their song titles — they made unsettling electro-pop that sounded like they were built from malfunctioning throats, and they were named “Belispeak” and “Lofticries,” familiar words turned weird. Their best, most upbeat sounding number dwelled on strange body noises and boasts a gross title. “Begin Again” is as boring as the title they came up with, a stab at wider recognition that trades unnerving for watered-down EDM, except with none of the fun. 
[3]

Ashley Ellerson: The electronic duo ditched the dark, supernatural feel of Shrines for a dreamier composition this time around. Megan James’ voice is less produced, and I can finally hear what she sounds like. Purity Ring are starting over with an EDM-lite tune, which I’m here for, but we can’t ignore that familiar beat featured in too many electronic songs.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: I’m often the first to celebrate weird indie bedroom electronic acts who clean up their sound and go pop, but “Begin Again” is a reboot that doesn’t quite work for me. Purity Ring’s early singles could be genuinely unsettling — Megan’s lyrics crawled under your skin with imagery that always felt a little off and that you couldn’t quite shake, while the production surrounded and warped her vocals. Shrines wasn’t quite claustrophobic, but it certainly wasn’t expansive. When you scrub all the vocal distortion and body horror off it turns out all that remains of Purity Ring is pretty, mildly sleepy EDM. It’s very pretty, if it helps.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Stepping a few paces back from the current pop moment for a vainglorious attempt at a big picture, it seems to me that Broadcast was maybe the most influential band of the last twenty years. Or 2 Unlimited. One of the two.
[5]