Anita Ward got nuthin’ on this.

[Video][Website]
[5.50]

Patrick St. Michel: For all the clunky product placement and extremely dumb controversies, K-Pop still shines because a song moving this fast can become a chart success. The actual music on “Ring My Bell” is dizzying, though count me as somebody who thinks the instrumental by itself is far more dazzling, as the actual singing often blocks out nutty this is.   
[6]

Mo Kim: A flaring highway wreck of a pop song. I can’t resist peeking, but stare at it from the wrong angle and you risk having your corneas burnt out. The excess is what sells it, down to the guitar squealing over that last chorus like wheels on concrete.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Power-pop explosive synths, rushed hi-hats, hoedown intros, big band brass, all to hysterics. Unfortunately it all ends up sounding less like a pop music Wrestlemania and more of a royal rumble in a three-star Vegas casino.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: Manic K-pop that keeps threatening to careen over a cliff but never does; this ship always rights itself, just. The verses almost have a ’40s swing feel to them, and then the chorus takes the BPM through the roof. And naturally, the bridge is hip-hop-slowed-down, until it smashes back into another chorus. The sum effect is, somehow, off-kiltered-ly entirely charming.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Closer to “The Lovecats” honestly and almost as much fun.
[6]

Jessica Doyle: Not since Rainbow’s “Black Swan” has a song been so ill-served by its video: “Ring My Bell” is not nearly so much a kitchen-sink mess (complete with crotch shots!) as it looks at first sight. But even the song by itself feels incoherent. The summery beat undercuts the story of focused lust, and the repetitions of “ring my bell” undercut everything. (At least for a native English speaker, it’s jarring to hear “ring ring ring my bell” in the chorus and then “ring ring ma bell” immediately afterwards. I get the impression that Korean is a little more flexible with regards to syllabic emphasis. So, grain of salt.) Factoring in, fairly or not, that this promotion cycle was terrible for Girl’s Day — not only are they now perceived to have “lost” the girl group “war”, they also received a torrent of criticism for not being smiley enough on a talk show — and it’s hard to find “Ring My Bell” worth a lot.
[3]

Brad Shoup: I’ve never had a good hook evicted from my head this fast.
[6]

Iain Mew: After the nightmare intro, the way that it moves fast-faster-fastest reminds me of Nana Mizuki with the prog elements replaced by less suitable jazz-pop. What it lacks in coherence and listenability it will presumably gain in popularity once someone makes a K-Pop edition of Dance Dance Revolution.
[5]

Retvrn.

[Video][Website]
[6.62]

Iain Mew: Is that a bit of “Sogyeokdong” I hear in the synth pattern? It’s a good one, but it’s a less critical part of “Leave a Trace” compared to previous Chvrches songs. This one’s more about where it falls apart, “there are tiny cracks of light underneath me” dropping clues before the thrilling chorus where Lauren Mayberry decides to just punch through to the light in advance, whatever the consequences. The floor sliding immediately back in for the second verse like nothing happened is a neat trick, too.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: The coffeeshop I work out of plays, in a hilarious confirmation of stereotype, Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” at least twice a day; it’s a little disappointing how something that’s, in my experience, a remarkably veritas monologue’s been relegated to ’90s bland and karaoke kitsch. So while I still prefer Chvrches of “Science/Visions” to each successive sugary incarnation, the keen to Mayberry’s vocal and lines like “I’m as sane as I ever was” and “anything you ever did was strictly by design, but you got it wrong” suggests I might want to hear Chvrches more like that.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Pretty sure this should’ve soundtracked a cutting-room-floor scene in Just One of the Guys in which Terry dances around her room to this song on the radio, happy/sad, as she comes to fully understand the depth of her feelings for Rick.
[6]

Alfred Soto: After a charming and surprising Pitchfork Festival performance two weeks ago, I waited for more goodies. It’s closer to pop than a phantom indie underground: Lauren Mayberry, singing at the top of her range, almost sells that chorus like Taylor Swift almost sold hers last year. The production glistens; the drum program and synths hit as hard as Mayberry’s lyrics. No reason why this couldn’t take up residence in the American top ten.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: It’s cool to be reminded that you can give nervous hysteria a danceable beat.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: It’s a slow-burner that’s less concerned with reaching any sort of resolution, because that line has already been crossed, the whole song one big declaration of freedom from a doomed relationship. “Leave a Trace” isn’t a particularly dazzling song, but it does show how Chvrches can turn a straightforward idea into something far more vivid. 
[6]

Sonia Yang: CHVRCHES have always been achingly beautiful but in a cold way, with Mayberry’s voice a small beam of light barely shining through the precise clockwork. “Leave a Trace” feels warmer as a whole. Despite, or perhaps because of the accusing and sometimes distraught nature of the lyrics, Mayberry comes across as more of a flesh and blood being before us than the wistful voice in the back of our heads. The vocal variety on this is fantastic: from the contemplative verses to the pleading “I know I need to feel relief” to the decisive, cutting “take care…”. The arrangement is less remarkable than a lot of their other songs but it serves its purpose well here; it’s the unrelenting heartbeat pulling everything together. “Leave a Trace” also doesn’t resolve neatly, its echoes tapering and lingering.
[8]

Brad Shoup: There’s a little country in the way Mayberry handles the meter; she’s called this the meanest song on the record, and for Nashville this is pretty harsh. The harshness extends to the trebly rendering: there’s no triumph here, just a bunch of mincing.
[6]

Sax solos…

[Video][Website]
[3.57]

Rebecca A. Gowns: It’s a shame that Petite Meller has invested so much in her image and brand, because the music could have stood on its own. It’s just fun, simple indie pop. Then she adds all these other elements — the labored outfits, a signature font and color scheme, the music video that’s a colonial wet dream — that just confuse the issue. She even completes this video with a dedication: “Pour les filles de l’Afrique.” What the hell does that even mean?! How is your single “for the girls of Africa”?! Are you campaigning the French government for reparations towards the countries damaged by French colonial rule, or are you just using a handful of Kenyans as accessories for a few hours??? I’ll take my fun indie pop without all the messy shit, thanks.
[2]

Thomas Inskeep: A pop weirdo from the Lady Gaga school, playing with text and subtext and willfully throwing her juxtapositions in your face, only with a jazzier je ne sais quoi behind her ultra-buoyant pop. 
[6]

Iain Mew: I suspect the BBC have already produced the definitive commentary on this release, if been a little on the generous side. I’ll add that the flimsy dance doesn’t do nearly enough to set up the sax solo, which should come with some kind of dire warning.
[3]

Alfred Soto: From the Supremes to Regina, a never-fail title. This one isn’t bad either, even the sax squiggle in the last third. A touch of J-pop too in the harmonies. The choir and house piano sound like they wish the Moby of 1995 could remix them.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Joyful dancing on the whims of an annoyingly magnetic ne’er-do-well. The lyrics are almost unintelligible free association, but that seems about the size of it, and the emphasis is on the joyful; irrepressible piano and broadening saxophone. It’s almost as if in creating it Meller undertook, as she has suggested, a Rimbaudesque derangement of the senses, compressing it into accessibility. That or just wrote a jaunty pop song anyway.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Like a less charming Catherine Ferroyer-Blanchard single, in bad house remix form. Except those already exist, so this is doubly pointless.
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: If the celebration of love is supposed to sound like someone who can’t sing over the worst house cliches as a mix of Red Bull backwash and plaque, with a corny-ass Springsteen-style sax solo, then I intend to live in a realm of despair for the rest of my days. Because I love myself more than that.
[0]

Enchanté?

[Video][Website]
[4.67]

Cédric Le Merrer: Nekfeu is the latest poster boy for French hip hop gentrification anxieties. He’s praised all around, he’s the run-out star of his crew, he’s technical, he name drops great white male literature. And he’s self conscious enough to address being a babtou. Yes, things may have been easier for him. He still can turn a better rhyme than most. His real sin on his album Feu is not the heavy handed respectability attempts, though, or the blandness of what he has to say. It’s the beats, which let him shine okay, but wouldn’t keep your yuppie neighbour bothered enough to call the cops on your house party.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: A head-nodder: very mid-’90s NYC beat, with a soupçon more bass. Nekfeu is a decent rapper, but nothing exceptional. Same with the song.
[5]

Brad Shoup: He’s got a name like Redditor martial arts. Shame Maxwell already trademarked “Drakk,” because it would attach real well to the distracted, laconic piano melody and his twerpy/serious delivery.
[6]

Will Adams: Nekfeu maintains enough energy throughout, but that awful piano preset threatens to derail the whole proceedings.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The beat’s not bad and Nekfeu in moments sounds like RZA at his stentorian best.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Drake Retreads in any language, framed around any sort of novel, will still end up being generic Drake Retreads. What’s crazy is the only person who has improved on this formula is Tyga, and that will go unheard for many a good reason.
[2]

We’re up all night to get loose…

[Video][Website]
[5.17]

Alfred Soto: Returning to the moniker with which he scored his early success, Puff Daddy returns to leading an R&B and hip-hop family/Family through a terrain that looks much like the one he created in the late nineties and reunited with new members and greater finesse on 2010’s Last Night in Paris. On this track he waves his baton and they fall in step on a track as jittery as Pharrell’s early Jay Z productions. It’s not great because Puff isn’t great when he’s leading, but he’s got urgency. Maybe his great, wracked performance on Meek Mill’s “Cold Hearted” was a one-off after all.
[6]

Anthony Easton: That Bad Boy tag at the end is a kind of desperate attempt to remind the world that Puff Daddy is relevant, and considering how rough shod he rides over Pharell’s featuring, a stunting one. 
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Sean “Puffy” Combs has been one of the most fascinating men in rap for a long time. As far as actual talents that muso-types respect, the only thing he can do truly is dance. But abstractly, he is a master visionary who paved the way for Kanye West’s struggles to turn hip-hop into pop art, who to this day haunts Andre Young’s yardsticks despite the both of them having long since been discarded as figures of expectation. In an interesting twist, the only person I can compare this song to definitively is the one man who’s incredibly close to Puffy in role and presence on records: Kirk Franklin. And make no mistake, Puffy is a religious man, so much so he took a bat to Steve “Culture Vulture” Stoute for disrespecting Jesus. The Dirty Money project, his last true album, was centered around his thoughts on martyrdom that’ve radiated through the stars he served and his own musings. That’s why he casually insists “this god’s work”, and that “he wants you to be happy, he wants you to be free!” over shivers of nega-funk gospel crafted by Pharrell while the duo play Chuck & Flav (AKA Bobby & James). Its a subdued sequel to the rambling hysterics of last decade’s Dark Magus-sampling “Get Off” that feels so slight, and surprisingly devoid of fleshed out work, but is all the more noted for the gaudiness ornamenting the bits of exoskeleton he’s still put on display. We’re promised the last musical chapter in the career of a rare breed of artist… A man not defined by his talent and skills, but the visions that have seized him.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Maybe an ersatz “Hot In Herre” beat isn’t quite the way to make a comeback in 2015, Puff. Just maybe. Also, you should be slapped for referencing Public Enemy again.
[1]

Will Adams: Pharrell’s chromatic-stepping backbone sets a good foundation for the first minute, but then… nothing really happens. There’s some sound like tapping a microphone in spots, which adds some interest, but apart from that Puff Daddy isn’t engaging enough to keep me investeed.
[5]

Brad Shoup: These fortysomethings do not give a shit. Not about a bass tone that’s like a dental drill tapping your skull, not about making the world’s grouchiest go-go song. The Combs renaissance continues.
[8]

Men… are not controversial?

[Video][Website]
[5.83]

Thomas Inskeep: Good new rapper from Manchester makes a good biographical track. He’s got a good flow and a good producer, so let’s see where he goes from here. 
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: Rappity rapper doing a lot of soul searching, darting around without learning to land on a beat in a proper flow, but never actually connecting all of these pseudo-poignant observations to anything cohesive. Not to mention this beat sounds like it got made on Game Boy Camera. Oh, and grime is not English hip-hop, you speng.
[4]

Alfred Soto: His flow is okay, and the production squonks in typical grime fashion, but the wealth of biographical details don’t achieve poignancy.
[5]

Iain Mew: It largely sounds like Bugzy’s talking things through with himself while the car stereo burbles away, and it’s compelling with it. The calm openness sounds naturalistic in a way that can’t be as easy to achieve as he makes it sound, and he’s interesting as well as reflective. The only thing holding it back is that the narrative drive centres around the time he attacked someone, and that section shatters the reflectiveness to start an outside argument that he’s never going to win — maybe the point, but if so the picture his words paint isn’t clear enough to show it.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: Ambitions of “put[ting] Manny on the map” seem sightly belated — Martin Platt’s got a cheese stall there! — but in rap terms they are undeniably justified, Joe Hart’s efforts withstanding. Malone isn’t misguided in his mission; he’s a skilled storyteller, peppering half a book’s worth of autobiography with outlines of Moss Side history, and Mr SnoWman’s production is a great match for it: moderately grim, with quiet stress. What comes next, with the imminent and eminent possibility of a top 10 album released independently — potentially outdoing Krept & Konan and JME’s feats — will be interesting.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Not triumphant so much as hard-won, not hard-won so much as still getting there: a track that creates tension by being unassuming.
[7]

We ARE still capable of scoring songs outside the 6 range…

[Video][Website]
[6.67]

Thomas Inskeep: Polow da Don is still making magic. Here he opens with an ace sample from Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ 1968 deep cut “Much Better Off” before Lil Wayne drops in and drops one of his more committed verses in some time (I’m especially fond of “Droppin’ her off then toppin’ it off with a muah on the jaw and a smack on the ass and a ‘call me tomorrow…’”), in and out in 30 seconds. Then Polow drops the track out for a couple seconds, only to drop back in with a monstrous, rubbery bassline – and then loops Smokey back in. This is a master class in R&B production, and I’ve not even mentioned the song’s star yet. Monica is a grown-ass woman and lets you know it – “so you know what a wife like me gon’ do” – while praising her man as she pledges to stick with him through it all. Her vocal is big and strong without being overblown; Monica is a singer in complete control of her instrument, and it’s only gotten richer over time.
[10]

Micha Cavaseno: That soul sample and this Wayne verse took me back to ’07, but then the time-warp production snatched me right back to the present while my shoes ended up getting flung off into the far-off tomorrow (see ya guys!) Monica is doing more energy than songcraft, but perhaps it’s necessary to balance out Polow Da Don’s overkill radiating around in the track, with 808 bass melody lines and transforming filtered orchestration threatening to swamp and drown a lesser performer.
[7]

W.B. Swygart: Monica’s voice is built for this kind of undulating grind, and the strings embroider things nicely. Doesn’t exactly qucken the pulse, though.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Monica provides the sort of vocal heft, that gravitas everyone strives for, that’s timeless. Lil Wayne is also timeless, in that his presence suggests a 2008 mentality but his verse quality suggests 2015 Wayne.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The beat doesn’t bang and it doesn’t cohere with the Miracles sample — it’s more like a straining dam. Monica latches onto that title and doesn’t let go. Wayne offers the chance to ponder an inverse relationship between bar quality and the number of times he flicks his Bic.
[5]

Alfred Soto: A victory of performance over songcraft, and thanks to Wayne’s verse and Polow da Don’s production, boy, does it sound like a victory of throwback over contemporaneity too. I prefer “Everything to Me,” though, and so should you.
[6]

Not a Giorgio Moroder cover. No, we’re never going to get sick of that joke.

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Alfred Soto: Not seeing Dev Hynes in the credits surprised me; the track’s got his use of humid electronic space, massed vocals, and block synth lines. As a singer Sparks is OK, too cool for school in the Ciara tradition. But this has bounce.
[6]

W.B. Swygart: The plot: Jordin and lover have sex so ridiculously that their fellow hotel guests have them ejected from the premises; however, fuelled by sex, Jordin and lover then proceed to have sex in a car in full view of some police officers. Epilogue: Jordin Sparks declares she will sex ridiculously in hotels again, because the bit where they get kicked out? That’s the best bit. It says something for her performance that the song’s ridiculousness takes a few listens to fully reveal itself; the Ciara-esque atmospherics help some, too.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: This is the most insanely sexy single I’ve heard in months, maybe all year. Key is the fact that Sparks is channeling Aaliyah so hard I can barely believe it isn’t her. She coos, she flirts, she climbs into your lap like Prince on “Do Me Baby.” Additionally, Dem Jointz’s production is superlative; it’s been far too long since that slamming-car-door effect, used so expertly by the Neptunes in the Clipse’s “Grindin’,” has been, well, used so expertly.
[10]

Brad Shoup: The dancehall intro is a Trojan horse; something this playfully melodic should’ve been able to state its own case. As it stands, it sounds a little like the mixtape cut it started as: the remarkable bridge, with its striking vocal intervals, gets a sloppy transition to the chorus via a windup string section. But that’s not really a quibble: Sparks fully inhabits the lusher stretches of the production, which are beautiful.
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: Thankfully, Jordin is sorta/kinda getting better at trying to navigate R&B as her new home. The production is fascinatingly restless, always predictable but at times seeming to slow down and speed up in a hallucinatory fit. But while these verses are so poorly constructed they might make better sense stammered, and while the chorus is a bit too disposable, Jordin’s vocal approach is getting a bit more natural. Maybe this will work one of these days.
[2]

David Sheffieck: The production and vocal barely seem to exist in the same song, one pulsing and frenetic, the other gliding like a skater; they’re interesting separately, but less than the sum of their parts. Where Sparks really trips up, though, is the chorus. It glides into and out of the mind without leaving a trace — it’s not here, and it’s certainly not now.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: A promising underwater beat, love in one of those sensory-deprivation pods, undermined by the lack of a chorus.
[6]

Will Adams: Cluttered and rushed, “Right Here Right Now” stumbles pretty quickly out of the gate, not least because Sparks’ smooth delivery clashes with the pulsing beat. The not-really-a-chorus recalls Aaliyah but barely has any time to get on its feet before the next verse, and suddenly the song is already over.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: Hamstrung by being almost done and dusted by the close of the first minute. Sparks is looking for a payoff, empirical substance to her internal certainty, and while it’s clear that it’s not coming in the duration of the song, that doesn’t mean it has to be so one-note, dreamlike backing vocals or not. It’s a vignette, but one with all the form’s potential untapped.
[6]

More like got [6]…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Madeleine Lee: “What Makes You Beautiful” rewritten for a post-“What Makes You Beautiful” thinkpiece world — including the na-na-nas — where instead of reinforcing the subject’s objective beauty, the message is, “Relax, because I like you just the way you are” (“Instead of the mirror, just look into my eyes/Instead of the scale, just get on my back”). Some of its hooks are better than others, but that’s okay; GOT7 and JYP have already made one perfect summer pop song, and it seems fitting that this is a song where I don’t care about counting its flaws, because I like it just the way it is.
[6]

Iain Mew: It turns out that “Just the Way You Are” is way more enjoyable when injected in concentrated form into a completely different song.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: The kids here go for 1D-style affirmation, but most of their lyrics read like sitcom boyfriend responses (“What do you love about me?””Uh, everything!”) and this fidgety attempt at rap production is less bouncy and more like the spontaneous combustion of a K’nex creature.
[4]

Frank Kogan: Dear GOT7: So you’re telling me not to change, that I’m just right the way I am. But one of the characteristics that makes me the way I am is that I don’t think I’m just right. So by your logic I’m right to think I’m not right and I’m wrong to think I’m not right. And you find it a turn-on, don’t you, that I don’t think I’m right. Because otherwise you wouldn’t have a song, and you wouldn’t be able to “help” me. [Walks off muttering, “codependent relationships” and “great bass part” and “fucker.”]
[7]

Mo Kim: The message is passable, even if Amy Schumer refuted it retroactively: I can still imagine the middle-school girls listening to their iPods on the walk to school finding strength in this. For the rest of us, there’s smooth surf guitar, deranged chipmunk hi-hats, and harmonies that swell through the composition like a sky of balloons.
[7]

Brad Shoup: They pull so many faces. It’s a shame so many of them are saying “I love you anyway”. The stuttering, the near-yodeling, the adult-alternative cliff-straddling: they’re all good looks. The refrain fills the stereo field; the voices are warm and low-stakes. A triumph of production if nothing else.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: The weakest track off their Just Right EP does GOT7 no favors: parts of it sound like Jason Mraz being introduced to bass (strummy acoustic guitar, just say no; it rarely doesn’t sound like campfire singalongs), and others seem to intentionally spotlight their weakest rappers. The production’s a mess, too. That said, the EP’s good, just skip this.  
[4]

And finally some tasteful Thai cocktail disco to cleanse your palate…

[Video][Website]
[7.29]

Thomas Inskeep: Synthy pop that’s the definition of breezy: light, summery, perfectly accented with a high-hat, and overall lovely. 
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Sounding like the wispiest Carpenters song that never was, the slightness of the disco-rock groove keeps the song locked in a soft step of sentiment and sealed-shut eyelids as the listener gets to drift along in the least visible shift of one’s hips. Lula’s voice sounds like polite resignation, not of defeat, but of a desire to accept and press on while the brittle rubbery guitar riff counts the seconds off.
[7]

Iain Mew: I pegged this as one of those delightful wisps of song that passes by like a breeze in the current heat, refreshing but fleeting. Then I got the chorus stuck in my head all evening.
[8]

Will Adams: Lula’s thin voice is supported wonderfully; between the surf bass and morphing electric piano, I feel like I’m on a beach enjoying some pineapple-based cocktail as a warm wind lifts from the sea.
[7]

Brad Shoup: There’s something Sixpence in Lula’s airy delivery and the easy glide of a weird band. The low-end sounds like it stepped in gum, and the midrange sounds like a mouth harp. But they’re still in service to an effervescent Lula.
[8]

Ramzi Awn: The high notes and hand claps are timed well, and the synths are pristine. It’s like The Cardigans went to grad school, and graduated top of their class.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: 70s soft rock disco! Carpenters doing Dr Hook or something. Actually, if Carpenters had ever covered “When You’re In Love With a Beautiful Woman” it might have been even better than this.
[8]