The Singles Jukebox

Pop, to two decimal places.

Month: October 2015

  • Rishi Rich Project ft. Jay Sean & Juggy D – Freak

    It’s no “Down.”


    [Video][Website]
    [4.80]

    Thomas Inskeep: Jay Sean and Juggy D team back up with the man who gave them their big breaks, Rishi Rich, and return to the formula that made “Dance With Me” a UK smash back in 2003, with Jay singing in English and Juggy in Punjabi. It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Rich, but it sounds like he’s used his sabbatical to re-perfect his sound, because this is just as bangin’ a hybrid of bhangra and R&B as ever (and how nice it is to hear danceable R&B without any EDM flavor). Jay Sean’s sweet voice still sounds like early Chris Brown, too.
    [6]

    Micha Cavaseno: Man, this is so stiff and self-serious, but it barely goes anywhere and doesn’t seem made for anyone in particular. Bring back the days of Punjabi Hit Squad, RDB and Dr. Zeus.
    [2]

    Jonathan Bogart: Listening to this without remembering who the players were, I had half-convinced myself it was an unusually tender soca-reggaeton collab until Juggy D started singing in Punjabi. There are of course longstanding affinities between Latin and North African-Middle Eastern-South Asian musical cultures, but really it was just Jay Sean’s liquid tenor, which could slide easily into any romantic music in the world and be just as seductive in each setting.
    [8]

    Will Adams: There’s a clear drop here, but it doesn’t sound like it. The synth bass cranks up, but nothing else does, and the result is a flat club track.
    [4]

    Alfred Soto: It’s nice to hear Jay Sean back but not on a soca-reggaeton track of no particular consequence.
    [4]

  • The Vamps – Wake Up

    Thanks for the Ibsen slash fic, John.


    [Video][Website]
    [3.88]

    John Seroff: Unpalatable schlock, like If I Stay MRM fanfic or A Doll’s House retold from a millennial Torvald’s point of view. Your fantasy is that the one you love is in a coma and the plan is to wake sleeping beauty with vague devotion, self-aggrandizement and the sheer goddamn glory of your adolescent, hydra-like presence? News flash, pals: she got this way by popping a blood vessel when you rhymed “right here” with “right here” for the fourth time. Please stop standing right in front of me and leave the ICU.
    [2]

    Micha Cavaseno: Oh, I get it: by, like, remembering the MGMT lick, and bringing that back to life, the coma/awaken metaphor and…yeah, that’s cool, I guess, but, man, this song is boring.
    [2]

    Will Adams: That distorted synth hook is insistent enough to burrow into your brain, but it’s difficult to avoid imagining that these kids are singing to a girl who’s actually in a coma and cringing as a result.
    [4]

    Scott Mildenhall: Feel that drone. The mixing of mangled metaphors is clearly Serious Business, but fear not, because they are also here to temper that seriousness with non-specific affirmation. “Wake Up” is an anthem caught between intimate reassurance and stadium portentousness, and it falls short of both. The hand on the shoulder is an empty gesture, given it has no grip on the problem, and at the same time The Vamps can’t quite pull off arena-size emotions, not least with something so lumbering.
    [5]

    Thomas Inskeep: I’m not sure why the Vamps don’t get the kinda respect that One Direction or 5 Seconds of Summer do; their pop-rock sounds much more sincere to these ears. 1D are Backstreet wearing Ramones t-shirts, whereas the Vamps are at least more Blondie-meets-the-Strokes, albeit played by “cute” young men.
    [5]

    Alfred Soto: For those who’ll miss the original line up, here’s One Direction doing “We Are Young.”
    [4]

    Brad Shoup: That synth almost wriggles out of the Passion Pit. Its freedom is the only reason I’d stick around.
    [5]

    Patrick St. Michel: Remember that brief window that opened a little less than ten years ago when MGMT suddenly became the most influential band in the world? The Vamps might, since “Wake Up” features a squiggly synthesizer line that makes me think of “Time To Pretend.” Whereas those two Wesleyan goofballs knew how to make a joke, “Wake Up” transfers it to a big, festival-eyeing singalong, “earnest” if “earnest” is code for boring. Guys, you can stop playing safe, not just say you are.
    [4]

  • Adele – Hello

    Hi! Welcome back!


    [Video][Website]
    [5.60]
    Nina Lea Oishi: Hello, it’s Adele. She’s back, and not much has changed. If you’d told me “Hello” was actually from Adele’s album 21, I would have believed you because “Hello” follows the Adele tried and true marks so closely: heartbreak, melancholy, big swelling choruses. An Adele song is like a Nicholas Sparks movie with gravitas.
    [6]

    Thomas Inskeep: Friends compare Adele’s 21 to Thriller in commercial behemoth terms; a more accurate comparison is to Norah Jones’s Come Away with Me, a freak AC monster that crossed over to every quadrant of the music-buying public imaginable (and dominated the Grammys too). Remember Jones’s follow-up? Feels Like Home famously sold 1M+ in its opening week, and Adele’s 25 may well do the same. And it may not suffer the same fate as Home. Where that album made a left turn, based on “Hello” Adele offers more overblown drama queen balladry. Nothing about this song is surprising to anyone who heard 21. Is this quote-unquote quality? Sure. Does that matter? Not a bit.
    [3]

    Jessica Doyle: I know everyone started making Lionel Richie jokes, but I can’t be the first person to think that Todd Rundgren is the better referent. He said, “Maybe I think too much,” then shrugged, offered freedom as a balm, and hoped he might stay the night anyway. She apologizes for talking too much about herself, and it’s not clear whether it’s heartfelt or a repeat of a criticism flung in her face. (Or both.) He argued for inertia; she alternates between not wanting to hurt her ex and resenting the lack of proof that her ex is hurt. Her “Hello” thus turns into an assertion of the value of passion, even if passion means packing ten emotions into an eight-line chorus and risking looking neurotic or selfish or pathetic or all of those things. I don’t gravitate toward this song, but then it makes me think of songs that I did gravitate to during breakups — Fiona Apple snarling “Fuckin’ go,” in 2001, Sarah McLachlan coming down hard on “How stupid could I be” three years later. I’m glad this “Hello” exists. I hope I never need it.
    [6]

    Alfred Soto: “Rolling in the Deep” sounded OK on the radio, the rest were easier to ignore, and that was the extent of my reaction to the 2011 phenomenon. Sam Smith and to a lesser extent Jessie Ware have benefitted from the renewed attention to belting Britishes, naturally. Navigating the familiar waters of “Hello,” Adele commits no mistakes from which her audience might recoil: the manipulation of silence and climax, the ginned-up drama, harmonies more interesting than the main vocal. Also, Neil Diamond’s “Hello Again” remains a supermarket staple. 
    [4]

    Katherine St Asaph: There’s a GIF going around my and perhaps your feed. You have almost certainly seen it: Taylor Swift getting memed on at some unspecified awards show by a cackling Adele. There’s a lot to be said (but not here) about competition between female artists and the stan-weaponizing and Team Edwardizing of everything, but it’s fitting because Adele does outdo Swift in one key respect: she is the most populist artist we have. My sister and her husband are visiting my mother and me this week: a casual radio listener, a Kings of Leon type, a classic-rock purist, and, uh, well; yet we have common ground. One of the first things he asked me was whether I’d heard the new Adele song. My mother asked if I’d cried. When we were out driving and “Hello” came on the radio, our conversation stopped dead. Between the three of us we have burst into every part of the chorus. I asked them how many times they sang it when I wasn’t around; they estimated twenty-two, then did it again. I’m writing this well before “Hello” would have gone No. 1 on Thursday — hello from the other side of the week! — and I’ve only edited this sentence on a chart-date technicality. You will hear a lot about “Hello.” You will hear a lot about how “Hello” is authentic when it uses every cheap production trick in the studio: cranking that first “hello” up to max and possibly even to Max; gently massaging the melody with Autotune. (Which is fine, because in case you forgot, Adele just got vocal surgery — you know, the same sort of surgery that destroyed Julie Andrews’ voice; I suppose you’re also against casts.) You may or may not hear that Adele’s schtick at this point is the female version of Crap Emails From a Dude (or, in other words, of Drake). You probably won’t hear that it’s a fourth-album-single version of “Set Fire to the Rain.” But there is something to be said for a song that tries to be all things to all people and largely is.
    [6]

    Mo Kim: The words don’t quite register as words, only as temporal, spatial, emotional distances: a million miles, when we were younger and free, hello from the other side, must have called a thousand times. Adele’s voice has the quality of a landscape, wrought from earthly feeling, but the impression I get from my drive-by listen of “Hello” is of a pretty, melancholy scene I will glimpse from my car window then never think of again. 
    [5]

    Edward Okulicz: This is more or less “Someone Like You” with the added politeness of calling before you show up out of the blue, uninvited. Sadly that politeness goes out of the window in the chorus, where Adele flails around trying to hit an emotion, any emotion. If ever a big moment of “feeling it” felt obligatory and forced, this is it. It’s a shame because the verses are really kind of lovely. Perhaps a cover of “Telephone Line” by ELO as a B-side is called for as an album bonus track.
    [4]

    Will Adams: There’s a warm comfort in the way “Hello” picks up exactly where “Someone Like You” left off: it’s years later, Adele has calmed herself from showing up uninvited, and yet the wound still feels fresh. In an industry where a three year absence might as well be millennia, Adele’s return feels as natural as her ability to command attention in the haunting first verse. There’s a bit of histrionics here (was the choir necessary?), and the song really could have used an actual bridge, but overall “Hello” is a welcome return.
    [7]

    Scott Mildenhall: Adele is, it could be argued, quite successful, and it’s good to hear her admit that. No longer is she the one left behind, spurned and stuck on the inside, but the one who made it outside, callously forgetting her prior loves and mistakes in the process. “Hello” is about the arrogance of thinking you can outgrow a person or place when they’re bound up in so much meaning and feeling, listening to “Hometown Glory” — which you wrote — and thinking “oh”. Only it’s not vocalised as an “oh.” It’s an unburdening wail, doomed to find only silence as a response. For once, the pity isn’t unequivocal.
    [7]

    Brad Shoup: A little unlike her previous world-smashers, “Hello” forsakes the throughline for lurching breakthroughs. She’s only gotten better at inhabitation: she can be a body, or she can be a ghost. The drums are drowning, echoes stain the air. It’s as dreadful as pop can get.
    [8]

  • Kacey Musgraves ft. Willie Nelson – Are You Sure

    …only Kacey and Willie… hey, wait…


    [Video][Website]
    [5.86]

    John Seroff: Hard as I tried to warm to it, Pageant Material ultimately rates as something of a sophomore slump. There’s a lack of snap and a hint of formula that suggests the creeping commodification of Musgraves as brand. It’s perhaps telling that two of her best collaborators, Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark, are currently at work on a Hee Haw musical; much of Pageant resonates as first draft work for Kacey! on Broadway. Not, he hastily added, that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that; when the song-and-dance flash matches up with Musgraves’ considerable talent just right, there are a few show-stopping singles to be found. Months later, I continue to return to “High Time” and “This Town” and the ecstatically glum, Danny Elfman-filtered country of “Fine.” That last one provides the fig leaf to an extended “hidden track” (people still do this apparently): a cover of the 1965 Willie Nelson minor classic “Are You Sure.” Nelson’s original is demo raw and no vacancy sad, evoking Hank and Patsy and the grit in the bottom of a last call shotglass. Musgraves’ take feels glossily misplaced, genuflecting in the direction of Outlaw Life under an honest-to-god disco ball, wrapping up the ending with a bow so pretty and final that it demands a round-robin Muppet nod. I’m not doubting the intention or the devotion, but the untarnished charm of the old crooked shack don’t quite feel the same with marble in the outhouse.
    [5]

    Alfred Soto: You want atmosphere? Here it is: yards of pedal steel lines, echo, Willie Nelson plucking those gut strings. On Pageant Material, positioned as the closer, this track evaporated. Recommended to friends who say they don’t like country “except Johnny Cash.”
    [5]

    Thomas Inskeep: Musgraves continues to prove why she’s the non-country fan’s country artist of choice: the arrangement is trapped in 1968 amber, all clichéd slide guitar, and you can hear how hard she’s trying. She’s outclassed not just by Nelson’s song, but by his singing as well. 
    [3]

    Nina Lea Oishi: I nearly missed “Are You Sure” on my first listen of Pagent Material, so overshadowed it was by cheesy fare like “Biscuits.” But it truly is a gem. The song, a mournful fifty-year-old Willie Nelson tune, is perfectly apt for Musgraves, whose Same Trailer Different Park captured a unique voice in the country world — one could comfortably sing midtempo liberal-minded anthems and just as easily transition to the melancholy laments of the downwardly mobile. But what makes “Are You Sure” feel so special to me is the pure sweetness of it, Willie Nelson’s rough croon against Musgraves’s earnestness, country music’s old guard and its new champion, the twang of Shotgun Willie’s guitar trigger along with Musgraves’s backing band drawing a line from 1965 to 2015. “Are You Sure” is worth a listen; it’s not only an homage to country music’s traditions, but a hopeful glimpse of the future.
    [7]

    Micha Cavaseno: I mean, it’d be pretty hard to screw up an easy sell like this, and placing the ol’ stranger on it doesn’t hurt any, does it? 
    [8]

    Anthony Easton: Willie Nelson’s Texas ballads are a genre onto themselves, and in the last couple of years, maybe for reasons of preserving his voice, he has returned to them. They were also wry and a little sad, but being so close to death, there is an added gravitas. For all of her jokes, hee-haw ironic staging and self conscious myth making, I suspect Musgraves knows this, and so the first half of this has that heart breaking obsession — it isn’t quite Willie. She is making an argument to be part of the Family, and the resemblance is strong. When Nelson moves in, he destroys any place Musgraves might have. Nelson is such a generous performer, and he has dueted with everyone; he usually strengthens his partner. There is a mutual generosity of spirit, but maybe because they aren’t actually dueting, or maybe because Musgraves is operating with an anxiety of influence, or maybe because Nelson has been doing this for decades much better, or maybe because Nelson has just gotten really really interesting in the last couple of albums, this kind of fails in an essential way. Go back and listen to “Mendocino County Line” with Lee Ann Womack, or “You Remain” with Sheryl Crow or almost anything on his album of duets with work by women, To All the Girls, to figure out exactly how this might work better. 
    [4]

    Brad Shoup: I spent a lot of nights at the Horseshoe Lounge, rarely thinking about the other barflies and the circumstances that brought them, day in and day out, to a cash-only beer-and-setups bar. When I did think about it, I chalked up everyone’s presence to camaraderie. It was a pleasant way to spend some hours: the jukebox was stocked with Kris and Willie and the Possum, pool was three quarters a game, shuffleboard was free, and Bill came by every week to sell his homemade jerky. You couldn’t smoke in the bar — a local TV station had used the Horseshoe for an hidden-camera exposé — but for some reason the tiny hall between the office and the back door was fine. Plus I spent a few months flirting with a bartender, up until she moved to Tennessee. But I stuck around. We all did. A good bar will let you be lonesome, unless you want to shoot the shit. Stare at the screens, glance at the newcomers, ask about the bartender’s band. It’s the secret depressant, and while I do all my drinking at coffeeshops and sports bars nowadays, I remember the wonderful, narcotic hold.
    [9]

  • J. Balvin – Ginza

    …how the J. flows…


    [Video][Website]
    [6.62]

    Alfred Soto: The preset and the electronic affect on the voice keep things to a becoming simmer, ideal for dancing after dinner at a wedding. Reggaetón at its most pleasant and functional.
    [6]

    Jonathan Bogart: I like reggaetón best when it’s straight down the line like this, a simple plaintive seduction, all rhythm and vocal textures. Balvin doesn’t have the effortless authority of Daddy Yankee or the forceful personality of Wisin (con or sin Yandel), so he has to rely on a slippery charm that the low-key production (in the extended family of “Hotline Bling,” though “Ginza” was released earlier) only makes more effective. If reggaetón were made by Sarah Records, it might sound like this.
    [9]

    Patrick St. Michel: It’s very nice of J. Balvin to name this vaguely futuristic sounding track after a part of Tokyo that, at this point, is basically a museum to the Bubble Era (and where a Coors Light will cost you like $8). Video aside, “Ginza” is a nice bit of muted reggeatón that aims to be sleek and achieves that, even if the shiny exterior isn’t enough to take this to another level.
    [6]

    Micha Cavaseno: Buoyant and Coca-Cola splashes of a bubble-bath making it a playful sea beneath the typical reggaetón tidal stir. Here J. Balvin’s Auto-Tuned croon doesn’t occupy the dragged out mildewy feel of “Ay Vamos” but instead serves to navigate all this fizz with finesse.
    [7]

    Brad Shoup: A worthy entry to the canon of songs celebrating genres. It’s so chill, which is another way of saying it’s focused on what matters. The midrange synth figure patters pleasantly — it’s amazing how Balvin and company keep this from getting purely, dreadfully, existential.
    [8]

    Thomas Inskeep: The most painfully boilerplate, lowest common denominator reggaetón, with nothing to make it stand out.
    [3]

    Juana Giaimo: “Ginza” is all about lightness — especially when compared to the dull “Ay, Vamos.” The voice doesn’t add intensity, but playfully alters the melody in a continuous line. Considering that “Ginza” is about attraction in the dancefloor and its different steps to get the girl — “Love is now tourism/ saying no to the next one with romanticism” — the shallowness of the music seems to fit well. 
    [7]

    John Seroff: A sinuous beat, surprisingly sparse synth marimba, and heaping helpings of what he’d appreciate you calling the T-Pain Effect make “Ginza” a zipless crossover reggaetón track, more steeped in trap than salsa. Eminently remixable, which I presume is the point.
    [7]

  • Enya – Echoes In Rain

    Who can say where the score goes…?


    [Video][Website]
    [5.11]

    Ramzi Awn: It’s hard to know what to say about Enya. I will definitely be playing “Echoes In Rain” wherever I am for Thanksgiving. I might even buy it for someone as a gift. Will it be available as a single on CD? Probably not, which is a shame. Enya’s needlework approach to song-making is almost akin to the America’s Next Top Model television franchise pioneered by Tyra Banks: sure, there may be some changes from season to season, but the formula’s always the same, and it always works. I have nothing but thanks for Enya, and however many homages to rain she wishes to write.
    [8]

    Katherine St Asaph: You wouldn’t think it’s possible to play the authenticity game in the New Age/classical crossover world, but it totally is and I totally did. The artistry spectrum goes something like this: a great hypothetical artistic and/or ethereal land to one side, fillable by whoever you’re a fan of; then maybe Clannad, Moya Brennan solo, Enya after her, onward and backward through Hayley Westenra and Celtic Woman and Susan Boyle and Katherine Jenkins. There’s a lot to unpack here, but at least part of it is a fear of pop. Because you cannot tell me “Echoes in Rain” is not based on, or at least in passing acquaintance with, “Alone.” A triumphant, expensive orchestral bridge to “Alone” that never returns to the chorus.
    [4]

    Patrick St. Michel: Less a song and more a daily affirmation, this is like a pool you just float on to refresh your brain. That’s been my image of Enya, based on morning car-pool radio and various YouTube memorial videos using “Only Time,” as music to soak yourself in to keep going forward. “Echoes In Rain” is more direct about that — the message boils down to “time moves on, but I can deal” — and just as vaguely inspirational as her other big songs, and like them they are fine but a little too grand in scope.
    [5]

    Alfred Soto: Where once her Fairlights spoke Gaelic, she now ladles inspirational hokum over orchestral stabs with a firm eye on Ron Howard’s agent. Nevertheless, like Sade, her fan base fascinates me. Expect this new album to linger as a catalog item for years. 
    [2]

    Micha Cavaseno: There’s a goofiness to the “alleluia” that implies an odd amount of tongue in cheek for an Enya song, but beyond that it IS an Enya song. Not much else to say more or less, other than I can’t find it being very inspiring for those moments of odd gravity, nor will this one probably be inexplicably flipped into a dancehall classic so oh well.
    [4]

    John Seroff: Oh sure, it seems soporific at first, but when the beat drops and the 808’s kick in, you’re gonna lose your MIND. +1 for the Young Thug guest spot, most unexpected.
    [3]

    Brad Shoup: Stately, synthesized, triumphant.
    [7]

    Jessica Doyle: My favorite Enya song is “Anywhere Is”; I remember being struck by the poignancy of You go there, you’re gone forever / I go there, I lose my way / We stay here, we’re not together against an increasingly insistent snare drum. It gave the song a propulsion that “Echoes in Rain” doesn’t have. I think the combination of the alleluias and the repeated strings are supposed to suggest hope, or gratitude, or both; as if Enya admired “Pied Beauty” but wanted something quieter and more determined. But she and the strings stay static when I want them to move.
    [4]

    Thomas Inskeep: One of the best pieces of writing I’ve come across in the past decade is Luke Turner’s “25 Years On” reappraisal of Enya’s Watermark, the 1988 album that made her a global superstar. Reading it earlier this year, anthologized in the 33 1/3 book How To Write About Music, made me decide to do a deep dive into her discography — easy, as just about every one of her albums is available for $1 at my local (San Francisco) music temple, Amoeba. To my surprise, having previously only been familiar with Enya via her hit singles, I’ve discovered a catalog that’s rich in texture, some superb production courtesy of Nicky Ryan, and glorious multi-tracked harmonies, which are all Enya. (Her other collaborator, Ryan’s wife Roma, writes most of Enya’s lyrics.) Her sound is incredibly enveloping, and that continues on “Echoes In Rain,” complete with synthesized strings, an electric piano bridge, and those remarkable, heavily layered vocals. The studio prowess of Enya and the Ryans shouldn’t be understated; they know precisely what they’re doing, and what they do results in maximum impact. This is a gorgeous, sumptuous single, same as it ever was — which in this case is a very good thing.
    [9]

  • Ty Dolla $ign ft. Future & Rae Sremmurd – Blasé

    But a less than blasé score…


    [Video][Website]
    [6.43]

    Thomas Inskeep: I’ve never cared for any of the artists involved much, before. But something about this pulls me in — actually, multiple somethings. Maybe it’s DJ Spinz’s production, which is spare, synthy and has a chorus bassline to devastate your woofers. Maybe it’s the Nate Dogg callout. Maybe repeated exposure to Future is breaking down my resistance, and I’m starting to appreciate his voice almost as another instrument — and that as goes my reaction to Future, so goes my reaction to Ty Dolla $ign. Maybe it’s that I read the recent GQ article on Magic City and now feel like I have a much better understanding of ATL’s strip-club music scene, into which Ty$, Future, and Rae Sremmurd all fit. Maybe it’s the brilliant-stupid rhymes like “blasé/Maserati”. It’s all of these; resistance is futile.
    [9]

    Andy Hutchins: While today’s other anthemic rap play featuring Future tries so hard to make “Them boys up to something” more than a tease, Ty$ and the Sremmers (a band I would see in concert, for the record) have a bit more vividity to their tale of semi-bored consumption, mostly thanks to the miscreants from Mississippi. Ty, who outsings Mr. Cash on the hook, isn’t saying much new, actually: His accomplishment here is saying “Nate Dogg” and excising the O entirely from his surname. But Slim Jimmy and Swae Lee are here to spout swaggy shit for eight bars each, and between “Shawty crunk drunk, fuckin’ up her new Louboutins,” “Ball on these niggas, I need knee replacements” and “I was (uh) hopin’ you were salty when you saw me,” there’s plenty of sauce on the plate. There’s a great Tumblr post to be written on their deliveries (it’s “BALL on THESE NIGgas, I NEED KNEE rePLACEments”), too, and it’s nice to know that DJ Spinz was able to recycle the malfunctioning arcade cabinet from The Throne’s “Made in America.”
    [8]

    Megan Harrington: This should be better than it is. There’s a mostly effective verse from Ty Dolla $ign, a great verse from Swae Lee, and Future relegated to the hook. But the production is dated, and worse, a boring hindrance to a group so bubbling over with inventiveness. 
    [4]

    Alfred Soto: Simulating ennui is hard without sounding like you’re steeped in ennui. From Rae and Future’s rhymes it’s obvious to me that the title refers to their unobtrusive skill. DJ Spinz’s spare track complements them.
    [7]

    Brad Shoup: That track is sly: it’s like a diorama of a cartoon factory. The guys aren’t as sly, but I love the idea of going through the motions so hard you break the looking glass.
    [7]

    Crystal Leww:Blasé” has grown on me immensely on the last couple of months, quickly becoming one of the most underrated tracks of 2015. This song, built on a kinda silly Future hook, has held up at work, at bus stops, in the club, in the car. Everyone has done better, but everyone sounds perfectly fine here, too.
    [7]

    Micha Cavaseno: Look, listen, I’m not going to tell you this generic filler DJ Spinz track with throwaway performances by Future and the two weirdos in Rae Sremmurd is worth your time. It’s not, the same way “Drop That Kitty” wasn’t, as it’s yet another example of cynical “Well, Ty can write hooks! He’s been writing hooks for disposable singles for half the business this past year! Let him fulfill that role ON HIS OWN DAMN SONG!” This song is what the radio pushed, and not the minimal goth-dread of DJ Mustard and Mike Free reuniting on “Only Right” (a testimony of the perfection of the Pushaz axis, marred by a video where even scumbag savant Joe Moses can’t make beating up a mentally disabled person enjoyable), which astounds me. But it’s all good, guys, because, Ty is dropping an album! Its got Sa-Ra and Babyface on it, and this is how he’s going to get out of this ridiculous novelty position of being some T-Pain for ratchet, and simply be the artist he wants to be. And we’re all buying the album, right?
    [3]

  • Drake & Future – Jumpman

    There’s also a video game. But it isn’t this


    [Video][Website]
    [5.00]

    Alfred Soto: The return of zombie Future, rapping to the rhythm of Drake’s metronome. 
    [3]

    Thomas Inskeep: Or, 2015: the year I learned to stop worrying and embrace Future. I’ve liked Drake for a while, so that was never the issue. Metro Boomin’s track slays. And now that I’m copacetic with Future, it all comes together. “Chanel number nine, Chanel number five, now you got both.” 
    [7]

    Micha Cavaseno: *cue IG meme of Drakk scowling and looking gross in some sweats with an ugly beard*, *cue IG meme of Russell Wilson being haunted by a ghostly aura of Future going “Sensational”*, *cue a formula for the dilution of a pure element (namely Future), and the addition of artificial sweet-boy sweeteners that will inevitably lead to cancer (namely Drakk)*, *cue me deleting the whole internet within the week*, *cue me listening to rappers rapping well and not foisting out generic retail albums and mistagging them “mixtapes” because labels are now trying to kill the old industry means of making song selection happen*,*cue me continuously amazed at how Honest had better than anything on here*
    [3]

    Andy Hutchins: More impressively boring: The mini-hook(s) here, which use(s) repetition to make sure the idea that them boys (are) up to something by drilling into it your head with six doses, or gifted melodists Drake and Future settling for essentially 1.5 cadences each over an endless 205 seconds? “Nobu, Nobu, Nobu, Nobu, Nobu, Nobu” makes me smirk every time, and is a totally unintentional callback to Future filling a bar with “Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo” on “Racks,” a 2011 song that seems to be from far further in the past. As proof of the concept that this duo can probably say literally anything over a Metro Boomin beat and make it popular, “Jumpman” holds some appeal; as a song, not so much.
    [5]

    Brad Shoup: We ever seen Drakk and that crow in the same place? It’s an advanced class in cadence — constructing a flow around a snowclone and a grab-bag of boasts. On Twitter, it’s a [10] for sure.
    [5]

    Crystal Leww: At this point, I’m usually grumpy when a new Drake or Future release drops, complaining about how all this stuff is mostly unlistenable (at a computer, where I usually am listening to this stuff for the first time), but you can still find me shouting all the words in the club. What’s the truth? (The truth is that this is great. I am wrong.)
    [7]

  • Los Horóscopos De Durango – Estoy Con Otro En La Cama

    No, no, honey I’m not good. Or am I?


    [Video][Website]
    [6.57]

    Thomas Inskeep: Los Horóscopos De Durango are one of the few banda groups fronted by women, in this case Vicky and Marisol Terrazas. If their discography — and especially their videography — is anything to go by, they like to drink, they like to party, and they like men. “I’m In Bed With Someone Else,” they sing, while the brass oompahs behind them. I like their style.
    [7]

    Alfred Soto: This solid example of banda comes from two women who put up with no shit. All they ask is that you, the boyfriend, please note that they’ve slept with several men and will sleep with several more and will remind your friends. And if you don’t like the message, then the horns will turn your eardrums to rubble.
    [6]

    Juana Giaimo: This is supposed to be a funny song, but while the disjointed brass joins this mood, the deep vocals overshadow the witty vengeful attitude of the lyrics.
    [4]

    Josh Langhoff: In pop music, real-time sex narratives are fairly easy to come by, but fewer singers have the cuernos to recount their infidelity while it happens, making “Cama” an unexpectedly nasty delight. When songwriter Espinoza Paz debuted the song last year, it seemed a tossed-off joke, like one of Toby Keith’s bus songs. Paz is hyper-prolific and usually maudlin, the driving force behind many drippy ballads about corazones. Vicky Terrazas (the brunette Horóscopo) said in a recent interview that “Paz es un Shakespeare,” which makes sense if we’re comparing their use of horns metaphors, but otherwise not so much. In “Cama,” though, he gives the Terrazas sisters a stately framework to exact diabolical revenge on their lovers, baptizing their anonymous new lays with the name of “amante” and hurling small-dick insults. Speaking of which — and notwithstanding the trenchant realism of the video — which fucking hotel hands out fruit baskets containing not just giant zucchinis, but eggplants? Are they conducting this tryst at the county fair?
    [7]

    Andy Hutchins: This is one of the funniest songs I’ve heard this year. In before the English-language remake, which will no doubt cut straight to the “He’s bigger than you!” reveal that plays as both wisely cutting and wistfully hurt here and make it a cruder joke. (But seriously, someone give this song to Rihanna.)
    [7]

    Jonathan Bogart: Straight-ahead baller ranchera, two feet on the ground and lungs blowing for all they’re worth. The tuba is what gives the song its languorous kick; the wind flourishes are cute, but it’s that blarting low end that backs up these two unflappable divas narrating their unabashed cougardom.
    [8]

    Megan Harrington: The overtly sexy title is a bit misleading, this is more like an anthem, a rally cry for the cheating heart. The interplay between the horns and the tubas suggests something like a devil on one shoulder and a worse devil on the other shoulder, suggesting bad ideas and then urging the reciprocal bad behavior. There’s nothing very seductive about “Estoy Con Otro En La Cama” but it makes infidelity sound as fun as a night of heavy drinking.
    [7]

  • Dënver – Mai Lov

    Chilean duo survives two PC Music comparisons in chipper style.


    [Video][Website]
    [6.56]

    Will Adams: Having been spoiled by Yasutaka Nakata’s immersive electroscapes with Perfume for so long, “Mai Lov” sounds thin and stiff by comparison. There’s still lots to like here though, from Mariana Montenegro’s carbonated vocal to the synth guitar solo on the bridge.
    [6]

    Juana Giaimo: Dënver knows adolescent dreams well enough to distort them completely. “Mai Lov” tells a specific situation that has appeared many times in movies: being behind the boy you like on his motorcycle, clutching his back and feeling the adrenaline inside of you. But while in movies, the pleasure lies in being protected by your boy, “Mai Lov” is instead about the seductive power of danger. Although the images are more shocking than previously, they are still subtle and include plain romantic images — “if I make the effort/I can even be your Milky Way” — in between sinister ones. If in the movie scene, the director would have chosen a placid song to transmit freedom, Dënver instead chose the artificial sound of J-Pop to reflect their double intentions; although the voice may be childish and the scene quite innocent, inside her head she is fully conscious of her sinful pleasures, as can be shown in the prechorus: “Come on, speed up, mai love/that death awaits us,” Mariana sings first and one may think that it alludes to the vertigo of speed, but she then pushes the limit further in the second line: “Do it with more strength, mai love/that death ashames me.”
    [9]

    Iain Mew: There’s something in the brash cheapness of “Mai Lov,” its high-pitched in-your-face eagerness, which makes me think of PC Music and the like. Dënver keep going further, though, not just holding hyper-pop oddity in tongs at arm’s length, but seeing how far they can push it, what else they can add to it to make it flash and bang, to cause a reaction and create something new and more fun. The resultant electro-disco explosion is a delightful one.
    [8]

    Alfred Soto: Those baseball stadium pep rally synths have the density of the vocals, i.e. helium. 
    [5]

    Thomas Inskeep: Vocals a bit twee for my taste, music a bit too pneumatic.  
    [4]

    John Seroff: Here’s a Mad-Lib amalgam of sounds and concepts that would’ve been more or less unimaginable in the pre-internet era: an umlauted, Chilean, indie-pop duo whose lead single fronts remixed Munch cover art, bleeps and whorls like PC Music, and Google-Translates what sounds like candied and innocuous Spanglish lyrics into semi-comprehensible vampgoth (“Do it, harder harder / Do it Mai Lov/That death shames me and my back”). “Mai Love” is a strangely appealing dust devil, well-served by spending the brunt of its pastel fury in a tidy three minutes.
    [7]

    Micha Cavaseno: Its chipper, mockingly so, but you can’t say you wouldn’t think it was cute in the right time or place.
    [5]

    Edward Okulicz: The first thing this reminded me of was Yellow Note vs Pukka’s “Naked, Drunk and Horny,” which I mean as high praise. The end reminds me of “Barbie Girl,” which I also mean as high praise. Slowed down, I could believe it was the work of a moonlighting Annie or Betty Who, which is fun to imagine, but please don’t test this theory out as I bet slowing it down sounds horrible.
    [8]

    David Sheffieck: The sugar rush of the synths grows unexpectedly grating shortly after the bridge, but there’s a truly thrilling 2-minute pop song located here, stretched just a little longer than it can bear.
    [7]