Pop, to two decimal places.
And that wraps it up for Amnesty Week and our coverage for the year! The Singles Jukebox will be on hiatus until January 2016. In the meantime, our 2015 champion, Susanne Sundfør, has arrived to cast Christmas spells on you:
To everyone involved with making this site the great place that it is — writers, editors, readers, commenters — we thank you so much for your continued support. We hope you have a wonderful holidays and great rest of your year.
See you in 2016.
Susannta Sundfør
Last one turn out the lights. See you in 2016.
Thomas Inskeep: Proof that I don’t love all Christmas music, because I thoroughly loathe this. The reasons are myriad: the song itself is an overwrought chamber music plod, the arrangement is sprinkled with both fairy dust and Radical Faerie dust (i.e precious precious precious), and Bond’s voice makes me long for the purity of — well, anyone’s. V’s voice is one I just cannot get down with; it’s got the clarity of one singing with a throatful of crushed glass, and v’s singing style is like Alan Cumming under heavy sedation. I never particularly cared for Kiki & Herb (of which Bond was half), but I didn’t hate them. This, I fairly do.
[1]
Micha Cavaseno: Without a doubt this might be the most maudlin Christmas song to emerge yet, and I’m not sure why. I mean, this is an excellent picture of isolation from the world of overdone orthodoxy in the holidays and everyone likes a good melodramatic dirge and all for a ballad. But at the same time there’s no implicit description of what exactly makes the Christmas season suck when people get their hands on it. You don’t have to directly connect it to say, a parent blackening another parent’s eye on Black Friday for the new hot animatronic toy or whatever, nor do you have to address weird Starbucks cup tantrums by people in their over-spaced Xmas lane. But like, explain exactly why you’re singing on such a grave tendency. I GET IT all the same but like, on paper this is just really lofty and condescending, even for an embittered cynic like me.
[3]
Iain Mew: Bond’s performance is winningly creepy, and I dig the “all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for a deep primeval horror” vibe that the song’s dessicated crawl offers. It’s only when it fails to build to a specific horror, and instead switches over to fairies bringing the world to light, that it begins to drag.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: I associate all slow, mannered cabaret music with Weill and particularly Brecht, so I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and the heavy anti-bourgeoise irony to be revealed; but no, it seems that if v is not perfectly sincere, neither is v interested in purely negative sloganeering. Forging new traditions, new kinds of hope, new kinds of community out of the wreckage of neoliberal capitalism is a worthy end in itself, and maybe you don’t have to smash the old system to pieces before you start building a new one on top of it.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Bond’s voice is one of the great gifts in the last decade or so, and v’s ability to shift and move from a punk screech to a lusciously creamy alto has been a delight. The move from camp to seriousness, from an aggressive un-style to a hyper realism, is even more delightsome. This is a beautiful, both inside (literally, it could be constructed as a kind of queer Christian apologia) and outside (about how this apologia cannot be believed because of sad hostility). All of that said, how v thinks that the isolation is not only about a kind of gelded neutrality, but actually about having sex — and about how reconciling the inside/outside pagan/christian problem is a reconciling of bodies. Weirdly, this might be on the more sophisticated theological arguments in pop form I’ve heard, and from someone whose previous genius was a cobbled together camp atrocity, I’m moved to tears.
[9]
Rebecca A. Gowns: Bond delivers in the Brecht/Weill vein, dancing between camp and dead-seriousness. Arch and pointed, as well as broad and hammy, it’s the kind of number that would bring down the house in a drag show or cabaret, but leaves you wanting more in its plain MP3 form. Nevertheless, this is definitely a track to slip into all my future Christmas playlists.
[7]
Megan Harrington: I love Christmas music, truly. It’s a bit hereditary, a sort of divine right of kings that I used to be quite snobby about. I’m absolutely guilty of busting out U2’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” in the middle of summer because it seems so arbitrary to limit it to one month, as though every Christmas is the same and listening to a favorite U2 song is the best way to mark it. No, every Christmas is different and my sentiments towards the holiday wax and wane like the moon. Some years are genuinely nice, I can’t deny that, but most are nasty and filled with grueling fake friendliness and untold hours mingling with people that same aforementioned genetic gift damned me to walk my life on Earth alongside. “Christmas Spells” is for those latter occasions, late afternoons on sunless days when you’re shoved into a corner and ignored, forced to watch toddlers perform their dance recitals over and over and over and over and over.
[10]
Will Adams: Imogen Heap’s “Just For Now” opened up to me the concept of songs about Christmas that countered the forced joy that comes with so much holiday music; instead of gazing twinkle-eyed at the tree or fireplace or the manger, it revealed a strained family dynamic just trying to hold it together over dinner. I imagine “Christmas Spells” could have worked similarly, but every element, from Justin Vivian Bond’s showy vocal to the plinky piano, is pure histrionics. It ends up being about as cloying as what’s being piped through the floors of Macy’s during shopping season (though if this were piped through Macy’s during shopping season, that would be hilarious).
[3]
Brad Shoup: The sentiment is, in its own way, as sentimental as any other religious holiday tradition. But there’s nothing huffy or cutesy about Bond’s expression of this sentiment: devotion and disappointment are plainly stated over downtown woodwinds and chilled hallway piano. By the end — when the song is carried to its climax upon Bond’s slow vibrato — the atmosphere has taken on a holy shimmer.
[7]
Settle up now, please. Call cabs as needs them…
Jonathan Bogart: The loudness wars meet Townes Van Zandt.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: Befitting a Red Dirt band, Turnpike Troubadours’ self-titled album from this year made the top 5 of the US country, folk, and rock charts. You could call them Americana, I suppose, but that feels lazy. This is country with some Cajun touches (especially in the fiddling), but just as clearly influenced by the Band as by the Kentucky HeadHunters. “The Bird Hunters” is a stately, sad waltz, reminiscing about an old love vis-à-vis bird hunting — really — and it works. Leader Evan Felker’s vocals are affective and affecting, because he clearly believes in what he’s singing (which he wrote himself), and after just one listen, so did I.
[7]
Iain Mew: I’m not even going home at Christmas this year (well, not to my home) and shooting is a long way from my choice of hobby, but I totally get this — falling into the long-familiar with a mix of nostalgia, relief and uneasiness, trying to deal with all the stresses and dramas of a different world by putting them into this one. The song’s fulsome swing and interweaving of the here and there strikes just the right kind of intensity.
[7]
Anthony Easton: There might be too many details here — too many attempts to be writerly, too much work at making it sound like a poignant short story that it might compromise the song itself. But it slides between rock and Americana, and the narrative itself outside the extraneous details is beautiful. All of that said, I am a sucker for any work of art that features rodeo dances. Extra point for the phrase “go on to hell honey, I’m heading home.”
[7]
Rebecca A. Gowns: A gorgeous poem set to song. The story is not just laid on top of a tune, as it happens sometimes; no, the song structure is a part of the poem’s syntax. The first set of verses vamps for a while on setting the scene of the present, then finally releases into the vulnerable, emotional chorus of memory. Thereafter, the chorus serves as a painful refrain, as it would happen in that moment: trekking through the woods, bird hunting with an old friend and an old dog; throughout the day, memories wash over you, then ebb away. The old hurt is uncovered, but along with it comes the joy of having felt love and friendship in the past, and holding onto the ephemeral pieces of them for as long as you can. It leaves me with an ache, a longing, that feeling of having experienced a story well-told and being unable to bring back the moment of hearing it for the first time. To experience such an ache from a piece of music is a rare joy.
[10]
Mo Kim: My favorite thing about this is its warm, chaotic swirl of strings, how they uplift even as they draw blood. The voice is about as collected as anybody is bound to be in the wake of a breakup (which is to say, not at all), but the chorus grounds it, a promise that the pain means something after all.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: The first comparison that sprang into my mind, because I’m not well-versed in the genre, was Old Crow’s “Sweet Amarillo,” which I adore, and I like this a lot too. But the even slower pace and deliberate narrative also spins it into associations with a more universal folk tradition, as well as making it seem even more like a drinking song, and the song about a guy who shot birds reminds me of a song about a guy who, or at least wanted to, catch fish. I could easily appreciate the words as a poem, but I also like the punchy way Evan Felker sings it, like they’d be punchlines or funny anecdotes if he could just get a little more over it. If the song’s a salve for a memory or a broken heart, the strings sting like iodine on the wound.
[8]
Brad Shoup: There’s no feeling quite like losing grip on your burden. The term of art, I think, is welling up, and to feel that grief rise is a precious thing. The fiddles kick up like fanfare at first; the narrator’s tramping across hills on a quail hunt with his friend Danny. “It’s good to be back in this place,” he thinks. But the light fades, and gradually he becomes the hunted. Hounded by his dreams and failures, conjuring reminders from an offhand comment about his grey hair; in trailing his old hunting dog, left behind in a move to Tulsa, doing just fine by the looks of it; in the shock of a shotgun he hasn’t held in years. At first, the blasts sounded like singing; now they’re the echo of future, faraway fireworks. The band’s yowling waltz doesn’t suggest triumph any more. It sounds like good times gone. “If you married that girl, you’d have married her family,” Danny offers, “you dodged a bullet, my friend” — and Evan Felker spits out the word “bullet” like he’s a .444. The standard country wound-licking tune is a performative thing, with pain channeled into extravagant drinking or punching jukebox buttons through the fourth wall. “The Bird Hunters” beats its narrator to shit, but the well has yet to finally burst. He’ll be carrying his failure down the next hill.
[10]
Last round! Final orders please, and tip your coat-check girl on the way out…
Micha Cavaseno: It doesn’t matter who they back, the Daptone Crew are the most lifeless band in the history of soul, and its remarkable they’ve pulled off this long a con job on the world.
[3]
Thomas Inskeep: My problem with this single is the same problem I have with everything I’ve heard from Jones and her Dap-Kings: it’s essentially soul necrophilia. This is a time capsule of “soul ’67” (which reeks of mothballs and mildew) – and if I want to hear that, I’ll go back and listen to the original article. “Little Boys with Shiny Toys” sounds to me like nothing more than a museum piece, music trapped in amber.
[2]
Anthony Easton: Sharon Jones has a fantastic voice, but like with Leon Bridges, the historical nostalgia gets in the way of figuring out how this music fits in now — and I know she has had a decades long career, and I know that the cult of novelty is as dangerous as the cult of nostalgia.
[6]
Rebecca A. Gowns: Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings are known for being a “revivalist” soul band, a term that suggests imitation. In fact, for a good number of groups in this sub-genre, that’s all that’s going on: a struggle to reproduce a specific sound, leaving small gaps that remind you that they’re recording on high tech equipment into tinny digital files. Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings are in another league entirely. They’re not just a reproduction or dinky cover band — they’ve got their own, full-fledged sound, one that could compete with or be mixed into just about any other song from any era, with no gaps at all. There’s no struggle to recreate, just the pure joy of creation itself. On this single, they’re in top form as the Dap Kings groove with a wonderful percussion/brass arrangement, and Sharon Jones sings with full expression, balancing the irony between the verses beautifully (essentially: a man is excited about his newfound love, and his newfound love is wary; if he’s excited by “newness” alone, then will he still love her when she’s no longer new?). As clean and polished as the recording is, it crackles with the energy of live performance. A damn fine song.
[10]
Megan Harrington: By turns tightly kept behind the wall of sound and a shambolic pile rug romp, “Little Boys With Shiny Toys” fuses the best of soul and rock ‘n roll. There’s a subtext but when the text is simply sweet relief that Sharon Jones is once again commanding a session, she could be singing about anything and I’d nod along.
[8]
Will Adams: The sine curve bassline — rising, falling in regular periods — is a cool move, and Sharon Jones gives a zesty performance that distinguishes herself from the band. I just wish the chorus had more oomph.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The urgency of the chorus compensates for the rote ’60s Atlantic Records arrangement, and by the time the saxphone sasses things up I’d submitted.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: Classic Stax punchiness, classic Philly melodic sophistication, classic auteur-period Motown social commentary. It’s hard to drag something so covered with the patina of respectable history into the disrepectable present. No one could hate this, so it’s hard to see what virtue loving it has.
[7]
Post-millennium nostalgia
Katherine St Asaph: A dangerous, seductive sentence: “I know what I like.” It is dangerous because it lures you away from the zeitgeist, where human conversations and connections are made (not to mention, for me, a living), and from new genres and sounds and ideas, into a musical walled garden impenetrable to anyone but you. It is seductive for the same reasons, and I know what I like. I wouldn’t have expected that to be Autour de Lucie; the two albums I’d heard were the sort of limpid mid-’90s alt-rock and late-’90s trip-hop that leads curmudgeons to dismiss entire genres as creativity landfills. I wouldn’t have even heard this had I not stumbled upon French radio halfway through this year. But it is what I like, and everything I like: wistful Sundfør dramatics, lead bass, swooning and brooding set to guitars, smoke and reverb and everything that makes the world seem that much more cinematic. It innovates nothing — even the rises and falls are timed to the particular formulaic seconds of EDM — and doesn’t need to.
[9]
Jonathan Bogart: I have feelings about that guitar sound, which reminds me uncomfortably of the ways in which I spent the early 2000s (not not electroclash would be how the kids would put it, I think), but who cares about feelings when you’ve got that bassline.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Had this come out between 1998 and 2002 and been sung by some impossibly British woman like Sarah Nixey (the verse even reminds me a bit of Black Box Recorder’s “Sex Life”) I would have basically frothed at the mouth, bought several copies of the CD and put the song on every mix tape I made. The feeling of speed from the drums kicking in over the messy riff is mostly a head-rush than a hip-rush, but how it surges without aggression or forsaking its cool is impressive. Just like that I need to hear if this lot have a second song as good as this.
[9]
Alfred Soto: The guitar squall is impressive, calling to mind Sky Ferreira’s “You’re Not the One,” and the other rhythmic tricks aren’t bad either.
[7]
Megan Harrington: Smooth, effortless, bubbling with carbonation — “Ta Lumière Particulière” disguises all the make-up and photoshop and angles that go into capturing one’s special light. I should feel envious but I’m just a little sad.
[6]
Brad Shoup: It has one of my favorite nighttime casts: partying while hidden from an orange-black sky. The guitars stretch and lacerate; the bass sounds like a giant grunting. They’re wide-eyed and still luxuriating. Leulliot sings of border crossings and traffickers; I imagine passing under the right door will bring that sense of escape.
[7]
Madeleine Lee: I’m so stuck on that scratchy, sun-faded guitar that I didn’t notice until a few listens later how sleek and fully shaded the electronic environment is underneath it. It’s just the right texture to keep it from sounding too manicured.
[7]
Given the temperatures, it’s an ideal summer song in December.
Juana Giaimo: Those plain piano chords reflect the enjoyment and lack of responsability of summer vacations. They cool the song down just like being on vacations make the excessively hot weather be enjoyable: you just can’t complain if you are by the pool in long sunny afternoons in between laughs.
[8]
Brad Shoup: For something that longs for endless summer, “Eterno Verão” sure lets the chill in. And that’s fine: I wish fall lasted half the year. A pushed-up piano unleashes jazzy peals, and on the refrain, Mahmundi affects a similar resonance. It’s like a Terence Boylan tune of the mind: yearning and cold and comfortable.
[8]
Thomas Inskeep: Gorgeous piano-anchored Brazilian pop with the slightest of, to my ears, chillwave touches, that gets bolder as it rolls along. Mahmundi’s got a lovely voice, too. On this song, she comes across as the would-be Carole King of MPB.
[8]
Megan Harrington: Summer is never really like this, maybe that’s why we conduct Amnesty during the winter. Of course, knowing full well that it’s a seemingly endless streak of self created moisture, I’m suddenly fantasizing about silk tank tops and the gentlest breezes and evenings that stretch until midnight. “Eterno Verão” is a powerful vision, especially when there’s no predictable misery to prove its lie.
[7]
Alfred Soto: This slinks like early eighties Fleetwood Mac, what with the piano and that excellent guitar break at 2:03. It would be a triumph if its brevity had resonance.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: The piano, with its gentle lilt but more complex than necessary harmonics, recalls Vince Guaraldi’s jazzy take on samba, and the guitar that shows up halfway through has the burnished tone of late-70s sophisti-pop (Gerry Rafferty and Phil Keaggy are my touchstones, but there are others). But it’s Mahmundi’s voice, unruffled and dispassionate, but tender, that forms the still center of the song, the uniting force that explains why guitar heroics don’t sound out of place in what is otherwise a skeletal mood piece. A year spent listening closely to Portuguese lyrics that aren’t available anywhere online to check my ears against has made me only appreciate all the more her air of reserved passion, a holding back not out of fear or lack of feeling (the romance is all there in the words), but because undemonstrative people deserve their anthems too.
[10]
Will Adams: Canned piano notwithstanding, “Eterno Verão” delivers on its promise, with a lovely guitar solo as its centerpiece.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: The bouncy, sun-kissed soft-rock piano is a lively, welcoming intro, and if “Eterno Verão” were nothing more than a clever collection of 70s AM radio pop tropes, it’d still sound terrific. But it’s got more than that going for it. In its heyday, this was a mostly male genre, so a female voice immediately adds interest, and doubly so because Mahmundi’s is nimble and chalky. The guitar solo is like a cool drink, entering where you might have expected another verse; it’s like a duet partner more than an instrument. And at three and a half minutes it’s the right length too.
[8]
He’s got the moves like…Jagger?
Crystal Leww: “She Keeps Me Up” is disco-tinged, funky, catchy, and by Nickelback. A band so derided for its use of formula has become, a decade and a half later, quite innovative, keeping up with the sounds of pop music. This belongs on a playlist with songs by good Maroon 5, good Jason Derulo, good Bruno Mars, and good Daft Punk. Nickelback have a lot of self-awareness about their jokey status, certainly a lot more than most “indie” bands, rappers, or DJ producer types. “She Keeps Me Up” is not trying to hide the fact that it’s a song about cocaine disguised as sexual innuendo, as though “right here on the counter” is better about sex than drugs. It’s corny, and yes, creepy when dudes talk about drugs in a sexual way, but as a work of art, a departure from the past, and a statement about what the fuck poptimism in 2015 even really means, this is e v e r y t h i n g.
[9]
Micha Cavaseno: I WAAAS MAAAADE FOR LOVIN YOU, BABYYYY….
[3]
Brad Shoup: In his own way, Chad’s a pop savant, albeit the kind who does his work within strictures: his songs are knotty and clenched, horizontal and grouchy. When the melody breaks through it’s like watching Soyuz 1 touch down. As the years go, Kroeger’s love for dance asserts itself more: “She Keeps Me Up” has those slurping hi-hats, some female counterpoint, some bassy gulps, and some guitar flash borrowed, a 75% speed, from “Couldn’t Get It Right”. Sure, it’s formulaic, but it’s the kind of formula we should be studying harder.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: My theory is that everyone secretly tolerates one of Nickelback’s critically reviled monster hits (mine is “Photograph”). This is probably going to double that number for those who actually listen without dismissal. That riff over the verses could be “Superstition” or something. The call and response of a woman’s voice who represents cocaine is more on the nose than in the nose though.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: Well, I gotta say I never saw Nickelback-doing-“Miss You” coming, which makes this nominally less bad than most of their oeuvre. But god, that would-be-glam-but-fails-at-it chorus, ugh. Also, I don’t ever need to hear Chad Kroeger singing about sex.
[3]
Juana Giaimo: I always knew that my ears didn’t need a “let’s pretend we are as cool as Maroon 5” Nickelback, but now I’ve confirmed it.
[2]
Scott Mildenhall: It’s so funky, it’s so lithe, it’s… still Chad Kroeger, Kroegering away. Rarely is there such a mismatch of singer and song. If anything, he sounds exceptionally Kroegerlike here, and maybe that’s apt, because while Maroon 5’s “Sugar” was supposed to be sweet, his “Coca-Cola rollercoaster” is a reference to coke. That’s right Mary Whitehouse, you heard: hard drugs. Quite why, well who knows, but rock’n’roll needs no reason, grandkidsdad. This could do with another Shayne Ward cover though.
[5]
David Sheffieck: If there was a more unexpected song this year, I didn’t hear it – this is catchier and more shameless than anything Adam Levine’s managed in ages, a genuine delight from a band most often known as a punchline. It marries the thudding slur of Nickelback Classic(TM) to a slinky disco beat that puts bandwagon jumpers of the past few years to shame. This is how you copy a trend: with a sense of elan and an ear for adlibs and hooks that belies your reputation. With a CO-ca-co-LA-ro-LER-coas-TER.
[10]
Megan Harrington: Rock, in general, is floating around like a severed arm in the wreckage of a plane crash at sea. Any newly formed group with a little savvy and a lot of ambition will steer their rock off course — make it glam, make it funk, make it pop — anything but that terrible, fogey dirge. Nickelback don’t have that option because they formed entrenched in rock’s worst qualities. Instead, they emerge from the fog of rock’s great dismembering humbled from their flogging and practically apologetic. Even Chad Kroeger, the once be-noodle haired wretchface and erstwhile frontman of Nickelback’s redemption narrative, has to know how embarrassing he sounds singing a very, very thinly veiled love song to cocaine. Instead of hemming or cringing, he leans into the pie flying at his face. It’s endearing.
[9]
Katherine St Asaph: Nickelback making a disco-funk song about cocaine that’s 1) via sex metaphor 2) Daft Punk vocoders 3) Carly Rae Jepsen’s writers, 4) an uncredited Ali Tamposi as an obvious Avril stand-in 5) “funky little monkey” 6) in 2015, is perhaps the most #nottheonion development of the year. (The second-most, and thematically related, is “Can’t Feel My Face.” This is where we are and what we fund as an industry, folks!) The dreadful punchline is that Chad Kroeger and his… particular vocal form are a much better match for the form than certain other lightweights who’ve made it a cliche.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Four on the floor! Rhythm guitar! She smells just like a flower? Right — it’s Nickleback. Chad Kroeger don’t got the moves like Jagger or the gross of Levine or the venereal of Big Dick at the bar — he’s just another twisted trickster who discovered funk too late to make a difference. But I’ll take it.
[5]
Will Adams: An unfortunate side effect of radio pop’s genre stratification in 2015 — with EDM’s fading homogeny and the ushering in of discrete styles from tropical house to lite-disco to R&Bass — was the tendency for some enterprising acts to meld every possible sound into a universally pleasing song. In a favorable light, these songs bravely blur genre lines; when I actually consider them, I realize they sound like nothing. So here we have Nickelback, whose status as the ultimate punching bag remains one of pop culture’s most tiresome jokes, testing my charity with “She Keeps Me Up,” which acts on this same kitchen sink mindset. Chad Kroeger picks and chooses what he wants from each era — Nika Futterman-esque call and response, dirty pop, vocoders, Dr. Luke guitar jangle, grunty vox — and funnels it all into an overdriven Kevin Rudolf stomp for an unpleasant piece that’s diluted as dishwater.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: Those who refuse to learn the lessons of Mötley Crüe will be forced to repeat them.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Oh the auto tune, the auto tune towards the end, proof that artifice is the new authenticity.
[8]
Madeleine Lee: Somewhere in the last ten years, Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” started becoming a staple in hockey arenas and at group karaoke. I’m not stupid enough to suggest that that’s how Nickelback picked up its disco guitar style, but I am cynical enough to suggest that that’s who Nickelback knows they need to be aiming at now: the people who loved Franz Ferdinand ten years ago and will these days grimace through a Hockey Night in Canada montage but not enough to change the channel and would hopefully be surprised to hear Nickelback doing this kind of off-beat funk thing. Oh, but that voice. I’d be impressed to hear Chad Kroeger’s voice singing lines I already recognized, in the way that unexpected but good karaoke singers are always impressive, but it just doesn’t work for me with this style. Probably sounds good in an arena, though.
[4]
We can’t even agree what it sounds like.
Brad Shoup: It sounds like 5SOS managed by Al Walser. It sounds like Aviici taking molly with Owl City. It sounds like Seven Lions covering a Punk Goes Pop version of a Seven Lions song. It probably sounds like Fleet Foxes, for all I know.
[4]
Alfred Soto: In recent years only Owl City has fumbled for the words with such sincerity, and because it’s 2015 this means sincerity + dance beats.
[3]
Crystal Leww: Tove Lo and dubstep were better looks for Seven Lions.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: It was when they rhymed “let me down” with “say so long” that I stopped trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.
[4]
Micha Cavaseno: Well, someone’s really done and made EDM versions of Styx and Journey-type anthem rock. Didn’t take ’em long, really.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: EDM for people who think the best song of all time is “Don’t Stop Believing.” Only this is way better than “Don’t Stop Believing.” Except I fucking hate “Don’t Stop Believing.”
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Where’s Walter Palmer when you need him? Also, Sombear. Christ. Get Ben Lilly too.
[2]
Thomas Inskeep: Seven Lions proves he’s learned nothing new since “Strangers” — this is button-pushing EDM-pop at its laziest: Here’s the “emotional” breakdown! Here’s the acoustic guitar, finger-picked! Here’s the over-emoting anonymous vocalist!
[2]
Iain Mew: I have no great love for the vocals, but they’re a minor detail anyway, and do well enough at their purpose of setting up an elegiac mood. The real point is the drops, each a series of graceful jumps and tricks strung together like a low gravity skateboard routine.
[7]
Will Adams: Dance music was always my first love. Growing up in the back of a station wagon listening to Top 40 radio when songs like “Waiting For Tonight” got significant airplay encoded my blank brain with an affinity for the 4/4 pulse, the 120-140 BPM range, each rhythmic element that creates the groove: kick, snare, hi hat, cymbal crashes. The iTunes boom coincided with my burgeoning freedoms as a teenager, to be able to sit in my room unattended, trawling through the store’s catalog of maxi singles. I’d have my iPod with me at all times, ready to plug in at a moment’s notice: as I lay on the floor, completing mundane grammar exercises; on the bus to middle school basketball games, opting to pump myself up instead of talking to my teammates. Weekend dances at boarding school showed me how to perform with music, to spot her from across the room, to move with her to the rhythm. I shook my head at the kids who got in trouble for drinking. I prided myself on being able to go crazy with just a strobe light and house music. College came; I attended festivals and concerts. I had loosened up on alcohol; now I shook my head at my friends who spent most of Lollapalooza searching for molly. I vowed that I would never touch that shit. I split from them and watched acts alone. I became sad, again, that I didn’t know anyone who could just appreciate dance music with me for what it was. The social act of music appreciation began to leave me cold. Dance music was still there for me, for the times I lay on my bed wanting to do anything else but move. Around 2012, It came back on radio, but it was less satisfying. Pop stars tried it on with the frivolity of a shopping montage. DJs I loved kowtowed to the loudness war, releasing pounding, oppressive tunes without a hint of passion. Mumford & EDM became a thing. Everything was EDM, whether it fit the category or not. I hated it. I found little use in screaming myself hoarse about the dance music I loved that no one else had heard or cared about. The loneliness returned. In 2015, Seven Lions, whose music I adored whether it was exquisite dubstep or heart-stopping trance, released “A Way to Say Goodbye,” a song that opens with campfire guitar and scratchy alt-rock vocals. I gritted my teeth, fearing the worst, but I was rewarded. The drop arrived, and I felt my entire history with dance music flash before me. The bass thundered, the lead synth coursed through my body like an electric current, Sombear scratched at the sky with a repeated “goodbye.” I found the love again, in the song’s unabashed drama, in Seven Lions’ perfect audio mixing, in dance music. I began to appreciate, even love, the acoustic verses as well, for their counterpart to that avalanche of the drop. I stopped searching for outside validation. I loved “A Way to Say Goodbye,” and that was all that mattered. I vowed to always hold it close to me — on planes, on treadmills, as I lay on the floor wanting nothing more to be still — and just let it play.
[10]
“Heroes” (It Could[‘ve] Be[en])…
Scott Mildenhall: Where to start, with a near-wordless song from a country in which you don’t live, representing a small, indigenous culture you’re even further removed from? There’s probably nowhere better than this sign-language interpretation of it, beautifully betraying all the “universality” so often desired, if not required from minority groups. It’s a dodgy concept, universality, but even if there are those of the opinion that this is a “Disneyfication” of Jon Henrik and Sami people — and this as a Melodifestivalen runner-up is noticeably different to even the joik that led to him winning Sweden’s Got Talent last year — he seems pretty sincere when he talks about the different elements of the song and its stage performance, and how they and he stand for what they do. It’s about more than just feelings — take this reflection upon it in conjunction with the rise of the Sweden Democrats, for one thing — but far beyond the few hundred people who will understand the language of the few spoken words, the feelings are quite nice.
[8]
Anthony Easton: The backstory is so exotic and so strange that to work through the extensive layers of indigeneity and trans-global, post-colonial baggage seems both necessary for context and a kind of distraction.
[4]
Iain Mew: I do feel bad that my associations for this amount to bad tourism adverts, but the key change would be more than I could take regardless.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: I guess there’s a reason all the Scandinavian pop I’ve loved from the last twenty years has been sung by women.
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: Based on some YouTube clicking, guy has a great voice. But it seems to get drowned out here by trying to be “epic,” or at least earning a spot on some European festival’s side stage.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: This mostly-wordless song in the Sami tradition would be more effective overlaid on shots of glaciers and mountains (fjäll even means “mountain”, you know?) on an advertisement encouraging me to visit Swedish Lapland, which looks very beautiful. I don’t say that to condemn it, because every Swedish Eurovision entrant works as an advertisement in some way — Måns Zelmerlöw, Loreen, Sanna Nielsen, Eric Saade, Carola Häggkvist, Lena Philipsson, literally everyone that won Melodifestivalen in the last 15 years had different words and music but still fit in with the task of promoting Sweden’s facade of gleaming, harmonious perfection. That image is attractive people, accomplished pop confections, efficiently showcased to show Europe that they’re the best in the business, and this isn’t that much of a departure; it’s even got a key change! It’s mildly rousing, but it’s not extremely rousing, and the key change feels obligatory, as if you having heard most of what the song has to offer halfway in, it has to run its final lap as fast as it can to win the crown. It’s OK, I suppose.
[5]
David Sheffieck: Overpoweringly obvious — if you told me you predicted halfway through that there’s be a bird screeching at the end I’d believe you — but charming enough about its complete lack of shame that I’m finding it easy to give in. I about lost feeling in my fingertips because of the wind today, but this is sunny enough that it could keep me using my phone the whole walk back from the train station.
[6]
Brad Shoup: That group chant, that melody line, is astounding. It dissolves into Fjällgren’s robust ululations very well, but every time past the first it’s clear that it’s the whole show. And take it from someone who underrated “Saxofuckingfon”: that’s absolutely fine.
[8]