Another SNSD member gone solo (Jessica, not Fabolous)…

[Video][Website]
[4.00]

Adaora Ede: And here we go with the comparisons to Tiffany’s single! There’s not much to say about that on my part because I shut off this song about twenty seconds in. On second listen, “Fly” isn’t as nauseatingly corny as I believed it could have been been, maybe more nauseatingly boring than anything. The glimmer and gleam of this Katy Perry copped power pop track to Tiffany’s Carly Rae-lite shows a flicker of originality, yet in this battle of the Kor-Am female soloists, Tiffany > Jessica, but only in concept, not in execution. Only the slightest bit of inspiration can be discerned in the hand clap and piano-lead chorus of “you’re a hero; you can fly.” Conversely, I’m not quite sure that Jessica’s other former groupmate didn’t release the same exact song (and at least two times better). Commence the SNSD OT8 conspiracies.
[4]

Lilly Gray: Jessica, to me, always was stylized as the somewhat nicer Regina George of Girl’s Generation, in that I could imagine her hitting me with her car and being sympathetic about it but also subtly cataloging the damage to the fender of her Mercedes. This has little to no bearing on her new single, except that it’s an uncontrollable facet of her public persona as an idol, now in a state of flux. Jessica left Girl’s Generation in 2014 in very public, brutal fashion, and once the queen has been dethroned, it’s hard to tell what will happen next. Luckily, for anyone who was worried about her being JYJ’d, Jessica seems barely pressed about any of this. It’s hard not to bring this past to bear on “Fly,” but Jessica’s pop dance song is less teary breakup letter than a juggernaut of self-confidence that seems to ask, what girl group? oh, that was so long ago! Pass the sugar, please; can I interest you in a sample of my upcoming beauty collection? It’s the divorcee lunching and laughing gaily, surrounded by friends, while her ex sweats at a hotdog stand. Jessica’s powerhouse return aside, it is not especially fun for other people to listen to. The sentiment of chasing your dreams and finding your own self-worth is recognizable to any audience, but her voice sounds strained throughout, really pushing the limits of that soprano, and the dance part of this track never arrives. The rap is oddly sweet until it gets to a garbled Steph Curry name-drop; one gets the idea that Jessica is waiting for him to get out of her studio. In any case, though I did not enjoy this song at all, I did enjoy hearing Jessica again. 
[4]

Alfred Soto: I’m a sucker for a good whoa-whoa, and I’d ignore the piano tinkle if I could. But — oof. Fabolous wanders in after a nice long nap.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: Vaguely inspirational pop that imagines “what if Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’ was really boring?” Which, fine, but that Fabolous verse is such nothing, a sinkhole marring an otherwise mediocre song.
[2]

Cassy Gress: I complain about rappers in need of metronomes a lot, and Fabolous spends his twelve bars slowly meandering off the beat, like when your turn signal just barely doesn’t match up to the car’s in front of you. Whether this actually sampled the “Back II Life” drum beat or is just reminiscent of it, that and the “Spread your wings and fly (oh-oh)” parts are rather earwormy. I just wish Jessica’s voice sounded less constrained; she’s a little bit Sister Mary Robert.
[6]

Katie Gill: It’s really interesting how a song can sound new and dated at the same time. I’m getting some major late 90s/early 2000s vibe from the harmonies and the chorus (S Club 7, R Kelly, 98 Degrees, Hilary Duff, there were a LOT of “spread your wings and fly” sort of songs during that time). That part works well — and hell, if I had to rate the song just on Jessica’s part alone it’d get a lot higher. It’s cute and inoffensive but wonderful, like a video of an otter. It’s when a wild rapper appears and Fabolous phones in a rap break that the song screeches to a confusing halt. There’s no getting around it, it’s not very good and the flow comes to an absolute halt.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Jessica checks all the boxes with choruses built to help you rise up from whatever getting in your way as far as traditional ballads go, but “Fly” is only meant to hold you over temporarily. While that might work for a real advice, it’s a different story for a pop song.
[5]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Cute albeit vapid pop that sadly fails at every opportunity to sound meaningful. The fact that Fabolous actually ends up dragging behind the beat in the second part of his verse sums it up for me. 
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: Blandly “inspirational” pop with a saccharine aftertaste and a WTF G-rated cameo from Fabo.
[2]

Brad Shoup: Well, the piano went airborne at least. Meanwhile, the producer’s trying to crashland Fabolous’s bars.
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: Save for the tight snare sound and bonus Fab verse, I swear I’ve heard this before in English. No, I’m not just referring to “Blank Space.” I’m talking about the type of music you hear when you’re getting your cavities filled, or when your dad accidentally switches to the CCM station thinking it’s KISS-FM and refuses to change it back for the rest of the road trip. It’s music that’s designed to be as pacifying and inoffensive as possible, and I’ve usually dismissed it as empty pablum. But the part of me that craves divine certainty in the face of a chaotic universe — which is in fact most of me — has always had a secret affinity for the inspirational swells and buoyant sentiments and “whoa-oh-ohs” that are adult contemporary’s bread and butter, so long as they aren’t overdone. As a debut solo single, “Fly” definitely doesn’t provide a viable blueprint for Jessica’s future, but in the meantime it provides a necessary service for nervous wrecks and faux-cynics like me.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Not coulda-been-Britney Jessica (Folcker), but a member of Girls Generation with a track that sounds exactly like an inert, but equally cliched, take on “Roar.” Man, wouldn’t it suck if you had wings that weren’t meant to fly?
[2]

To be clear, this is SNSD Tiffany, not “I Think We’re Alone Now” Tiffany…

[Video][Website]
[6.77]

Katherine St Asaph: Not unwitting ’80s inspiration for swaths of ’16 pop Tiffany, but Tiffany of Girls Generation, with a track that sounds exactly like dancing in a beach-resort submarine. Three years ago that’d be a cool, novel sound. Now it’s just competent.
[6]

Alfred Soto: She moves through the electrogroove with practiced ease, and the electrogroove itself takes it slow, luxuriating in its curves. It shames similar efforts on Ariana Grande’s latest.
[7]

Katie Gill: You’d expect a song titled “I Just Wanna Dance” to be a bit more…dancey. As it is, it’s surprisingly laid-back, a fact which hampers the whole song.
[5]

Cassy Gress: SNSD was the first kpop girl group I ever heard, and due to internalized misogyny, I was repelled by how very pink and girly and cute they were. Their image and performing style isn’t much different from a lot of other kpop groups; I think it’s just that I saw them first. It’s years later and I’m still having trouble shaking it, as evidenced by how I almost wrote a bad review for “Party” for reasons that had scarcely anything to do with the actual song. So now I’m listening to “I Just Wanna Dance” and thinking about how Tiffany doesn’t sound like she wants to dance the night away; she just sounds like either she already has, or she’d like to sit and watch someone else dance. And how those high Cs mostly just serve to show that she can hit them, rather than contributing something to the song. And I’m so skittish about SNSD and its individual members at this point that I can’t tell whether I’m really hearing that or if it’s just my internal hater. At least I’m confident that I like the harmonies on “I wanna… dance… the night away.”
[5]

David Sheffieck: So effervescent and sparkling it’s hard to resist getting swept into a neon cotton candy reverie from the moment it begins. But while I love that the production essentially renounces bass, I also wonder if that might be the missing element that keeps the chorus from taking off – or even differentiating itself from the verses in any meaningful way.
[6]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Sun-drenched synth layers and a syncopated beat are a very good look for Tiffany, who can lead this settings accordingly, but there’s a point when the vocal processing gets overwhelming, and the voices start fighting the other elements for space in the mix. I’ll give it an extra point ’cause Tiffany’s melodies themselves are really good, especially the ad-libs in the end. 
[6]

Madeleine Lee: “I Just Wanna Dance” is the sound of an idealized summer day, from beginning to end: afternoon sparkles of sun off the water, pink and orange boardwalk sunset, late-night bonfire on the beach. That’s obviously by design, but everything is done with such confidence — every transition from one synth riff to another, every swoop Tiffany makes through her octaves — that it doesn’t feel contrived or cramped. f(x) got the actual Carly Rae Jepsen song, but “I Just Wanna Dance” (and the rest of the mini album it comes from) makes me feel what I think other people feel when they listen to Emotion, a bubbly bliss that’s easy and total.
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: Like all the best songs about heading out on the town for the night — obligatory mention of Carly Rae Jepsen being particularly versed at this, and yeah this certainly bares a resemblance to E•MO•TION — “I Just Wanna Dance” eschews the actual heading out in favor of the nervous excitement preceding it. This song definitely moves, but everything is tempered ever so slightly — the chorus doesn’t burst open, but imagines what the actual letting go will feel like. Tiffany pirouettes through it just right, like she’s imagining the evening to come while staring in the mirror. 
[8]

Brad Shoup: A lot of people are hearing Jepsen, for good reason. Tiffany has the foggy-disco production down; and if her tone skews more existential than emotional, she’s still got that pinch-me vocal shiver. And there’s the text itself, where she wants nothing more than to be lost in her head in a crowded room. The production’s not set to kill, but there’s a very nice, rest-filled descending filigree in the bridge. 
[7]

Juana Giaimo: “I Just Wanna Dance” doesn’t aim to be a dance-epic, but to reflect the dancer’s state of mind. When compared to the loudness of EDM, “I Just Want to Dance” is comforting thanks on Tiffany’s delicate voice and the light ’80s vibes. It doesn’t matter if you could be doing a hundred different, better things; tonight you can also be the best dancer, even if it is just in your room. All that it matters is you deeply feeling the fulfillment and liberation of your own body spontaneously moving to a beat.
[9]

Ryo Miyauchi: Tiffany’s single reminds that the discotheque is a venue for soul-searching as it is for a weekend thrill. Like the singer at the center, the beat of “I Just Wanna Dance” is cathartic and tough yet slightly bruised. But rather than dwell on the past, she instead cares only about what she wants to do now — dance to forget and heal.
[8]

Lilly Gray: One of my main pastimes used to be going out every single weekend to dance; unfortunately, I now have the body and stamina of a balsa wood marionette and can manage this maybe once or twice a year. The one thing that has not left me, however, is the sense of restlessness that sets in around 4pm on a Saturday, when the city is starting to wind into night — the unspoken admission that the whole day has just been a long, slow morning of preparation for when the lights come on. If before the witching hour there are lengths of window-gazing anticipation, Tiffany’s “I Just Wanna Dance” is that period’s hopeful refrain. If you expect a banger that you can drunkenly grind to, this is not that song; this is instead an in-between-hours mid-tempo love song to the dancefloor and what might happen there. The beat is subdued, her vocals flirt with breathy but remain strong over the gentle synth, and the knuckle-biting pause that develops in “I just wanna/dance the night away” in the latter half of the chorus keeps it wanting and fresh. It doesn’t build too much, but that’s fine, as this is an expression of need yet to be fulfilled. I could do without the piercing vocalization once we hit 3 minutes, but that’s as good a time as any to lay out your make up or check the freezer for leftover vodka. (I’d also suggest listening to this sans video — the SM-town motto here seems to be “look as close to an Urban Outfitters catalogue as possible,” with some bracingly bright parking-lot dance sequences, particularly jarring to the muted, hangover tone of the song.)
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Delicious, frothy dance-pop akin to some of Kylie Minogue’s prime moments, and utterly perfect for summer ’16.
[7]

It’s “Gone Solo” Tuesday! And we WOULD start with Zayn…

[Video][Website]
[4.67]

Katie Gill: After the exceedingly generic “Pillowtalk,” I was hoping that Zayn’s new single would be something better. Surprising no one, it’s exceedingly generic. It’s like Zayn was trying for Justin Timberlake but ended up squarely Geri Halliwell (and that’s an insult to poor Geri — she at least can sound energetic if needed). I mean, what else can I say? It’s cookie cutter. Zayn’s taken what’s popular right now and shoved out a mediocre One Direction song with extra electronic beeps and airy backing vocals in place of good solid harmonies.
[2]

Alfred Soto: The influences: Luke James, a Fisher Price version of The Weeknd, gobs  of Justin Timberlake, the last a new millennium model for GED programs  in post-boy-band education. The One Directioner’s debut presents a guy  who want to convince listeners that he likes sex, and from the way he sings the title hook as “like my wood” why not. The world could use a Fisher Price version of The Weeknd, believe me.
[4]

Tim de Reuse: If someone had told me in 2014 that one of the members of One Direction would split off and morph into a half-baked electropop act that makes production nods towards more interesting genres but stops short of anything that could make an impression, I’d have probably said something like “A superstar who was pulled into the global spotlight when he was still a teenager will have trouble establishing a coherent identity of his own when he tries to strike out solo in his early twenties? I guess it’s as likely an outcome as any! Hey, on an unrelated note, that Daft Punk album from last year really brought palm-muted guitars back into vogue, didn’t it?” 
[4]

A.J. Cohn: Back in his 1D days Zayn sang the wonderfully cheesy “I Would,” about a boy pining after a girl a little too cool for him (she has a boyfriend with 27 tattoos!). Now Zayn is the boy with 27 or so tattoos, and in “Like I Would” he pines for a girl who has left him. The track is cool, hard, and angular, totally missing the tender messy vulnerability that made its predecessor so stupidly charming.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: It’s not clear if the shifts in modality here are intentional or just clumsy writing. Do, would, could, do — either he’s existing in a time warp or he’s making a hash of a Beverley Knight impression. The former does work, because the bubbling chorus and the ominous build towards it bring both futurism and a sense of occasion — the kind of thing that might be good for a debut single, perhaps. Lithe, pulsing and even intelligible; this is, happily, everything “Pillowtalk” is not.
[7]

Cassy Gress: Why couldn’t this have been Zayn’s lead single, instead of that warmed-over 1D bucket of lube? He’s so much more electrified here, and “he won’t love you like I do” is almost euphoric. 
[7]

Crystal Leww: Zayn’s debut album is, unfortunately, a fight to get through. Neither he nor his team was brave or imaginative enough to try to create a definitive style for him. It’s sad, too, because Zayn has mentioned before that he himself loves R&B music, but instead of trying to create a definitive sound grounded in that style, his team gave him an album full of trendchasing stabs at relevance. “Like I Would” is not the worst of The Weeknd-biting tracks on Mind of Mine, but as 2016 has gone on, it’s become very clear that even the more uptempo Weeknd tracks like “Can’t Feel My Face” have fallen so quickly out of favor with pop music. This sounds dated already, and Zayn’s only on his second album single.
[5]

Jer Fairall: For whatever else can be said about him, Justin Timberlake’s solo career has displayed a clear knowledge of the relationship between music, lyric, and personality; looking to JT as a template, it is precisely the failure to understand this relationship where so many wannabe boy-band ex-pats stumble. As commissioned production jobs go, “Like I Would” has the chilly spaciousness of the cutting edge of 6 or 7 years ago, but Zayn’s anonymous vocal could be Karaoke-ing along to just about anything. This is hackwork. 
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: The chorus throbs like the mildest version of “Love to Love You Baby” imaginable, but the verses prove yet again (like the awful “Pillowtalk”) that Zayn, at a minimum, requires some tempo.
[4]

Madeleine Lee: I wish I’d turned this off after the second “what’s up” 10 seconds in like my instinct told me to, because that beat drop is so good that I stopped minding how mundane everything else is and now I’m stuck with this dirtbag.
[7]

Brad Shoup: He’s marshaled those raspy backing vocals like ghosts against his own haunting. All this gothic woundlicking floats over a brittle gallop, not unlike Jason Derulo’s “Cheyenne.”
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: “This is probably gonna sound wrong — promise it won’t last long.” Yeah, that sounded wrong all right. (Thinkpiece: All the songs by girls asking guys to love them harder, put in work, try; all the songs by guys bragging about their indifferent-yet-prolific sexual un-prowess.) I have little investment in Zayn as a boy bander and even less as a sex symbol — it’s like he thought AJ MacLean’s career misstep was pandering too little to future OMG! 10 Weirdest Boyband Hairstyles slideshows. He clearly finds no missteps in Justin Timberlake’s career, as he attacks the prechorus like his childhood aspiration was to be one of the backup baris on “Cry Me a River.” That’s Zayn’s first trick; trick two is beginning every single with lung-splitting oversinging, and trick three is sounding like everyone else sounding like The Weeknd. It’s a hard thing: build your persona on that male affliction of caring as little as possible, while still somehow generating charisma. The only emotion Zayn manages is in that lavishly sighed he, which can’t be intentional. Even the porny lines — how predictably shocking! — sound lust-free. Yet somehow I don’t hate, even like, an album and artist I find utterly unconvincing. It’s probably that I haven’t gotten sick of this particular sound yet. For others I guess it’s the hair.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Still not sold on this Zayn solo thing, but this is at least tip-toeing in the right direction. It actually snaps and bounces along when it isn’t swirling around all boring like. 
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: I wasn’t a big fan of Purpose when it came out, and I still think at least half of its tracks are disposable fluff, but the inexplicable/inevitable rise of Zayn has made me realize how many basic things that album gets right. For one, most all of Purpose‘s tracks, even the flat-out faceplants, sound primed and ready to take on the world, whereas this one doesn’t even sound capable of taking over a department store. I get the sense that I’m supposed to be impressed by all the ricocheting bleep bloops, but the self-consciously “dark” atmosphere, aided by the wearisome background vocals, eats away at any morsels of enjoyment. And here’s the thing: Zayn’s voice just isn’t made for the dark, no matter how hard he tries. It’s fitting that his “would” sounds so much like “wood,” because that’s the word that comes to mind when I hear him struggling to extend his range: wooden. Balsa, to be precise. He could maybe fill in for Joe Jonas in DNCE if need be, but he’s no Weeknd. The lesson here is that we need to stop taking our easily hateable Canadian male pop stars for granted, because we could always have it worse.
[2]

Gin Hart: Picture this: Our Marble Princeling Zayn Malik had a party that made him sad. The lads weren’t there. Everybody smoked all his weed and left, and now it’s 3AM. He can’t sleep. Open tabs: The Mirror, Perrie’s insta, feud receipts, smooch receipts, some OT5 fanfic (your fave), and Justin Timberlake’s 2013 SNL performance with all the lasers. Inputs swirl in the haze of two hours of sobriety as he rummages for a pen to scrawl Know it’s late but I’m so wired/Saw your face and got inspired next to a loose sketch of himself in his future laser suit. A single tear gets caught in the lashes of his right eye. Orange, he thinks, yeah, and proceeds to pen this closed loop of petulant desire, this plea for heart-relevance. Zayn wants her/them/us to know what it feels like to be without him. We should admire that mind! The way he knows our collective body! He feels as inspired as any pop superstar born in ’93 who recently cancelled his membership to a monolith can feel. You miss me, he cries, but I’m still here.
[6]

Hotter than anything else today…

[Video][Website]
[5.78]

Katie Gill: I absolutely adore Lipa’s voice. The chorus is pure belt but the way she works around those low tones in the verses is seductive, refreshing, and just downright sexy. Lipa described her style as “dark pop” in a Guardian interview. I don’t really know what’s “dark” about this, but it’s a perfectly fine pop song that’s inoffensive enough to get mass radio airplay but distinctive enough that people actually talk about it.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: “Be the One” was an unexpected delight, so my expectations were high. For about 45 seconds this sounds like Sofi de la Torre, but Sofi lacks the boldness — or, frankly, budget — for an all-out anthem like this one. “Hotter Than Hell” isn’t as effortless as “Be the One”, but the production is more interesting, with sounds ranging from spontaneously huge drum fills to nearly atonal post-chorus vocal yelps. In fact, Dua’s powerful voice sounds instantly recognizable after only a few officially released songs. One hopes she finds more outlets for her idiosyncrasies in the future — think Shakira’s weirder excursions (“Empire”, “She-Wolf”) or Ellie Goulding’s more dramatic moments (“Figure 8,” “Guns and Horses”). Comparison points aside, she clearly possesses something; the trick is to harness it.
[8]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The steel-drum synth jabs and the percussion runs make up for a decent tropical house instrumental, but Dua’s voice injects the track with a hefty dose of stamina, a natural grit that’s rarely found in today’s young Pop. Her low-register verses are tantalizing, and when she soars for the chorus, it feels completely exultant. It’s nice to see such a talented upstart climbing up the ranks, and while “Hotter Than Hell” does not have the scorching dynamics of previous single “Last Dance“, this is definitely Song of the Summer material.
[7]

William John: This is the sort of thing that might’ve landed in Rihanna’s inbox as she sat in post-BBHMM, pre-ANTi purgatory. If indeed it did get lost or left behind in one of those Samsung diary rooms then that may have been a grave error, given how much the chorus sounds like a thunderstorm. The tropical house production touches are virtually quaint, but there’s a self-assuredness, underlined by Dua Lipa’s throaty vocal, that I thought missing from jittery previous single “Be the One“. A bit more radio play and this ought to be ready for take off.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Credit to the gulp that Dua Lipa inserts, intentionally or otherwise, at the end of each chorus — a ghost in a machine proud of its assembly line virtues.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Dua Lipa’s lump-in-throat delivery of this song’s stream of obvious clichés doesn’t make me feel like she’s engulfed by a desire that will make her burn alive, but it does convince me that she could make a few cigarette-burn sized marks on her lover. Everyone copping their phrasing off Sia should take a listen to Lipa instead. The shuffly bounce of the track makes it sound like a promise rather than a threat, and it’s got a winning hook in the chorus.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: Forceful voice and alright tension, but all those in-style tropical sounds take the edge off.
[5]

Peter Ryan: Lipa continues to circle the banger she’s capable of, but in spite of another subtly-textured powerhouse of a vocal I don’t think this is The One. It falls victim to one of the central cognitive dissonances of trop house, namely: why bother ripping off dancehall if your finished product is decidedly not danceable? The beat’s too deflated to prop up the song’s floor-filling designs, too smothered to provide the vital momentum demanded by Lipa’s prowling. When she joins forces with a producer that can match her she’ll be unstoppable; until then this is a marginal improvement.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: Tropical house is just what happens when you take dancehall and emphasize thumping four-on-the-floor kick drums instead of syncopation, right? Thereby rendering it significantly less danceable? Lipa’s voice is warm, but summer songs should be either light and breezy, or as dank and muggy as “Oh” and “Do It to It.” “Hotter Than Hell” wants to simultaneously sound like a dark, humid basement party and a giant open air stadium and a beach and it ends up just sounding like Radio 1.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Spring 2016: the tropical palette is now so embedded in the pop vernacular that it can serve as matter-of-fact backing, without a sniff of gimmick. The upshot of that is interesting — short story: if Hot Chip had released One Life Stand today it would be the multi-platinum hit it always should have been — but it isn’t the crux of how this sounds more like it’s trying to be a hit than “Be the One,” yet also less like an actual one. The rapturous, bellowing pop ambitions are great, but they’re offset by it being lyrically cumbersome.
[7]

A.J. Cohn: This track is tepid, lacking the sizzle of real sexual heat. The cut-and-paste steel drum line and faux-provocative lyrics don’t help either.
[2]

Iain Mew: The intensity level of the track’s tropical thump is more British summertime than infernal flames, but Dua Lipa wrings more urgency out of it than the words always deserve. And they’re at least not all obvious heaven/hell juxtapositions — “you probably still adore me with my hands around your neck,” is a striking way to set things up, deliberate flip of Arctic Monkeys’ “505” or not.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The way she lands on “hell” is quite braying; the stress she portrayed in “Be the One” just sounds like strain here. Canon tropical house is feinted at, but the rest stomps loud enough to present a real challenge to Lipa.
[5]

Gin Hart: I want to fistfight Dua Lipa (and writing team Tommy Baxter, Adam Midgely, and Gerard O’Connell) for underserving the prevailing metaphor here. Why invoke hell’s landscape as representative of your body if you’re too lazy to back it up? Aside from “you’re my manna from heaven,” the song is more idiom than myth. Call me a petty nerd, but do something else about your Hot-Topic-tortured sexuality. Older hells are cold, girl, in which case it doesn’t take much to be hotter, but it still takes more than you’ve given. 
[2]

Cassy Gress: I’m not in love with the hell metaphor, and “some sweet alcohol” is a weird phrase, but that squeaking, smoked alto is pretty great, and what’s even better is the play between the church organs and the vaguely Caribbean drum beat. It’s making me picture a late-night beach party, the only lights coming from a nearby church with its doors wide open.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Exudes the kind of sturdy, understated confidence which is universally considered attractive, so liking it feels less like a matter of taste or opinion than sheer biological imperative. With a tension-and-release structure like that, I know I’m being manipulated, but when it’s tethered to such a compelling vocal presence, I’ll gladly go along for the ride.
[7]

Mo Kim: The hottest thing here is Dua Lipa’s voice, which evokes Sia in both inflection and evocative power; the track itself is too close to the onslaught of festival-ready EDM to ignite much interest, but it smolders with the same promise of its young star.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: If you can’t be a celebrity, be a mood. Such is the thinking behind this latest “dark pop”/”tropical”/vaguely alternative-positioned song, the kind that produces that cynical twinge of sensing I’m being marketed to, which I am. I don’t know quite how I feel about the slow melting-together of mainstream and indie-pop yet, or the playlistification of everything, and so I have no logical, defensible reason to feel that twinge. But top 40’s been genuinely darker than this for the past six years at least; I do get the sense Dua Lipa is talking about actual flesh-and-flesh sex, but that alone does not dark make. “Tropical” evokes, as it’s designed to, a memory cloud of stuff I don’t like: summer, music festivals, fast-fashion exoticism, and overdone trends. I hear no song beneath the descriptors, no personality beneath the vocal quirks, no added value over countless other vaguely alternative artists who aren’t getting promoted. But hey, it sounds good and will probably slot nicely alongside all the others of its kind. A low bar, cleared like hell.
[5]

Might not.

[Video][Website]
[4.92]

Crystal Leww: More evidence that 2016 is lawless: Anderson .Paak takes a couple of samples from Xscape’s “Who Can I Run To” and puts out “Might Be.” The song is a goofy kind of high and matches .Paak’s overall persona of being a chill dude who puts out sunny So-Cal R&B tunes. Two years later, Luke Nasty took the production and theme of women and weed from .Paak and turned it into a late-night L.A. raunchy lounge jam. .Paak’s version definitely doesn’t shy away from the topic of sex, but compared to Luke Nasty’s version, it is definitely a more passive approach to chatting up girls using weed. There is nothing wrong with being overtly sexual, but Nasty’s come-ons are too corny to be sexy, and the point of comparison is .Paak’s version, which matches the production better. Neither version is as good as Jeremih’s “oui” though.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The source material is as tangled as the bed sheets: Anderson .Paak interpolated Xscape‘s 1995 cover of The Jones Girls’ disco-era “Who Can I Run To” to create the feminine submission he can’t summon on his own. Pledging to be the most considerate of love men in the leaden tones of Big Sean, Luke Nasty sounds as threatening as a slip cover.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: I won’t waste your time, or mine, doing a lyrical side-by-side of the original and this SoundCloud rework, because the difference in quality should be self-evident. But there is one difference that stands above all the rest, and that is Luke Nasty’s pig-headed insistence on letting the sampled vocals complete every other line, even when the end result is nonsensical (e.g. “we on cloud high”). His marriage to this gimmick puts the song’s potential in a straitjacket, preventing his bland rhymes from approaching even Wiz Khalifa levels of stoner cheese, which would at least be something. It’s absolutely criminal that Anderson .Paak remains a virtual unknown on urban radio, and this song’s success compounds that crime even further.
[3]

Tim de Reuse: I will say, at very least, that the backing vocals chanting “high” in a feathery, sinking chord every so often are just lovely — they’re caught between that word and a bored “ahh,” content and distant. Presumably they’re listening to a much better song. By the second verse, this guy’s already douchey, awkward play-by-play gets so linear and dry it’s like he’s trying to follow a poorly-written wikiHow article.
[2]

Cassy Gress: The first couple times you hear the women cooing “high” (hi?), it sounds like bubbles, hot tubs, and steam. But the more they repeat it, the more animatronic it sounds. Also, if I’m not mistaken, I think he implied that girls have to be high to enjoy sex with him.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: The “hiiiiiigh” female vocal sample becomes a siiiiigh awfully quickly. Luke Nasty hasn’t got the natural charm to make his sex-talk interesting or inviting.
[3]

Anthony Easton: I really like the juxtaposition of the stumbling, blocked flow of Luke, and the floating, airy push-back by whoever is singing high here. It would be nice if she was credited. 
[7]

Alex Ostroff: A study in contrasts that’s almost impressively less sexy than its source material. Even the beat sounds more awkward, but I’m not sure if it’s actually been constructed differently or if it’s just the effect of Nasty dropping lines like “but you know what you can blow.” Not even an early invocation of The-Dream’s “sugar-honey-iced-tea” can make me crack a smile at this. Naturally, this is the version that’s going to be a giant hit.
[4]

Brad Shoup: The man’s going to be one hell of an A&R rep. The BPM, the nods to The-Dream and 50 Cent (still relevant for white college students), the endless talk about getting high all speaks to someone who knows his market. Luckily, he’s also fairly charming, mostly when he’s guessing at notes. I didn’t know about .Paak’s original, so I can’t give Luke credit for suggesting chipmunk soul without actually delivering.
[6]

Natasha Genet Avery: Breezy and playful enough to earn a spot on this summer’s cookout playlist but too safe to make it on to next year’s.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: The rap is just so-so and not very memorable, but the way the samples from Xscape’s cover of “Who Can I Run To” are used, most definitely are. 
[6]

Peter Ryan: Luke’s lines here are a little lame but he’s betting she won’t care (“You can tell me if I’m wrong”). It’s pesky insistence and unselfconscious goofy charm all at once, elevated by a spongy bass anchor and hazy rhodes undertones, but most of all those sublime wafting “hii-iiigh”s.
[6]

Gin Hart: Normally, I’m too much of a prude for ~explicit sex jams~. If the POV character’s penis is chorus-integral and the activities made explicit, my honest-to-god first reaction is probably “ew.” Human adulthood! Yikes! Despite these qualifiers, “Might Be” is a fucking jam?!?!?! The politics of sex-related drug awakenings (drug-related sex-awakenings?) are complicated, true, but — sorry!!! — high sex is the best sex and (here’s the part where I conflate the song and the video) Mr. Nasty & Girl seem to be having a really sweet/sexy/consensual beach date. I’m here for it. I’m here for YOU’RE THE SHIT, YOU’RE THE SUGAR, HONEY, ICED TEA, which is a) one of of the best lines of all time and b) not even part of the .Paak original, which is pallid by comparison. Poor buddy! I figured out this was a cover after I’d fully formed my opinion of it. How must it feel when somebody’s made the aural equivalent of a silk sheet out of your television static? No offense, but I truly adore when good shit trumps fame shit. You go, Luke. A fan? I might be. 
[8]

…uh yeah. Hi.

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Lilly Gray: Minor deity Tao has summoned us all to listen to his impassioned recounting of betrayal, the echoes of which turn into thunderclouds in the mortal realm. Thing is, ironclad swag aside, it’s hard to eagerly attend to the tale of someone else’s unfocused, back-and-forth relationship drama for any extended amount of time. Wiz’s appearance in the heavenly court hopefully implies future team-ups — Lil Jon and Kris, anyone? — but he acts only as a herald, delivering a boilerplate reminder of their status, just catching us up, money and hoes, etc, before Tao takes the floor. Tao accuses the nameless of never telling him the truth, but in a piano-backed land of uncertainty, the realest part is his “oh, it’s happening”: halfway between a decision and a lament. Flashes of humanity are appreciated, but most of us in attendance are trying to look awake and avoid being struck by lightening. 
[4]

Cassy Gress: I had high hopes for this, after the jittery glitterbomb that was the last thing I heard from him. And I’m not really disappointed: they threw together this with a pinch of this and then brought in the Imagine Dragons drummer guy to top it all off. Z. Tao’s chorus is almost reminiscent of Adele’s in the way he says “hello.” Can’t understand what Wiz is doing here, though, other than confusing lyrics transcribers who have never heard of Turks and Caicos.
[8]

Adaora Ede: Ever since his departure from EXO, Tao has made gallant efforts to display his #Baller lifestyle. Tao displays key ballerisms even just in the music video: tiny ponytail, WOES hat, and all. Every once in a while though, the baller needs to reflect on the sad aspects of his life with a phone light-waving pseudo-ballad and a Wiz Khalifa feature to make sure that we know that while he’s kinda bummed, he’s still poppington. Tao serves the “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” remorse-cum-nostalgia minus mega doucheness. Wiz’s verse in this song is highly reminiscent of that era in early-mid-2000s K-Pop where entertainment companies would use auctioned-off American rap verses in songs and if we were lucky, stick in a holographic image of that rapper somewhere in the video. Z. Tao’s actually got Wiz next to him blowing smoke rings so that’s at least an automatic +[2]. Even with a middling hip hop ballad, the braggadocious nature of Tao as an artist and a person creates an aura of sincerity.
[7]

Crystal Leww: I am a native Chinese speaker and it took me three listens to figure out that Z. Tao is rapping in Chinese. This is odd, given Z. Tao is a native speaker. As a result, his phrasing sounds awkward and his flow is a mess. The production is already snoozy to start, but it also exposes his rapping flaws because it’s doing so little. Wiz Khalifa is here too, I guess, but seemingly just for the paycheck.
[3]

Mo Kim: There would be an interesting point to make here about cross-cultural hip-hop and the way in which Wiz Khalifa and Z. Tao interact through the song — that is, if the snoozy backing track, repetition, and lack of dramatic progression didn’t put me to sleep before I could make it. The percussive hits are flashes of thunder on a rainy Monday.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: On the one hand, it’s great big-name Western artists are working with Asian pop stars, yay! But man, does this scene really need to feel validated via a Wiz Khalifa feature?  Z. Tao delivers solid, melancholy verses that match up with the woozy backing music. Khalifa does enough to get a paycheck.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: So many mood swings that its defining mood can only be described as “moodiness.” Wiz pops in to remind us of the wonders that exist outside the cramped confines of Z. Tao’s head, like award shows and, um, Pittsburgh. It’s so disjointed that it fits right in.
[4]

Brad Shoup: When Z. Tao finally gets his dander up, it’s a tonal rhyme with Khalifa’s verse, which otherwise might as well be him endorsing his check on the pop blocker. Maybe it’s a stretch, but I’ll take it. A lot of care went into a few elements: the backwards melody, the drums that crack like thunder, even the boudoir piano.
[7]

Jessica Doyle: Our hero is back! And no less dramatic for it. Since striking out on his own he has only gone up, on the strength of his home market and his ability to summon F5 tornadoes of self-pity at will. That said, I think his aim was a little off here. Generic break-up songs don’t suit him: at this stage he really needs something specific to get upset about. And Wiz Khalifa’s verse feels disconnected, as if Team Tao wanted his presence but wasn’t sure how to write for him. This could be a case of subsequent releases never living up to the first — but I doubt it. The guy has filmed two different variety shows and a movie recently, after all; switching between jobs is probably costing him something in the short run. Give him time to build up his skills, and something solid to work with — the evocations of thunder here are promising — and he’ll be slaying like a damn arithmetician.
[4]

Everything we covered last week in score order:

• FAMM’IN – Circle [7.44]
• Chance the Rapper ft. 2 Chainz & Lil Wayne – No Problem [6.86]
• Alicia Keys – In Common [6.22]
• Jana Hermann – Kults [6.11]
• Twice – Cheer Up [6.00]
• Nite Jewel – Kiss the Screen [6.00]
• OT Genasis ft. Young Dolph – Cut It [5.83]
• Paul Simon – Wristband [5.79]
• Kungs vs Cookin’ on 3 Burners – This Girl [5.27]
• Blink-182 – Bored to Death [5.20]
• The Stone Roses – All for One [4.75]
• Calibre 50 – Préstamela a Mí [4.43]
• Red Hot Chili Peppers – Dark Necessities [4.11]
• Madeintyo – Uber Everywhere [4.00]
• Gnash ft. Olivia O’Brien – I Hate U, I Love U [2.33]

This week we will be reviewing Zayn, Adele, Meghan Trainor, Céline Dion and lots more…

Writing these blurbs served a therapeutic purpose.

[Video][Website]
[4.11]

Lilly Gray: Imagine, if you will, that you’ve been cornered by a witch. “Name this song or I’ll transform you into my very own hideous imp,” she demands. You accept, believing this to be an task that you might conceivably manage to best. She then hums the juicy bass line of Dark Promises. Sweat begins to gather on your brow. Get ready for a lifetime of servitude to a dark and fickle master, friend, because even if she takes pity on you and adds the sweet ooze of the nonsense lyrics and moebius strip piano, it’s basically indecipherable from every other RHCP song. 
[3]

Brad Shoup: Van Halen’s “Right Now,” overwritten by a rippity-rapping serial killer. Yeah, Kiedis’s melodic gift — the way he colors his mush — is as good as it’s ever been. But I wish the Peppers had given the instrumental hues a little more time in the lamplight. There’s a really lovely descending guitar whine in the bridge, but it’s chained to Kiedis.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: It takes chutzpah to pen lyrics this transparently bullshit. I try to ignore them and lose myself in the piano-driven groove like the band wants me to, but something about astronauts smoking weed comes up and the immersion is shattered. Just as the rote bass slaps are leading me to check out entirely, a polished and efficient chorus arrives to save the Chili Peppers from themselves. “Dark necessities are part of my design” — hey, we got Señor Kiedis to form a coherent thought! And I can even sing along if I wanted to, which I don’t, but still! So this is the latest in a long line of RHCP singles that scrape by on the backs of their surprisingly strong choruses. Given just how long that line is, though, can it really be considered surprising anymore?
[5]

Tim de Reuse: For the most part “Dark Necessities” is a smothered, half-baked chore, but there was potential here! Flea’s bassline is more percussive than the percussion section, more melodic than the lead guitar, and more expressive than anything in the lyrics by a country mile. He’s the only truly engaging element present, and when the song deigns to allow him a little elbow room he brings together a couple tight, satisfying verses. Unfortunately, someone thought that lush background strings and twinkly little piano interludes would be the perfect complement to that pure RHCP-funk-energy. This is not the case. (Actually, it makes a lot more sense if you imagine that everyone but Flea woke up ten minutes before recording and they were all just thinking about getting back to bed; this also nicely explains the groggy, phoned-in solo from not-John-Frusciante that closes it out.)
[4]

Alfred Soto: The silent majority — Chili Peppers fans keep the albums shipping platinum while never troubling the sleep of Anohni and Santigold fans. The flattening of Anthony Kiedis’ voice and the opening piano ripple augur gentler Peppers, but Flea can’t resist horning in with a solo, perhaps to compete with a line that sounds like “Socrates isn’t part of my design.”
[5]

Cassy Gress: I’m not questioning whether Anthony Kiedis is presently struggling with sobriety, and I don’t dispute that drugs are bad for you. However, the strung-out heat mirage of a song he wrote 25 years ago blasts this chilly, late-night highway groove out of the water.
[4]

Will Adams: The intro had me hooked, cultivating nervous energy through arpeggios and sixteenth notes in the bass. But then the groove locked in, I realized the handclaps and heavy blanket of piano were here to stay, and “Dark Necessities” descended to the level of “tepidly received Coldplay single.”
[4]

Alex Ostroff: “What would happen if RHCP replaced the tightly-wound nerves of yore with some jazz bar vibes and a piano interlude or two?” wondered precisely nobody.
[3]

Peter Ryan: If they were going to win me over in 2016 it would probably have to be with something like this — I was never altogether immune to their moodier, hookier charms, and I have a real soft spot for irrelevant adult contemporary-leaning rock. But, oh, don’t they sound exhausted, and this is in the running for Most Inane Specimen of Kiedis-Babble Ever. Danger Mouse Danger-Mouses, Flea’s trotting out his slap-happy gimmickry to placate the base, but none of it staves off the sense that not even they know why they’re doing this anymore.
[3]

A generation held its breath.

[Video][Website]
[4.75]Katie Gill: The lyrics are terrible. The melody is basic. But oh my god, there is some wonderful guitar work in this song. John Squire plays the hell out of that opening riff and that other riff near the end is a thing of beauty. At least it’ll earn the band some money when it inevitably shows up on Guitar Hero a few years in the future.
[6]

Cassy Gress: This belongs on a classic ’90s movie soundtrack or as a segue on Daria. It needs a flannel shirt tied around its waist and a backwards cap. Can we go back in time and put it there?
[7]

Alex Ostroff: Oh hey! It’s that band from Louis Tomlinson’s T-shirts. I was slightly too young for The Stones Roses the first time around. The lyrical platitudes are wallpaper, but they’ve got some good jangle for Brits, and out of today’s “Guess Who’s Back? Back Again” slate, these lot are the only ones who really have a pulse.
[5]

Will Adams: “All for one, and one for all/If we all join hands we’ll make a wall.” Since the USA Freedom Kids never took off as expected, maybe Donald Trump should call up these blokes for the convention in July.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Gone all these years and all they’ve got are plodding beats and a line about joining hands? Who bloody cares?
[1]

Edward Okulicz: Nice riff, pleasing jangle, not a lot more. And the lyrics! Oh my. Holding hands and building walls — did they decide to write a campaign song for the US election and hedge their bets between Sanders and Trump?
[4]

Iain Mew: I recently watched Studio Ghibli’s 1986 début, fantasy Laputa: Castle in the Sky, for the first time. I had an overwhelming realisation that I was finally seeing something clearly that I’d already loved all kinds of reflections and refractions of, and that doing so satisfyingly tied those together. As someone who got into new music at the arse end of Britpop, listening to The Stone Roses ten years ago provided a similar experience. Studio Ghibli went on to evolve and diversify, and seeing their modern films I don’t think of Final Fantasy or Fez or anything else that took after Laputa, but The Stone Roses have been rather less prolific. The result is that if they want to be recognisably The Stone Roses, they’re on ground which has been taken over in their absence, and “All for One” reminds me of their successors than their own material. Principally, John Squire’s fluid variations on the theme of jangle remind me of those of Adam Devlin of The Bluetones, who (to be reductive) spent their early days as The Stone Roses minus the swagger. They were also one of my favourite bands, and so I get a peculiar circular nostalgia from the way “All for One” is filled with the same kind of bubbling sweetness. It just about wins the fight against the vocals and lyrics being more Oasis, i.e. The Stone Roses minus the magic.
[6]

Brad Shoup: It’s got the lilt of top-form Rolling Stones, the cheeriness of sunshine pop, and a production that suggests approaching the festival stage from behind. They did it!
[6]

Gin: ‘a hosanna to world-weary masturbation.’

[Video][Website]
[5.20]

Jer Fairall: Though I jammed along to “What’s My Age Again” and “Man Overboard” back in the day, I never cared enough about the band to learn any names, so colour me grateful that the member they recently dropped turned out to be that annoying, high-voiced dude. Whatever else he may have brought to the band, his departure hasn’t hurt their taut sense of dynamics or their way with a bright, chiming guitar riff, but “Bored to Death” lacks their earlier bratty exuberance, instead suggesting something closer to a middling Jimmy Eat World track. 
[5]

Katie Gill: If this came out in 2000, it’d be played in Hot Topics nationwide. It’s nostalgic in all the worst ways, the worst offenders being the lyrics. And look, I never expected Blink-182 to mature. But I honestly expected 2016 Blink-182 to at least sound a BIT different than 1999 Blink-182 and less like a band that’s going through the motions. Nobody likes you when you’re forty three.
[2]

Taylor Alatorre: It takes a lot of talent to pen lyrics that are this transcendently meaningless. Call it “dream imagery” or “death anxiety” if you must, but that won’t make you feel any less self-conscious when you find yourself shouting along to some half-assed koan about tigers stuck in trees. The real coup here is in creating a song where it doesn’t matter that the words don’t matter; as with “I only wanna die alive” and other Max Martin-isms, the meaning is subordinate to the surrounding headrush. With its “Adam’s Song” guitar line, “Feeling This” drum fills, and an “over and over” refrain that plays like “First Date” fanfic, no expense is spared in recreating the ineffable sound and feel of a TRL-era Blink single. In the wake of Tom’s departure, laying out an appealing nostalgia buffet is no mean feat, and it’s all the world was really asking for. Turns out the vibe generation still likes to take off their pants and jacket when no one’s home.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The change from boys 2 men is less excruciating than composing music to accommodate twaddle like “bored to death and fading fast” and the other pensées with which they decorate the oh-ohs and rhythm changes. Yet boredom is a phenomenon over thirty too — and more dangerous, signaled by those rhythm changes. In short, they don’t sound bored to death, just bored by feeling the same things, over and over.
[7]

Lilly Gray: Blink-182 solidly expresses the earnestness of being young, upset, and about to vomit or jump a chain-link fence. This anthem — which easily could have been released in 2008, a detail that is probably off-putting to many — gets a huge pass from me because of that double whammy of recognition and yearning. All Blink songs are plucky loser songs, and I feel just as ready to indulge in satisfying, shouted sadness as a directionless adult as I did as a teen. I’ll see you all at Warped Tour this summer. 
[5]

A.J. Cohn: Would that the stupidly perfect chorus (so shout-along-able!) were hitched to less perfectly stupid verses.
[3]

Hannah Jocelyn: Apparently John Feldmann thought “Life is too short to last long” was a deep statement about getting older, but once it’s processed and multi-tracked to hell, the line lands with a thud. There are some glimpses of maturity, including one lifted from Frightened Rabbit, but that doltish line, along with the whole thing about “rescuing a tiger from a tree”, doesn’t exactly suggest that this band is growing up. Lyrics have never been Blink-182’s strong suit, though, and neither have vocal performances. As a result, it’s up to Travis Barker to carry the song. By and large, he succeeds. His drums busily move about the stereo field before finally taking center stage in the thrilling, string-filled climax. As far as last-minute crescendos go, it’s not exactly “Keep Yourself Warm,” but it still lends just enough gravitas to be effective.
[7]

Cassy Gress: Blink-182 to me will always be embodied by the “All The Small Things” video on TRL, from which 16-year-old me in cereal-logo baby tees and baggy jeans developed an embarrassing (particularly in retrospect) crush on Tawm deLawnge and his lip ring. It’s not a surprise to me that a older and more mature version of the band has joined in the 2016 90’s revival, and while this doesn’t sound much like the Blink I remember, it does sound almost exactly like my memory of the summer I graduated high school: sunsets and concrete and finality. A YouTube commenter (I know) mentioned that the chorus is the Tom part of this, though, and now that I read that, I’m not sure Blink-182 functions as well without him.
[6]

Gin Hart: The, um, I’m sorry… pop-punk “thing” is something I respect but don’t understand. I dig (or have dug) it, sure, I mean the shit’s so “talking bout my generation,” but I’m at most a visitor to these hallowed halls. Everything seems a hosanna to world-weary masturbation, and I embarrass myself when I try to shout along in the car on the highway with my friends who never stopped caring about all the small things.Some neat history: Blink-182 was formed in San Diego in 1992 (coincidentally the town and year of my birth). Tom “Rock Star turned UFO Investigator” DeLonge (our past) and Matt “painter, pisces, biker, surfer, lover, fighter, loner, rebel” Skiba (our present) were both 17. This is an ouroboros of the band’s (the tiger’s) interpersonal distress in the form of a subtweet in reference to, like, a letter in a lovers’ quarrel. It tries its best to remain blinky, to get sonically snuggly with diehard and burgeoning audiences, all the while eschewing narrative specificity for fear of being petty and/or emotionally uncouth. It’s so curled in on itself yet so empty in the middle! So fraught yet so boring! It’s backed up against the wall, masturbationlessly world-weary, mumbling “I’ve made a huge mistake.” If this sounds like a negative review, it’s because it would be if I weren’t so entranced by the simultaneity of core nothingness and liminal heartache. What can I say? I love see-through things.
[7]

Alex Ostroff: Overwrought pop-punk trying to sound like a world-weary adult is only charming until you’re actually old. ‘Bored to Death’ is warmed-over 2003-era Blink-182, so in the spirit of clichés and nostalgia for 1997, let me presumably be the fifty-leventh of us to end with: Well, I guess this is growing up.
[3]