Rather be bucked off than bucked up…

[Video][Website]
[5.71]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: As a music-obsessed teen, I always wondered how some people could eventually default to listening to the same artists for decades. “Wouldn’t they want to keep seeking new, exciting music?” I used to naively say. Well, “Bucked Off” is the exact type of song that makes me think “Yeah, I understand why someone would be comfortable with repeatedly listening to Brad Paisley for decades.” It’s well written.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Dunno why Brad’s getting hopped up — sorry, bucked off — over George Strait when he’s been a nostalgist for years; like hip-hop, country depends on nostalgia, only don’t remind Paisley or he’ll ask Akon to duet on a future collaboration. Anyway, the riff is solid, perhaps his best in years, and the moment when the acoustic guitar entered at 3:40 his first surprise in at least eight. Still, that’s little to hang one’s hat on, and Strait could wear a hat.
[5]

Katie Gill: Brad Paisley has two genres: serious (“Whiskey Lullaby,” “He Didn’t Have To Be”) and dad joke funny (“Alcohol,” “I’m Gonna Miss Her,” “I’m Still A Guy.”) With a title like “Bucked Off,” you’d think this would fall in the latter camp. Instead, it’s play by numbers Paisley trying to play a series of ham-fisted, clunky rodeo metaphors straight. Get it! Breaking up with someone is like getting bucked off a horse! Get it? Isn’t this so smart???
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Starts promisingly with a good, muscular riff, but the song doesn’t take advantage of the built-in momentum. It’s too sing-songy, and too slow to be sing-songy in an effective way; you wait a long time (possibly about 600 years between two halves of a rhyming couplet) before it gets to the punchline, and it’s a pretty corny metaphor. Paisley sure knows how to put a smile on my face with his guitar, but I’m finding his way with a chorus and a hook is massively diminished these days.
[5]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Damn, this is fun. It’s throwback country, 100% “authentic cowboy”style from the winking metaphors down to the Grand Ole Opry arrangement, but then there’s this fun little detail that jumps out at me — “I think about those nights in Marina Del Rey” — yes, Marina Del Rey, that little California town, near where Brad Paisley’s second home used to be (before he sold it for a meager $2.5 million, around 2% of his net worth). A sly peek behind the curtain there — of course this isn’t a humble cowboy hanging out in dive bars, this is Brad freaking Paisley. But he plays the part so well!
[8]

Anthony Easton: His playing is too in control to sound either luststruck, drunk, or about to be bucked off. What might be more interesting is this recent attempt to claim Strait as a paterfamilias of old school country authenticity, something that Paisley himself was for a while. 
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: I love George Strait, as is my legal obligation as a native Texan. That doesn’t mean I’m going to love every song that tries to pass off a Strait name-check as instant traditionalist cred. Paisley, being a country veteran in his own right, knows better than to half-ass a tribute to one of the greats. He manages to convey respect without veering into ritualism, and he deploys familiar musical tropes with a smiling assuredness rather than supplicating before them. The narrative scaffolding, though pedestrian on its own, is crucial in preventing this from devolving into a grocery list of references. It’s also more subtle than it really needs to be. The lyrical rework of “The Cowboy Rides Away,” and its centrality to the song, makes it clear that Paisley has weightier issues than just women and horses on his mind. “Feels like there’s a number pinned onto the back of my shirt”: rodeo imagery, sure, but death imagery as well. If “The Cowboy Rides Away” was a song about mortality in the guise of a breakup song, “Bucked Off” is a higher-order version of that — it’s indirectly a song about the mortality of George Strait. In the ending applause I hear not a rowdy rodeo crowd, but the 105,000 fans who packed AT&T Stadium for his final stop on the Cowboy Rides Away Tour, which I can still barely even think about without getting misty-eyed.
[8]

Turn that cherry out!

[Video][Website]
[7.29]

Jessica Doyle: The thing I admire about Sawayama’s work so far is how her song structure is recognizably pop, not experimental, and yet within that structure she puts together narratives that are at once specific (“Now it’s Tuesday”; see also the magnificent “biting the shit out of her straw“) and flexible enough to be recognizable. (I mean, yes, the story here is clearly about sexual attraction, and yet it’s easy to tell a story in which the narrator never actually gets together with the girl on the subway; the joy, power, and fear come from the awakening of the desire but isn’t dependent on its fulfillment.) Her sound is fresh and challenging without requiring the listener to forfeit all need for a hook. It’s impressive, the way she embraces constraints. One extra point because both the official video and the behind-the-scenes video, in the notes, list all the dancers by name.
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: Rina slices through the humongous, cuttlass sharp bass, thudding, heavy lidded drums and glassy, watery synths to peel out a stunning hook of pop.
[10]

Micha Cavaseno: A hypothetical scenario game for the reader: Let’s say from the ages of say 8 to 14, the most dominant music in your life was hair metal. Hell, maybe this is the case for some of you, so let’s proceed! Hair metal punctuates your adolescence and then eventually you get bored of it as you mature and more music occurs and decide you want to try to diversify your taste. As time goes on however, you mature as a person, becoming aware of your responsibilities and obligations to the world, while also seeking to challenge everything around you: it calls to you. Hair metal. You constantly go back to hair metal because the merits are now very easy for you to crystallize and you can see who tried their hardest to avoid the easy pitfalls that made it embarrassing or even regretful. Then suddenly, people start making hair metal again, but with a twist! The hair metal reflects the modern age, nostalgia, the shifting sense of the world and sentiments. Suddenly, hair metal is speaking to you on your terms. And, not to mention, it manages to be some really kick-ass hair metal that perfectly gets what worked so effectively back when you were young. It works so effectively you ignore the fact that rock has moved on a good two or three times minimum from the days of hair metal… Now, replace hair metal with the pop of the late 90s and early 00s and that’s what you get with “Cherry” and a lot of Rina Sawayama in general for me. That isn’t to say she can’t make high quality pop of the kind I loved back in the days before my teenage years hit and I started getting pretensions about being Into Music. The production’s slickness is a gentle familiarity, and she addresses the nostalgia with a casual admission and none of the “REMEMBER THE 90S!?!?” nag; she also touches the most noble of bases while returning to a pop that doesn’t admit what about it you realize was inadequate or even of questionable intent. Enjoying “Cherry” comes with a disconcerting admission that rather than admit we can’t make the world adhere to our expectations, we’d rather construct an idealization of our past which is much more suitable.
[6]

Ian Mathers: It’d be lovely to just appreciate the effervescent “Cherry” on a purely pop level (right down to those airy, post-Carey backing vocals on the chorus), because it’d be lovely to live in a world where writing and singing about non-heterosexual romantic feelings and relationships was just, as it were, another colour in the rainbow. But this world is manifestly not that world, which leads to the pit in the middle of “Cherry,” a song expressly about, among other things, feeling guilty for identifying as (for example) pansexual when one is currently in a straight-passing relationship. That doesn’t make “Cherry” a worse song — if anything, I’d argue it makes it a better one — but it does mean you’re going to get a little melancholy to go with all that joy.
[8]

John Seroff: I dig Rina’s voice, the song’s general vibe, and the song’s message of inclusivity but the total package is too slick, emotionless, and flat for this to leave a mark.
[5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Rina Sawayama’s “Cherry” details an experience that the singer had as a teenager, one that led her down a path towards understanding her sexual identity. She relays the conflicted feelings she had (“I live my life within a lie”) and the importance of wrestling with them (“Holding onto feelings I’m not used to feeling, ’cause oh they make me feel alive”). “Now I wanna love myself,” sings Sawayama in the bridge, proud to finally know who she really was all along. It’s heartening and encouraging and bold to hear such a song, especially one from an Asian, and its importance has been proven: some fans have been inspired by the song and Sawayama’s own coming out to do so themselves. Knowing all this, it’s kind of a shame that “Cherry” doesn’t have the strongest hook. Like most of Sawayama’s works, it has an interesting and engaging idea that gets its message across in a relatively procedural manner. The result is a song that feels like it should be catchy but feels more inert. But in this particular case, maybe the dissonance and the semblance of mental processing are appropriate.
[5]

Vikram Joseph: Rina Sawayama’s had quite a 2018 — she started the year playing tiny venues and ended it with a headline show at Heaven, a cult following and an engaging, talismanic social media presence. Even more hearteningly, she’s felt comfortable embracing her truest self; “Cherry” is a self-styled “pansexual bop,” and it’s every bit as queer and effervescent as that implies. It’s cut from the same cloth as “Ordinary Superstar” — a playful, sweeping, streamlined pop song — but if you’ve heard the RINA EP you won’t doubt her range. Still, this feels like a huge personal step forward from the EP; the insecurity and anxiety that filled every crevice of a song like “Tunnel Vision” is still present in trace elements, but “Cherry” makes coming out sound wild and fun — a world of possibilities and opportunities fanning out in spectacular colour, uncharted lands just waiting for discovery. There’s joy in this mess, too.
[8]

When she goes solo, we go somewhere in the middle…

[Video]
[4.43]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Oh, the regality of pizzicato strings. Amidst their presence is Jennie, disdainfully reciting a list of things couples say to each other: “Baby. Darling. Honey. I Miss you.” Sigh. “It’s all useless,” she sings, and it’s evident that she’s ever so exhausted. The decorum, the patina of a good relationship, the perpetuation of any and all bullshit — everything’s increasingly tiring, so the song steers clear of “Issues” to become the second-rate YG Entertainment stock music that producers Teddy and 24 whip up on the regular. Despite my reservations for “Solo,” there are several good moments: “Used to be your girl now I’m used to being the GOAT,” implying that this dude was nothing but unnecessary baggage; how the final verse mirrors the first verse’s vocal rhythm, indicating that the pain of keeping up appearances has to be solved with the pain that comes with breaking up; the intentional bilingual impact of “I’m shining solo/Bitch, I’m solo.” YG’s decision to have every Blackpink member release solo tracks is questionable, but “Solo” reveals that this endeavor may allow for songs that are slightly different from what the group is typically given. Here’s hoping the other girls do better solo, and that it’s better than “Solo.”
[4]

Anthony Easton: Her voice is delicious and can wind around anything that is given to her, and I know nothing about this, but there is something delightful about the whistle, as a continuation and wink to Blackpink’s monster hit.
[8]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: There’s promise here — Jennie has a very versatile tone and lots of star potential — but Teddy Park’s production doesn’t do her voice and her capabilities any justice. The string-hits/finger snaps combination in the intro and the “oh-oh-oh” chants in the pre-chorus hinted at something far more engaging, but what we got was yet another underwhelming drop-as-hook. I know it’s intended as an extension of the Blackpink sound, but she deserved a stronger debut solo single. 
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: The overall structure and that snake-charmer beat drop bring some deja vu as the song flops the same way Sunmi’s “Gashina” does. “Solo” similarly goes inert in the chorus when the break-up narrative, another link to Sunmi’s viral hit, calls for a sense of release. The single tapping into its own meta-narrative of it being Jennie’s solo debut from her group Blackpink doesn’t help matters as it shoulders her with a responsibility she can’t quite fulfill.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Even as a hater, I have to think that Jennie or anyone in the Blackpink camp deserve better than a Sabrina Carpenter tune with a generic drop from 3 years ago. It’s one of those baffling things that a group that’s expected to inherit a throne of “the cutting edge” always manages to sound incredibly far behind. There’s few ideas to sink into, and it’s all far too brief, so that any chance of establishing a true solo identity here is honestly a bit impossible to come by.
[2]

Alfred Soto: If this Blackpink member had done better than throwing a useless drop at 0:50, I might endorse this solo move.
[3]

Jessica Doyle: I listen to Morris Baxter’s daily motivation when I can, and normally it’s prosperity gospel with a side of well-worn anecdote, but this morning stood out: he was talking about work not as a road to wealth or financial security, but as something rewarding in its own right. So many of the narratives that have swirled around Blackpink in the last year have been about work: what are they working on? Why don’t they work more? Is YG promoting Jennie at the expense of the other three members? If Blackpink weren’t working would CL be working? And, most recently, is Jennie not doing the work she’s supposed to do? All of which points to one question: what should the relationship between the worker and the customer be? Especially when the customer is also, usually, a worker, and pop-music work can seem enviable: not just for the supposed possible riches, but also because Jennie gets immediate feedback (people talking about her, whether she’s seen as performing well or badly). She can say her work matters, in a way a lot of her customers can’t. But the worker who focuses too much on the work, to the exclusion of the context of the work, risks turning into the horse from Animal Farm. No customer has the right to demand that Jennie find visible pleasure in her work. And yet, does it make me too much of a capitalist to say Morris Baxter has a point? No one should be forced to enjoy work or prohibited from pursuing better work conditions. And yet work visibly enjoyed is a contribution: it makes the work matter, however briefly. There’s a difference between saying that “Solo” feels unenjoyed, and thus unenjoyable, and blaming Jennie. The one should not imply the other; the one should still be said.
[4]

Shaking it but in a fleeting, forgettable way…

[Video][Website]
[4.00]

John Seroff: Cool Story, Bro: The Song
[3]

Iain Mew: The picture that captured a moment is already a thin sketch of a thin premise for a thin-sounding song, but there’s a name signed as well? The whole “looking for the rest of my life” idea falls apart with the obviousness that, armed with a phone snap of the Polaroid, the internet could find its subject quicker than you can say Brother Orange.
[3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Finding ephemeral but meaningful relationships in a live-in-the-moment world can make for a cute premise, but “Polaroid” spends so much time explaining its rather bland story that it forgets to be a memorable song along the way. Also, given that you’re taking decent care of them, Polaroids take more than 100 years to fade, so…
[2]

Anthony Easton: The little falsetto in how he sings “Polaroid” is as charming as his full awareness of Polaroid’s essential flaws. I want more excellent-archival-knowledge-as-ongoing-metaphor for the ephemeral nature of desire. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: The voices blend well, I must admit, and the melody is sweet, so maybe if I listen to “Polaroid” a few more times I’ll understand how this trio can “dance without moving.”
[5]

Stephen Eisermann: Lennon Stella’s airy, smoky voice sounds especially refreshing here, and even Liam Payne sounds engaged, but this dance-pop track is a tad too generic for either artist to save. EDM producers, though, take note: Lennon Stella could make for a wonderful vocalist on a future, not same sounding, track. 
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Liam Payne The Semi-Anonymous Guest Vocalist is a much more appealing proposition than Liam Payne The Creative Visionary, and he’s complemented well by the even more unobtrusive Lennon Stella. “Polaroid” as a whole is pleasingly unimposing: cliches of lost love at first light and cliches of the Jonas Blue sonic palette, all carefully crafted by a predictable team of predictability specialists (JP Cooper’s fingerprints are especially noticeable). Music does not get more OK than this.
[5]

Please take a moment to appreciate our intentional scheduling of this song on this day…

[Video][Website]
[3.71]

Micha Cavaseno: Man, the further and further Jess Glynne departs from Clean Bandit, the faster and faster she becomes Rachel Platten with some sense of range.
[2]

Stephen Eisermann: Restraint doesn’t sound as good on Jess Glynne as belting does. Just like the song’s message and minimalist production seem like calculated decisions, so do her vocal inflections, which would be fine, except that seems to go against the message of the song, no?
[3]

John Seroff: Approaching lack of artifice as some sort of special occasion virtue emphasizes artificiality as a necessary norm; one presumes Friday through Wednesday are the days when Glynne’s down with the patriarchy? This empowerment-by-numbers track would be better served with less flimsy bravado and a lot more thought.
[4]

Alfred Soto: This “I’ve Never Been to Me” depends on Jess Glynne’s starchy Beth Orton-indebted tones, and a bookmarked copy of The Alchemist. 
[3]

Ramzi Awn: Any song that uses the word “broken” to describe a person in 2018 is not worth listening to. I’d much rather hear about a broken dishwasher. Anyone up for “Mrs. Bartolozzi” by Kate Bush? 
[0]

Anthony Easton: This kind of lush self-loathing is absurd, and we can tear apart the lyrics, but how she sings “Thursday,” and how it clips into a production that was fairly anemic, has a charm that complicates the enterprise. 
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: “Thursday” is constantly on the precipice of mawkishness, but that’s the secret to its appeal: everyone knows that the sentiments expressed in these lyrics are trite, so it’s the song’s quiet navigation of its ideas that help listeners ease into them. The tremolo picking is awkward — like it’s shoehorning a cinematic undercurrent to the song — but it feels like the perfect way to transition into the song’s jubilant finale. The post-chorus is underwritten, but this otherwise has the perfect topline to transmit self-love in a manner that’s both cautiously and unabashedly sincere.
[7]

A supergroup we mostly find pretty super…

[Video][Website]
[7.30]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: When Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers announced that they were joining together as Boygenius earlier this year, I was both excited and skeptical. All three were coming off of excellent sophomore releases that worked in the same indie singer-songwriter milieu, but each of those albums was brilliant in large part because of its unique brand of loneliness: a god-fearing despondency on Baker’s Appointments, a strung-out LA wandering on Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps, a warm, embracing solitude on Dacus’ Historian. It felt strange, in concept at least, for these three vibes to coexist in one artistic body. Yet “Bite The Hand” proves my skepticism wrong almost immediately. As soon as Baker and Bridgers come in on the harmonies to support Dacus’ tale of romantic self-sabotage, it’s clear that Boygenius works as a group to bridge that loneliness, and in that synthesis, in the gorgeous descending vocal lines over the clamor of the guitars in the song’s outro, to find some musical solidarity.
[8]

John Seroff: The Dacus-led “Bite the Hand” is the first and by far the best track on the Boygenius album, all wistful Robert Smith guitar, steep slow build, and lo-fi girl-group harmonies sapped of color but not emotion. Both structurally and lyrically, it keeps its scope narrow and its pressure constant. The unresolved ending has kept me replaying, looking for a closure I know won’t come.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Unpopular opinion: I find Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers’ solo work bland individually, so the prospect of that times three is also not overly exciting. Why, with so few exceptions — the Dilettantes, Wild Flag, Pistol Annies when they’re on — do supergroups end up so MOR? Is it just that the most exciting artists make music that’s harsher, spikier, less submersible into others? (Imagine a supergroup of Kristin Hersh, Erika M. Anderson and Meg Myers.) Is it the folk roots, when the most exciting artists now are working outside sedate folk? (Imagine Karin Dreijer in any supergroup.) “Bite the Hand” is crunchier than I expected, with decent harmonies (though not amazing or frequent, and they highlight how glum the main melodic line is), but at center is still a platitude sung in saltine-beige voice.
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: “Bite the Hand” features dreary guitar chord strumming meant to create a bleak void for one to safely reside in. It’s lethargic and insular and grey, perfectly summed up by the matter-of-fact delivery of “I can’t love you how you want me to.” It’s primarily a Dacus song, making it more personal, but Baker and Bridgers harmonize as if to provide comfort. It does a lot of things right, and it’s hard to fault it of much, but Dacus isn’t particularly engaging.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Lucy Dacus can’t muster the strength by herself to share how she feels, and neither Phoebe Bridgers nor Julien Baker can get through a crushing refrain like “I can’t love you how you want me to” on their own either. But they claim the lyric together in “Bite the Hand,” with Bridgers and Baker singing behind Dacus just in case it becomes too much for her to bear her words alone. Keeping company may not exactly soothe, but it makes it a little easier.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Brilliant harmonies, infused with heartbreak, have a long tradition in pop. This is an excellent example, made even better when tempered with anger. 
[8]

Tim de Reuse: The three-part harmonies are the focal point here, each line sliding between the others with a kind of dead-behind-the-eyes unenthusiasm that gives an appropriate sense of resignation to the line “I can’t love you like you want me to.” The surrounding indie-rock instrumental is functional; it frames the voices and otherwise stays out of the way. Feels like a proof-of-concept for a band capable of more substantial things.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: The biggest question I had coming into the Boygenius EP was how these three superficially similar indie rock auteurs would piece their musical visions into a singularly compelling whole. Would it all melt into a slurry of meet-in-the-middle sameness, or would centrifugal forces tear apart any hope for cohesion? Even the title of the project seems to hint at the ego clashes that have undone many creative partnerships; it jabs at the cult of the individual genius while testifying to its powerful allure. “Bite the Hand,” for the majority of its runtime, is thoroughly a Lucy Dacus song, with only sparse and cosmetic traces of collaboration. This is fine insofar as Dacus is a fantastic songwriter, but a full surrender to this approach would reduce this supposed supergroup to little more than cross-promotional branding. Thankfully, the harmonizing outro singlehandedly dispels such concerns. Bridgers and Baker chime in with impeccable timbre and timing, at once validating Dacus’ unsentimentalism and extending her words into places she alone can’t take them.
[8]

Alfred Soto: At first it deceives listeners into thinking it will depend on the strummed intimacy of recent Mitski until the members of this supergroup use their vocals as directional signs, and when they no longer strum their guitars I can see their teeth going for the fingers. 
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: Similarly to Be The Cowboy, the group name of Boygenius comes from a place of asserting yourself and not being afraid to take up space. Yet “Bite The Hand” is about the side effects of existing as a Badass Woman In Indie Rock, with the expectations of both intense vulnerability and steely-eyed strength. One of the first lines is “I can’t see you, the light is in my face,” and the light is literal, but symbolic. Lucy Dacus (the lead writer on this song) once clarified this sentiment in an interview: “I don’t go into crowds after shows anymore… but I hate how unfair that exchange is. Everyone in the crowd is probably a creator, and they all get to see my thing, and I don’t get to see any of theirs.” With that in mind, “I can’t touch you, I wouldn’t if I could” weighs even heavier. Even after she stopped going into crowds, they touched her anyway, creating an unwanted physical connection instead of the emotional one desired. Maybe I’m afraid of you. “Bite the hand that needs me” sounds like a throwaway rhyme, but it’s the most important line of the song: fans of vulnerable musicians have guns with no safety on, they have the box tattooed on their arm, they lie in the bathtub and put on your first record. Opening yourself up as a musician can be cathartic, and it can make others feel less alone, but doing that night after night in an increasingly unstable, exploitative industry takes its toll. As Dacus goes into a round with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, as the layers of distortion pile up, a deeper purpose of Boygenius as a group becomes clear. It’s not merely for listeners or concertgoers; it’s for the trio to commiserate too, for them to feel less alone. The three of them don’t have as much in common as some might assume, but they’re still all lumped into the same category. If the song concludes by closing off completely from the audience (“I can’t love you how you want me to…”), a more uplifting resolution is in the subtext: in that final crescendo and a cappella coda, “Bite The Hand” finds strength through companionship instead. 
[10]

Love: suggestions about on par with country music…

[Video]
[4.25]

Katherine St Asaph: So much pop writing, whether old-school stuffy or reaction-GIFed-out, is just an ongoing version, periodically reassessed for shifting artist cred, of the fundamental attribution error. Context changes everything. Announce that a song’s written by Nicola Roberts, Kylie Minogue, TashBed and Miranda of Xenomania, and half of Popjustice would be found dead the next day. Credit that song to Cheryl, and suddenly it becomes a tepid comeback attempt whose lyrics blatantly bait the tabloids. Listen to it, and while the subdued grotto production on the verses, the shiny vocoded chorus, and the cheeky backing-vocal asides are appealing, they’re also nothing Tove Styrke hasn’t done lately. And remove the sass, and the result veers close to an iced-tea jingle.
[5]

Tobi Tella: I really wanted to like this, because the way people talk about Cheryl is gross, sexist, and ageist in so many ways (the YouTube comments for this song are a cesspool). But unfortunately, I just can’t get into it. The lyrics are shallow and almost meaningless, and the minimalist production just highlights their weakness. Cheryl sounds fine, I guess, but there’s basically no song here.
[4]

Anthony Easton: Most of the points come from the lazy but charming rhyme of “sucker” and “fucker.” An extra point for the percussion, the only thing on the track at least slightly weird. 
[4]

Alfred Soto: It hits its marks, rhyming “sucker”/”fucker” and finding a spare insinuating backbeat. Yet I wish Shania Twain had written and sung it in 1997, preferably with exclamation points — two for good measure.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: “Love Made Me Do It” is pleasingly empty — it’s the rare dance-pop song where the bells and whistles of the beat feel like they’ve been given enough room to breathe, a track made with the confidence of a pop stalwart. Unfortunately, the opposite is true of the lyrics, which shoot for a manic energy but just seem in disarray. Yet “Love Made Me Do It” is salvaged by Cheryl’s own vocal performance, effortlessly moving between moods and selling them all.
[6]

John Seroff: Repeated snotty tween refrains of “it wasn’t my fault” and “I won’t apologize” in defense of being a jaded adult lover, alongside the oh-no-I-know-a-dirty-word sucker / fucker rhyme scheme barely buoyed by uninspired production, make this whole exercise feel painfully basic, a rant on the heels of drinking too much box wine on a Tuesday night. I have the sneaking suspicion that the shit Cheryl has seen actually might not make my head explode.
[4]

Pedro João Santos: When I reviewed “Girls” for the Jukebox–my very first entry–I more or less called it indigent pop. Though not typed for clout or cattiness, those words echoed in my head for days; had I been too harsh? (I’m sure Rita Ora can’t sleep at night.) But here, a descriptor like indigence really takes audible shape. The composition and its elements sound like they were reheated in the microwave, the center left frigid. The unexcitingly mechanical arrangement has no rhythmic variation, no aplomb or impetus in sight, and Cheryl provides the vocal equivalent of anonymity and imperturbability. The chorus comes closest to feigning some type of emotion, pushed by the layered, reverb-kissed vocals and a cheeky bassline, but then there’s the diabolical break and (my pet peeve) the faux-naïf “it wasn’t my fault”. But there’s a further problem: something that “Girls” didn’t have and that containing the word “fucker” doesn’t dissolve: insipidity, the real enemy of pop.
[3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: A bunch of interesting production choices and an amusing “sucker”/”fucker” rhyme that all stays suspended in air, unable to find its footing. Less a song than sketch.
[3]

If by “it” you mean “a couple of points since last time”…

[Video]
[4.25]

Katie Gill: It says a lot about Kane Brown’s charisma that he’s able to sell these far too generic “girl you’re so pretty” middle-of-the-top-20 lyrics. The meter and rhythm in the chorus is super fun, the violins and the drums work amazingly well together, and I love the brief bridge before the final chorus. It’s a thought-out blend of the country genre and pop stylings that someone like Sam Hunt can only dream of achieving.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: Innovation in 21st century country: a vocalist insufferable not for a straining, Nicklebackian gruffness, but because of his too-clean, monotone nasality. The instrumental is kind of fascinating, though; we’ve got banjo, we’ve got mournful fiddle, we’ve got hard-rock distortion, we’ve got sci-fi synth blooping every once in a while, and it’s all wrangled together into a tasteful, spacious sonic package. Whoever produced this deserves to be working with a less obnoxious headliner.
[5]

Anthony Easton: The last Kane Brown album had potential, but this one kind of broke him open for me. He has that kind of laconic, looping Sam Hunt quality, and the soft ramping up to an almost manic hardness, but there is some really interesting variation here. The rests have an anxious push, and the whole thing speeds pretty close to recklessness. It moves from R&B classicism to rock nostalgia, from Sam Hunt to Eric Church at his grindiest. The lyrics rest on a pretty sodden single entendre, but the hunger to fuck actually has more of a push than some of his cohort. Not as much of a push as Ashley Monroe, but what does?
[8]

John Seroff: I’ll acknowledge that Brown’s foghorn tone gives George Strait a run for his adenoids, but what in the name of Kawliga is going on with his phrasing? Somewhere between trying to match “phone in your hand” with “cover band,” pouring on the foreboding banjo (THERE’S a preset for you), high-in-the-mix percussion that wandered in from an unrelated session next door, overbearing guitar and some unasked for late-innings heroics from the strings, it all falls apart.
[3]

Ian Mathers: I’d be more impressed with how many different parsings of the title phrase he manages to get through if even a couple of them weren’t dumb as hell; meanwhile, the backing track is like every nightmare I had after being stuck in a room with CMT on when I was growing up.
[3]

Alfred Soto: I have an unnatural disgust with titles promising a release or hysteria that never happens. Kane Brown sticks to the script with such fidelity that I can see the bouncing ball on each syllable. And what on earth is the banjo doing?
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: Y’know, even as a non-country fan I’d like to think the genre deserves a little better than something like a Dream Street comeback single. Kane Brown’s about as uninteresting a vocalist as you can get, and the rest feels like your typical pop record where the general sentiment is old-fashioned but you’re playing Current-Day Pop Culture Madlibs. Also, for a record that brags so relentlessly about getting away from modern distractions, the pop production is blatantly hollow. I take it back: Dream Street did less transparent gestures than this.
[2]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: That back-and-forth vocal melody in the chorus drives me up a wall. It’s completely off-putting given Kane Brown’s congested-sounding voice, making the rest of the song worth ignoring.
[3]

Went a little heavy on the Squeez, did ya there, Mitchell…

[Video]
[3.57]

Anthony Easton: Country is a set of ongoing repetitions of tradition, so it is mostly about how well they use cliches, instead of the fact they use cliches at all. Novelty is overrated. This is an excellent example of how that might be true — every line, and every line as it has been delivered, has been done with more wryness, or more yearning heartbreak, or more ironic remove, or any suggestion that he knows what he is saying, or at least he believes it. 
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The way this grows into a series of accented cymbal crashes and guitar strums — as if to model Mitchell Tenpenny’s drunken stumbling — is impressive. Not sure what else the song has going for it though.
[5]

Crystal Leww: You can hate Sam Hunt’s persona and influence on country music, but at least you can admit that Sam Hunt never wrote something as sloppy and un-banging as this. 
[4]

Ramzi Awn: In somebody else’s hands, “Drunk Me” would fall flat on its face, but Mitchell Tenpenny and his production team make the most of well-placed harmonies, anthem acoustics and heart to propel this power ballad over the arena ceiling. 
[6]

Stephen Eisermann: A bad, modern, barely-country “Man in the Mirror” dipped in alcoholism, except “Drunk Me” tries to make up for the lack of personality by being overproduced. Much like a six pack doesn’t give you a personality, neither do electric guitar licks and synths in the background of faux-country tracks. 
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: The finest, or at least the biggest, megachurch/Matchbox 20 “Unwell” country-stuff, deployed to call a girl a hangover.
[2]

Alfred Soto: That’s not his name, is it? It can’t be. At any rate, this isn’t a song — it’s a series of incoherences held together by spit ‘n’ syrup. Has Mitch ever had a hangover? If so, he wouldn’t want them to linger. 
[1]

“Hey QT”; “Doctor Pepper”; “Cola”; “Goya Soda”; “Soda Pop”; “Soda”; “Pop”; this: which fizzy drink anthem shall reign supreme?

[Video][Website]
[6.29]

Will Rivitz: The hyper-bubbly electronic pop of Moving Castle and its associated artists is one of the best developments of the past few years. They act like a funhouse mirror for the PC Music camp, in which the latter’s streamlined saccharine perfection is reimagined without a hint of irony — which is to say it’s everything that makes PC Music great without anything that makes PC Music obnoxious. The “Hey QT” comparisons that bubble up with “Squeez®” are obvious, but subject matter and musical stylings constitute pretty much their only proper similarities. Whereas the Sophie/A.G. Cook project presents its product tongue firmly in cheek, ostensible skewering of consumerism oozing out of every nasal vocal swoop, Shawn Wasabi and Raychel Jay treat their central conceit as more a jumping-off point to bigger and better things. It’s not about the soda — it’s about the effervescence and jolts of sucrose, it’s about capturing the childish idealism of a Coke ad sans the cold and calculated marketing goals, it’s about making things meant to be shared. Detached irony is the absolute worst, and bless Shawn Wasabi’s heart for recognizing that.
[9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The rare song from a semi-popular YouTube person (albeit, one whose channel is focused on music) that makes me think, “Ok yeah it’s kind of cool that this random no name was able to make a song and get it out there to a wider audience.” It’s cutesy, PC Music-lite pop that’s mostly charming because of its low stakes context. Raychel Jay’s voice is limited, but that’s kind of the point, right?
[6]

John Seroff: Video may have Killed the Radio Star but YouTube got kids out here auditioning to make jingles. Raychel Jay and her ly-ly-lyrics are frankly bad but, if I’m reading the cultural tea leaves correctly, that’s all the better to chant along with? As someone who identifies as pro-pop music but anti-Pop Art, I’m torn as to whether this sort of blithely infantilized effervescence is more or less preferable to PC Music’s vacuum sealed formalism. I guess the fact that I keep hitting replay answers my question. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: “Squeez®” has the effervescence of Savage Garden’s “I Want You” but lacks the bubble pop electricity of what the average K-pop star would’ve injected in the first verse.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Shawn Wasabi’s music is first and foremost about giving the listener a good time, but he goes a step further than your typical mash-up artist in finding ways to wring genuine pathos out of pop cultural detritus. Amidst the ricocheting ruckus of “Marble Soda,” a message faintly emerges: these songs, these shows, these websites you waste your time on are not incidental to your experience of the world; they, and the connections formed through them, are integral to it. Maybe not the kind of thing a Burkean conservative or orthodox Marxist would endorse, but it speaks to something real and abiding, even if it’s through the language of silly memes. On “Squeez®,” Wasabi leaves the borrowing behind and sets out to codify this ersatz humanism, with the help of a performer who seems to intuitively understand his vision. Raychel Jay is more girl-next-door than powerhouse vocalist, which is all too appropriate for a song where the stakes are kept deliberately small. She dispatches an intrusive thought about rent like it were a pop-up ad, and her emotional peak comes in the form of the line “can we date ’til it rains gingerade.” The latter is part of a commitment to beverage puns that’s as whimsical as it is dizzying; I had to look online to make sure this was a real drink and that I wasn’t just mishearing “ginger ale.” It’s at this point where I’m supposed to mention that these are all thinly veiled sexual metaphors and the entire song is an analogy for a no-strings-attached relationship, which is not wrong. But the lewdness is filtered through such a thick layer of lyrical abstraction and repetition — “pop pop pop pop POP pop” — that it ends up sounding entirely chaste, almost to the point of incorporeality. Pair this with the affably antiseptic production and one begins to get the idea that this may just be about a delicious summer drink after all. You might even go a step further and say that, with its simultaneous acceptance of sexual maturity and avoidance of its coarse biological implications, “Squeez®” could function as a rare but necessary example of an asexual pride anthem. It’s doubtful this was the intent, but that sparkling violin outro is open-hearted enough to embrace just about any interpretation you want to give it.
[9]

Crystal Leww: Shawn Wasabi’s Mixmag Lab set in late 2016 felt like the last bits of a wave of dance music that was committed to being weird and fast but still good. The LA EDM scene really sunk very deep into various nostalgia waves over the last few years from straight up pop punk to brostep. “Squeez®” sounds like some kind of strain of PC Music pop, leaning more heavily into the dance side, but without the pretension of that crew circa 2013. Shawn Wasabi has the ability to be thrilling at times (the videos of him playing with a Midi Fighter are incredible), but this is like eating an undercooked s’more — too fluffy and a little cold. 
[5]

Will Adams: I remember when Four Loko was a thing: a nefarious alcoholic beverage that would get you fucked up. It was banned in several states upon the discovery that combining stimulants with malt liquor is pretty dangerous. Eventually, in the early ’10s, Four Loko returned to shelves but without the caffeine or guarana, and no longer marketed as an energy drink. This happened just before I started college, and before I started drinking. As a rowdy college kid I felt a slight twinge of regret for never being able to try the original concoction. Sometime after my 21st birthday, I bought my first can of the new, safe version of Four Loko. Turns out that even with all the harmful, insidious crap removed, it still tasted awful.
[3]