We here at TSJ are good and ready to seal 2018 with a kiss and put 2019 on our radar. But first, we have one last thing to say:

We freakin’ love Simmy.

 

The South African singer-songwriter topped our 2018 rankings with “Umahlalela.” Want to see everything we covered in 2018? Here’s the list in alphabetical order. You can also check out our Spotify playlists:

• all songs (well, except for the ones not available on Spotify);
• songs ranked 6.10 or higher;
• songs ranked 4.10 to 6.09;
  songs ranked 4.09 or less.

While we’re taking our break, you might be so curious about some of our writers’ end-of-year thoughts:

• Will Adams has put his top 20 albums up on Medium.
• You can find Claire Biddles’s top ten albums in The Wire’s round-up lists (although you’ll have to get your hands on the actual print edition to read her extended thoughts).
• Also on Medium: Hannah Jocelyn explains what your favorite album of 2018 says about you…
• …and Ryo Miyuachi has published his favorite Japanese, J-idol, and K-pop singles.
• The team of Megan Harrington and David Sheffieck are counting down their top 50 singles of the year over at Grooves ‘n Jams.
• Finally, Kat Stevens wants to know what your best of 2018 was. Head over to the Freaky Trigger readers’ poll by the end of December 31st to send your vote!

We’re making our plans for the coming year, knowing that we can because of you, dear readers. Even in times that can feel scary or chaotic, this community of music lovers keeps going, and we’re grateful for all your comments, suggestions, and help. Our only wish this year is that you stick around so we can all be stronger together in 2019.

Happy New Year!

 

We no likey…

[Video]
[3.83]

Will Adams: A Christmas miracle: even a girl group that boasts a deep catalogue of electrifying singles can release a ballad this boring.
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Fact: No K-pop group can ever claim that a Christmastime song was the best thing they ever did. Granted, this track is one of the least egregious ones in recent memory, but the talk-rap is abysmal and the whole thing reeks of being a low-effort, obligatory holiday song. Every year, I hear complaints about how it seems like we’re stuck with the same Christmas songs forever. Every year, South Korea proves that the alternative isn’t any better.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: The title’s a “Kick Me” sign, but on its own merits the song isn’t awful, it’s just a bit on the sappy side. The lyrics, translated, say that “December is no longer lonely” which is a sop to the season and making it a default Christmas ballad as well. The overall effect certainly is one of cozy satisfaction, but there’s a fine line between that and falling asleep, and I’m not sure this is on the right side of that line.
[4]

Tobi Tella: I was pleasantly surprised by the restraint of this — not very characteristic for the genre, but it works very well for a sweet, chill ballad. It makes me want to sit in front of a fire with hot chocolate.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: I am probably the only person alive whose mind places this on a spectrum containing Britney’s mildly twinkly “My Only Wish” (well, if we’re being totally honest, the late Hairpin’s Personal Bests hijinks) on one end, and Barbra Streisand’s saccharine “The Best Gift” (I Ever Got) on the other. The actual influences are more along the lines of Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Christina Aguilera’s “I Turn to You”: the derivative ballads of the catalog. It’s after December 25 now; who isn’t a grinch?
[4]

Alfred Soto: High fructose corn syrup poured over a carton of sugar. Happy New Year!
[2]

So please don’t break it just because you can.

[Video][Website]
[5.88]

Will Adams: Seemingly a nod to ground zero of when Cyrus made her turn into Serious Artistry, “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” is less Joanne than it is a deep house remix of “Jolene.” Except that remix already exists, and has the added benefit of being “Jolene,” which this does not.
[5]

Iain Mew: A Star is Born worked out, but apparently elevating the Mark Ronson credit on “Sinner’s Prayer” could have done it too.
[6]

Tobi Tella: It’s been a little while, so it’s time for another Real Miley Cyrus, Making The Music I’ve Always Wanted To. However, if she’s picking a direction to go in, this isn’t bad at all! Her voice has always suited country well, and Mark Ronson’s country-disco producion makes it so it’s not the slog much of Younger Now was. The music video is good if heavy-handed, but hey, we all know how much worse it could be…
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Miley Cyrus sounds a smidgen unnatural at points, but it’s hard to imagine something that better suits her voice than this low-key country disco tune. As she sings a subtly addicting topline, the reverb and arrangement of strings make it seem like a strong wind is blowing. “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” consequently sounds lonely, like she’s standing alone, ready to accept the breakup that awaits her: “Nothing gon’ save us now.” Not sure I believe her when she sings it, but I want to.
[6]

Stephen Eisermann: This folksy, more organic sounding, country-tinged dance-pop does work better for Miley’s voice than most of her material, but this song still sounds more like filler or an introductory track, rather than the mega single it so badly wants to be. Like the first draft of so much of my writing, the pieces are there but there is still a lot of room for improvement.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” aims for capital-E Epic but ultimately rings hollow. Mark Ronson adds string arrangements like a music cue for primetime TV while Miley gives an emotionally detached performance that delivers longing and heartbreak in only the vaguest sense. The two manages to sneak in a curious little line — “we were drunk in love in Tennessee” — though they don’t care much beyond scene-setting to tease it further into something more personal.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: Like DJ Khaled, Mark Ronson’s greatest talent is his Rolodex. That’s not nothing, and hooking up with Miley Cyrus for a gothic western is an inspired idea, even if it only evinces shades of the clammy Ennio Morricone twilight it hints at. Cyrus shows signs of wanting to enter the weirder thickets of the sound, and she apportions her syllables with appropriate weight, declaiming “things fall apart” as if it had a gloom loosed entirely from Yeats. Ronson, however, tends to gesture at ideas rather than inhabit the spaces that build up around them, and while that works fantastically with a master of pastiche like Bruno Mars, it only holds Miley back.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: I assume Miley Cyrus remembers to send a nice present to her godmother Dolly every year, and maybe she should send an extremely large one this year, because parts of the verse to this lean hard into “Jolene” — not just the melody, but the whole strength-in-the-face-of-emotional-pain thing. It’s shtick, but it suits Cyrus well, though at the end of singing it, I imagine she just went and counted her money rather than feeling drained or emotionally spent. I’d like to hear her shred properly. Maybe the problem is that Ronson’s whistle-clean production with sad Western movie strings really needs a coat of dirt on it. Everything he does just sounds opulent by default, and this is a nice song but it’s not the massive event Ronson’s tried to produce it as. I think these two together could potentially be a really good songwriting team, but I’d get in a co-producer.
[6]

And sometimes we appreciate you, Grimes!

[Video][Website]
[6.40]

Katherine St Asaph: Single as misbrandbot output. What will it take to make me capitulate? Releasing a song that sounds like Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, The Lucy Nation, Ladytron, Client, butt-rock Enigma, and other sounds someone should have warned me about imprinting upon as a teen, lest a decade later I inescapably love a song by an artist reborn as a milkshake duckling. The song is a magnet for takes, most not totally fair. “We Appreciate Power” isn’t any more fascist, to take one take, than “bow down before the one you serve.” “But ‘Head Like a Hole’ isn’t about –” and neither is this. I’ve seen some talk about how it’s propaganda for The Big Bad Algorithms, but recommender algorithms and evil AI overlords are several orders of magnitude of separation from one another, and I know for a fact that Spotify is not spitting out 200 songs like this a playlist, because if it did I would love music a lot more. What this is, is mockable: inspired in equal parts by North Korean propo band Moranbong and by boyfriend Bong Moron; about the rationalist-forum version of John Titor; not remotely subtle in sound or lyrics even before the part that goes “submit! submit!” I have no real way of defending my love for this song — it must be hardcoded, I guess.
[9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Aside from the lyrics, this is a pure futurist vision, martial but charming all at once. Accounting for lyrics, it’s largely the same, but perhaps a bit on the nose?
[6]

Tobi Tella: This is a feast for the ears, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Every second felt like a whirlwind, and by the end when I was simply being told to “submit,” I was ready to do so. It’s the perfect sound for the ominous message that the song  provides- putting the existential dread that comes with the advancement of technology in the forefront.
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: A preemptive, AI overlord propaganda piece that is far more interesting than the recent Poppy collaboration if only because its conceit is strong enough to birth a line like, “C’mon you’re not even alive/If you’re not backed up on a drive.” As far as providing a glimpse into Grimes’s next LP, it shows how the nu-metal influence that appeared on her previous songs can now be elegantly tethered to a song’s themes; “We Appreciate Power” is so fully realized that it extends beyond pastiche. The sweet tonal shift during the bridge is a nice surprise, but it highlights how this song could be far more concise and harrowing. The bleakly monotonous singing, the siren-like guitars, the piercing percussion, the occasional screaming, the quiet demands to “submit” — they all only have as much impact as the song’s context provides for them. This is not an inherently bad thing, but listening to “We Appreciate Power” is more exciting on a conceptual level than anything else. I suppose state-sanctioned pop songs care most about their message, though.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Will there ever be an era when a pop song using tech jargon for its bridge like “baby, plug in, upload your mind” won’t be corny? That section is one of many here where the song winks to its own half-joke of building an edgy/sexy pop song around the concept of a near-future led by AI. The industrial-metal riffs may provide it a good musical base, but the overall eagerness behind “We Appreciate Power” to sell its concept makes it off-putting.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: At five and a half minutes, this song has about enough good ideas to last two and a half, but the thrashing drum beat and pure pithiness of the title make this as pleasingly acidic as it is poisonous. The lyrics are dumb, which is bad, but that primal squall of guitars and drums is also dumb, which is great.
[7]

Will Adams: While there are certainly points stacked against this — the tech-happy lyrics, no more clever than Poppy’s; a petulant sing-song melody that sits right between “The Streets of Cairo” and the Oompa Loompa song; this year’s utterly bizarre PR turn — “We Appreciate Power” captures everything I appreciated loved in Art Angels. It’s a bracing onslaught of sound composed of roaring guitars, metallic clangs and demonic screeching. What’s new is the militant stomp, which appropriately draws itself out before asking you to submit, as if holding you in a headlock.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Ironic transhumanism: it was only a matter of time. My personal bias is that I think it’s one of the most dangerous ideologies in the world, and anyone who’s willing to make pop lyrics out of the Wikipedia summary for Roko’s basilisk probably doesn’t share that view. But neither is this the completely sincere neo-reactionary manifesto some had feared. If it were, Grimes would be a terrible evangelist; “what will it take to make you capitulate” is not what you want on the front of the brochure. It is alluringly brazen, though, and along with the title, it demonstrates a keener understanding of politics than most artists working in a political space did this year. Here is the subtext of most vaporwave brought into the open and set to music designed to shake you out of complacency, whatever your stance on cybernetic consciousness might be. In spite of its outward bluntness, “We Appreciate Power” refuses to clearly identify itself as either protest music or marching orders, which is equal parts amoral, aggravating, and liberating. Even if this really is Grimes’ way of throwing her lot in with our future posthuman overlords (or, in the more short term, celebrating the return of the Lochner era), who of us by resisting a good beat can postpone the singularity by a single hour?
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: “We appreciate power” is exactly the hook to sing over degenerate buttrock guitar, but Grimes’s voice is a phantasm that catches on spectroscopy and comes to life in photographs of empty hallways. Evoking brute force, it only evinces a lack of inspiration. The globs of transhumanism that form the lyric hardly compensate.
[5]

Alfred Soto: I often complain about length, and rarely is my criticism apter than in this case. After two minutes of a muscular riff over which Grimes constructs a conceit that encompasses two dozen months of tumult and a lovely middle eight, “We Appreciate Power” grinds onward for another two and a half minutes. Then a funny thing happens — I listen to it again and again.
[7]

This podcast was supposed to be published about 3 weeks ago, but we had some technical problems and our editor was laid low with a nasty influenza infection and was physically unable to listen and edit. But we decided that we might as well not throw it away even if it might be a few weeks out of date now. William John is your host, and he discussed The 1975’s album with Claire Biddles, and what local artists were having hits on the New Zealand chart with Edward Okulicz. Stephen Eisermann also talks us through some nominated and winning artists at last month’s Latin Grammys.

Download it here: (53:52, MP3)

High quality – 87.1 Mb
Low quality – 19.3 Mb

The Singles Podcast can be followed on the iTunes store and on Soundcloud. You can also keep track of us from the on-site podcast archive.

(more…)

For In Review Online, Will Rivitz reviews KOAN Sound’s retrospective-feeling album Polychrome.

And summer either ended long ago or is in full flight depending on where you are, so consider this Amnesty Week’s End. We’ll be back after Christmas with some more songs before taking a break at New Year!

[Video][Website]
[7.43]Juan F. Carruyo: A song to ugly-cry to.
[8]

Ian Mathers: Look, as far as songwriters go I’ve thought John Prine was a genius since I was a kid playing Great Days on repeat and I was crying before I watched the video for this one, because the ways he sings “come on home” just wrecks me in a way I’m not sure I’m capable of articulating.
[10]

Alfred Soto: These songs are tough — would a tyro hear anything worth exploring or is “Summer’s End” for fans to project their affection? Both. Boasting much of his loping grace, The Tree of Forgiveness is a worthwhile tombstone for a career should John Prine start seein’ those shadows creep across the ceiling in real time. The light Mellotron touches on “Summer’s End” let the light into the room.
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Hard to imagine Prine winning over any new fans with this; “Summer End” is a late-career single from a longtime musician, and most of its appeal comes from hearing an artist do more or less what he’s always done except with more wear in his voice and some of the ostensible profundity that comes with age. It wavers between pleasant and tepid.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: Prine’s gently weathered voice settles into a twilight that won’t be followed by a sunrise. “The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking,” he speaks, drawing magical realism to the honky tonk, and letting the soft edges of the scene blur into eternity. Other images, like drying clothes on a line and shadows on a ceiling, are striking for their clarity and their decontextualized vividity, as sharp as memory. The arrangement is so warm and hushed it could have fit on Lambchop’s Is a Woman record, and while it’s comforting, it also softens the starkness of the lone guitar figure at the center of the arrangement. The rote and cyclical quality of some of the lesser lyrics — St. Valentine’s Day, Easter, New Years’ — dulls and fills out the space between the more distinct moments. When a performer reaches a certain age, it’s hard not to read death into darkness, but “Summer’s End” leans into that; it is a song not bound entirely to this plane of existence.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: I guess it’s a symbol of Prine’s influence that “Summer’s End” itself could have fit snugly on to many alt-country, or even country, artist’s records, and not just the ones who provided assists on Prine’s 2018 record. Prine’s vocals are frail, but the song’s delicate and has a strong melody, so the effect is humble and gentle more than anything. There are some striking word pictures here, but the song rests on the comparatively well-trodden — the emotive words “come on home” over a simple guitar. Whether it a literal beckoning or the soothing of a dying pillow, it’s a simple, but real comfort. I really enjoy Brandi Carlile’s spot-on backing vocals too.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Prine has already had a pretty close brush with death, one that fried his vocals enough that he had to learn a fairly different singing style. That style is smaller, a little more broken, complicating narratives that are already very sad and often very funny. Every album he releases seems like it may be the last, and the spaces between albums seem longer, and so the question arises — is this the last one? The interesting thing is that though the metaphor is fairly clear, the death here, the mourning — is not a solitary act. Coming home might be what a beloved Father says, but for Prine it is also what the community hears. The cosmic becomes domestic — the sun and moon in the bar together drinking — but also that coming home is being embraced in a low church communion of saints kind of way. For a song about death, it is a song about how a community folds in on itself. Mom has been really sick this year, and Dad has been very unkind in Mom’s sickness, and their complications, the question of what their relationship is, has been a decades long puzzle. I have cut Dad off, but he loves Mom, and other people have also helped Mom — friends parents, members of her church, my sister, and her wife. Family and friends are taking this stressful and sad place, and crafting a kind of homecoming for her — a home coming that I am not sure that other people would recognize a year or more ago. I also decided that the place I was living is home, and that despite the months-long prep I made to move back west, it was not going to happen. I am sentimental, and country music is sentimental, and home is a hornet’s nest, and all of this is bullshit, and Prine can usually hold his sentimentality, and there are sections of this that are as tart as Prine at his best (both in production, and in writing), but the bits that destroy me, especially in this year where I tried to figure out what home was, was when he sings: “Just come on home/Come on home/No you don’t have to be alone/Just come on home.” The simplest, tiniest, language, the saddest and happiest sentiment, words as simple a child can hear, and ones imbued with a Grace, and words that make me cry — maybe because of biography, maybe because of Prine’s age, maybe because it takes decades of figuring out how to sing before one can sing well about such big things in such small ways… but I keep feeling like I am flailing in describing how this thing just fucking destroys me.
[10]

Slightly more contentiously, here’s some Canadian post-punk…

[Video][Website]
[6.29]

Tim de Reuse: Isn’t it convenient to tell yourself, at the tail end of a failing relationship, that it was doomed from the outset? The first half of this song repeats the sentiment over and over: I could taste it, I could feel it, I knew it from the beginning in so many ways. 20/20 hindsight makes it so easy to get bitter and beat yourself up over unknowables, and that’s certainly the direction this song would’ve gone if I’d tried to write it; I mean, it writes itself, doesn’t it? I overthink so much I’d have trouble not writing it in my sleep! I’d never have thought to get a feathery choir to call out from the distance and release the pressure; I’d never have thought to make a breakup song that focuses not in grief or in celebration or in revenge but in placid self-reflection. Tim Darcy’s trademark wail is full of nervous energy, but the impeccably clean production and the simplicity of the composition imbue it with a certain levelheadedness (after all, what could be more pleasantly neutral than an endless I – IV – I?). The message is matter-of-fact in the end, despite the singer’s grandiosity: “Desire, desire / It was never gonna stay.” Nothing bitter, no self-pity, nothing to grieve, no should’ves or could’ves, no plot twist — just an acknowledgement, floating on clean air. Someday I hope that all my exits might be this graceful.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Holy hell is that a mannered vocal — Tim Darcy makes David Sylvian sound like Rosanne Cash. Okay angst-rock until the guitar fills form a cage, keeping Darcy from his excesses. 
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: A song that develops in a slow but effective manner, with a single interesting thing being introduced at key moments to keep one interested. At first, it’s Tim Darcy’s idiosyncratic vocalizing. Then it’s some winding guitar melodies, then a choir, then some horns, then a dreamy coda to tie it all up. None of these components are particularly invigorating on their own, but throughout the course of a relatively somnolent track, they make “Desire” feel cozy.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: I’m having a violent indie-schmindie allergic reaction to nearly everything about this song, but really it’s mostly the bug-eyed Byrne-esque vocals — the bits where that’s less pronounced actually reveal him to have a nice tone! And that ridiculous choir you can barely even hear, and certainly does nothing to add grandeur or drama to what sounds like the world’s most boring epiphany. (Overwr)ought, more like.
[3]

Rebecca A. Gowns: This hits the deep voice pleasure center in my brain; just like when I’m listening to Scott Walker or King Krule, I can feel the low baritone molasses seep out from my speakers and surround me like I’m being caramelized. 
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Began promising dark arpeggiated menace with a Covenant voice; continued by delivering drunken-sounding college dude sneering through nondescript indie rock.
[4]

Hannah Jocelyn: I love this song so much, but it suffers the same issues that the rest of the record did – for one thing, the bizarre mix and compressed master that make a 70-person choir sound smaller than Young Fathers’ five-person choir. For another, Tim Darcy’s David Byrne-homaging stylings now incorporate Bruce Springsteen and U2, which cancel out and make Darcy sound like he’s yawning through his performance. What saves this song is how Ought incorporates their Talking Heads reference points, which requires more than just shouting like “Once In A Lifetime.” Talking Heads remain beloved largely because they reach catharsis and joy through off-kilter, slightly detached methods, and Ought does the same here. The choir is distant, the lyrics seem to imply a breakup, but if you listen closely, all the elements for an emotional breakthrough are there, which those ‘woahs’ at the climax confirm. Ought always has a handful of stellar songs per album, and while the production keeps things from being truly transcendent (to be fair, “Habit” and “Beautiful Blue Sky” are some of the best post-punk songs this decade), “Desire” still qualifies as stellar.
[8]

Being the opener of last day of Amnesty 2019 >>> being the opener for some bill of shit dudes. Fact.

[Video][Website]
[7.43]

Leela Grace: I get tired of empathizing. This year lasted a thousand disappointments; sadness gets old. The clean fire of rage is a functional replacement. We are all screaming into the void of time, here. It is going to carry us away from all our pasts. 
[9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The band provides a tight, unwavering foundation with which Georgia Maq can take center stage and deliver a series of biting statements about dumb men, particularly those in the music industry. What’s important to note, though, is how nothing she says is a revelation; every line is based on actual quotes she’s heard, and since the song’s release, others in the industry have shared how they’ve had similar experiences. Ultimately, sexism is so ubiquitous — often in ways that men are unable or unwilling to recognize — that it manifests in ways that feel banal. That’s what makes “The Opener” so potent: the plainness of the instrumentation represents this reality, and Maq’s fierce vocalizing finds her pushing back against all the bullshit. Her passion is magnetic, and the song is addicting for that reason alone.
[8]

Juan F. Carruyo: Prominent bass, very opaque guitars and a singer that reminds me of Jim Adkins anchor this somewhat underwhelming emo tune that resorts to screaming instead of coming up with captivating melodies. 
[2]

Alfred Soto: I love this rhythm guitar sound and the shouted declaration of principles, forsaking choruses for rage. “Same old shit,” Tracey Thorn said with a shake of her head earlier in this godforsaken year. U.S. Girls had to keep changing form to stay sane.
[7]

Rebecca A. Gowns: This brings me back to my college radio days, c. 2006-2010, both in sound and subject matter. I’m a married hermit now, so I isolate myself away from these issues that I used to deal with all the time. I don’t miss these problems, but I do miss being in direct contact with this kind of music. I miss the righteous anger, the snarl that pops out at the end of phrases. And listening to this a few times over, I have to admit that I miss this sound. In the past few years, I haven’t gone out of my way to listen to indie rock, settling back into the childhood comforts of the local classical and jazz stations. This song jogs my memory, bringing to the surface the pleasant times from my early 20s, a time that’s mostly buried in anxiety and trauma. Reminds me how nice it can be to listen to someone half-screaming over electric guitars. How nice? How cathartic.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: I have such a conflict in me about whether I like to hear the broad Australian accent I grew up surrounded by in music, but the vowels are deployed like weapons against an all-too-familiar enemy, and I can get behind it. The stories of mansplainers and tech guys criticising her band’s bass sound are worthy targets for Georgia Maq’s anger, and she shows it both when she gets loud and when she doesn’t. Taking words and situations used to cut their band down to size and turning them into armour in the form of a song of defiance can’t be easy, but Camp Cope emerge from “The Opener” strong and triumphant.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: A parched rhythm guitar and high bass lock together, tracing a circle. It sounds weary from the get-go: an effort to do the same thing again and again and not get anywhere new. It’s dealing with obvious bullshit like “tell me you never wanna see me again, and then keep showing up at my house.” Georgia Maq has the Australian male voice down. “Nah, hey, come on girls; we’re only thinking about you,” she avers, parodying its laconic selfishness and the poison soaking through it. “The Opener” begins with one man who, with his appetites and self-regard and gaslighting and manicured progressivism, takes and takes and takes. And with him are more men who take and take — the men who book shows and the men who make excuses and the men who are generous with their opinions and parsimonious with their praise. Maq sings with arc-weld intensity, scorching truths upon the track: Camp Cope is claiming their success, booking that bigger venue, taking the headlining slot, choosing their own frequencies to miss. The amount of dead weight the song piles on makes the triumph glow hotter: “See how far we’ve come not listening to you,” Maq wails, an ascension that incinerates all that precedes it. Camp Cope is missing nothing. Show ’em, Kelly.
[10]

We love a good 50MPH cruise…

[Video]
[6.57]

Nortey Dowuona: Glittering, glassy guitars and sandy, drifting drums ride a pulpy, heavy bass groove while Afro Kitty Jones spins a tangled tale of delusion and infatuation, swirling the fantasy and reality in with a little horn flourishes she adds at the last inch to spread more stars throughout the cosmos. Oh, and here are some more strings to cap the credits.
[10]

Juana Giaimo: I enjoy the contrast between her confident, straightforward voice and the fragmented instrumentation. The guitar is the only soothing sound — while the beat is far from typical, the backing vocals lose control and the brass adds a seductive nocturnal feeling. 
[7]

Will Adams: The aqueous guitar recalls Miguel’s “Do You…” enough to hold my interest, even if the production veers toward cluttered in the chorus.
[6]

Anthony Easton: There is a kind of whine to her vocals that works against a set of fairly conservative production choices, but in a way where any interference seems accidental. 
[3]

Alfred Soto: The quietness with which “Rearview Love” doesn’t cohere bespeaks its confidence; the glue is the prominent rhythm guitar, the pathos provided by the stack of harmonies. It does its job by conjuring a sensation that crumbles between the fingertips. 
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Perfectly hazy and wistful, like looking back on memories of an ex. The strings and guitar strums and layers of vocals set the mood, all quietly weeping in their own preferred manner. The constant hit of those toms feel like small gut punches, though: a reminder that the oscillating feelings one has of a past love (“You’re pissing me off/You’re turning me on/I love you, I hate you, I can not keep up with it”) always conclude with a painful reality (“Another broken heart/How could I end up like this again?/I guess the love we shared was all in my head”).
[6]

Edward Okulicz: 2018 badly needed a couplet as pithy and perfect as “You’re pissing me off/you’re turning me on.” I’m also taken with how Afro Kitty Jones fills up all the spaces with interesting backing vocals — wailing cool little sub-melodies and dropping asides like “what are we even doing here.” It’s all those little touches that make “Rearview Love” worth repeat listens. I was initially turned off by that wafty guitar, but so much else turned me on.
[8]