• Rachel Saywitz reviewed Celeste’s debut album Not Your Muse for The Line of Best Fit.
• Madi Ballista and Dorian Sinclair have started a new project reviewing the music of the BanG Dream! franchise: read the introductory post and their first review.
• Thomas Inskeep, for Rock & Roll Globe, wrote about Tortoise’s post-rock landmark Millions Now Living Will Never Die to commemorate its 25th anniversary.
• Jonathan Bradley has updated “Infatuation, Freedom, Fast Cars“, his exhaustive catalog of Taylor Swift’s references to automobiles, to include Folklore and Evermore.

Definitely our favourite singer to have been stolen from Usher by Adam Levine…

[Video][Website]
[6.43]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The iceberg-paced Sam Hunt-ification of country music shows no signs of stopping — and I’m not mad about it. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: A tub full of blarney, guts, and mullets, Morgan Wallen may be indistinguishable from Sam Hunt in a lineup, but he’s even more influenced by hip-hop. Treating the trap beat like George Jones did pedal steel allows him to flaunt a conversational cadence: he’s not smarmy, just chatty, honest about not having enough on his mind but knowing that mind well.
[7]

Samson Savill de Jong: It’s a bit of a grower, this one. First listen I wasn’t very impressed, but repeated listens have revealed its qualities. The lyrics are one — at first I just heard the generic country tropes (“bourbon” “boots” “Chevy” etc), but I think when listened to properly the song tells a story with enough detail that it feels like something that really happened to Wallen. His singing is good too, with enough gruffness to get to the emotions he’s trying to convey. He maybe could’ve injected more emotion, especially in the chorus, but it’s possible that might have just come off as overwrought. The way the rap-influenced drums hit in the chorus are another thing that I came to like, and overall the music sounds good here. Glad I gave this a chance.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: Wallen’s voice on “Wasted on You” is just as whiny as his lyrics. And as for the click-track beat, the less said the better.
[2]

Al Varela: The double-edged sword of Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous is that there is enough quality stuff on it for you to pick and choose your favorite songs while ignoring the ones you dislike. That’s bound to hamper the album’s quality as a whole, but it has so many excellent songs that show genuine growth in Wallen’s music that I think the future looks bright for him. Unfortunately, “Wasted on You” is not one of the reasons why. I totally get its appeal, and in a way, it represents Wallen’s appeal pretty concretely. A dark, dour song that wallows in its misery and recounts the regret and heartbreak that he feels over the one who got away. Problem is, the song is pretty sluggish and not even all that cathartic. The hook is fine, but the trap-like skitter of the drums and the sour chords make a song that never builds to any real emotional climax. That may be the point, but it’s a lot less memorable in comparison to the other sad drinking songs on the album like “865” and “Only Thing That’s Gone”. I get why this was the song from the album to break out, but I am also a little bummed that it’s probably going to overshadow some of the others that are more deserving of being Top 10 hits.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: This is one of the most effective hook delivery devices of 2021 so far, and it’s got something for everyone, both what they want, and what they don’t realise they want yet. It would really work as just a country song without the trap beat, and it would totally work without the country elements too. You could absolutely give it to any replacement-value R&B singer instead of Morgan Wallen, and it’d also be fine. And damn it, it’s really good as it is, pulling off the trick that Kane Brown inexplicably hasn’t yet. I’m humming and strumming this one constantly already.
[9]

Jeffrey Brister: All of this is so good. Wallen’s voice has just the right amount of beauty and grit, wrapping itself around the guitars and tumbling through the chorus. And then the mechanized, skittering drums kick in, and it feels like seeing a tiny, weird robot make its way across a bar near closing time: a strange and jolting novelty, which after a few minutes starts to looks really cool and like it was always meant to be there. It’s not a new thing, but I haven’t heard it deployed with this amount of restraint, and it takes what is already a pretty good song to excellent.
[8]

Sounds like an IPA (Interesting Polish Artist)…

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[5.38]

Katherine St Asaph: Among its European peers, Poland has a surprisingly(?) good ratio of chart filler to amazing, yet-to-cross-over pop bangers I keep trying to get properly hyped: destroying-everything-it-touches synthpop by Pati Yang, ambitious fantasy-epic artpop by Justyna Steckowska, just a lot. Sanah, something of a breakout Polish star, isn’t quite there yet, but that’s not for lack of trying genres: slinky spy-funk with high-drama piano and smoke-machine aura, ABBA-esque pop with a retro sequencer solo, a heaving, Sarah Brightman-esque sigh of a piano-violin ballad. She reminds me a lot of Billie Eilish: not in her sound, per se, but her versatility this early in her career, her gravitation to sounds besides your standard landfill altpop, and her willingness to just go right for the melodrama. (At least in translation, she’s also a promising lyricist, for the same reasons.) Sadly, Sanah’s debut was in 2020 and this is 2021, so the single we’re covering isn’t any of those, but a bouncy, lite trifle, jazzy in a Regina Spektor way, with the requisite feature dude assigned to all breakout pop stars. This genre road will probably not lead to those amazing bangers, but I feel pretty confident Sanah’s got them in her, and in the meantime, at least I haven’t noticed 500 of these on Discover Weekly.
[6]

Michael Hong: Like a kitschy version of Sylvan Esso if the guy wanted to sing instead of tinkering around in the production booth.
[3]

Dorian Sinclair: “Ale Jazz!” is a pleasant enough listen, but it’s pretty insubstantial. The exclamation mark in the title promises something a lot higher-energy than what we get, which is a midtempo groove that doesn’t build to anything in particular. The most interesting element is the hilariously wobbly instrumental riff that prefaces the verses, but with it not being picked up anywhere else in the production, the impression it leaves fades very quickly.
[4]

Samson Savill de Jong: This is a fun song. I like Sanah’s singing more than Vito Bambino’s — she’s got a bit more character to her voice — but this is an overall upbeat, poppy, not very jazzy song you wouldn’t mind hearing in the background.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: Bright, sunny pop from Sanah, whose vocal tone is beguiling. Vito Bambino sounds a bit like a less smarmy Adam Levine, and pairs nicely with her. 
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I can’t help but think this is for the Polish equivalent of Disney adults, but the vocal performances are very charming and that faux-Buggles instrumental break will be stuck in my head until the end of time. I really don’t know what kind of nostalgia they’re going for, though!
[7]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: Pleasingly dinky in instrumentation, “Ale Jazz!” is a lightly melancholic, jackdaw-referencing, extremely twee warble of a song. It manages a neat trick of sounding quite diminutive, yet it’s truly almost absurd how many hooks are packed in. Tonally it’s not a mile from all those eight-plus-member bands that weirdly proliferated in the oughts — except the majority of the instrumentation comprises truly hilarious synthesizer sounds, with the likely exception of the suspiciously slap-adjacent bass. Despite these bewildering choices, “Ale Jazz!” has captured a youthful peering-out-the-window-and-thinking-about-people ennui that speaks to the current moment; coziness tempered with disquiet. It’s an irresistibly catchy song, and so I’m sorry to say that even the small quantity of listens I made before writing this was testing the limits of my enjoyment. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Basement Jaxx would sample it.
[6]

Introducing “Hardline” according to The Singles Jukebox…

[Video][Website]
[7.77]

Aaron Bergstrom: Finally, the time has come. With the outcome of the war hanging in the balance, the Julien Baker Manhattan Project heads down to the Trinity Site. After years of painstakingly enriching the concentrated emotional uranium necessary for this potentially world-altering endeavor, she has assembled the components necessary to harness the awesome power of the often-rumored full band. Some said it couldn’t be done, or that it would require a team of specialists, but Baker has chosen to play every part herself. Nothing can be left to chance. The flash hits before the blast, but just barely. Onlookers would later report that they had less than a second to process the climactic final line (“You say it’s not so cut and dry / It isn’t black and white / What if it’s all black, baby, all the time?“) before the full force of the instrumental crescendo flattened everything for miles in all directions. When viewed as a successor to Baker’s sparse but searing solo detonations, it represents an exponential spike in intensity without sacrificing a single atom of intimacy. She is become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
[10]

Harlan Talib Ockey: What can I say but ouch? The crashing-wave synths and ragged vocal performance — Baker sounds like she’s choking back tears when she edges into her higher notes — give “Hardline” such an incredible sense of pain and immediacy. The lyrics, too, are damn near faultless, perfectly capturing a horrifying mix of self-loathing and self-fear. The only obvious missed opportunity is in the outro, which cuts off remarkably quickly after the brutal gut-punch of the final few lines. If the goal was to escalate further and render this section even more tempestuous than the mid-song break, it’s dialed back so swiftly it never has a chance. Regardless, ouch. I might be crying now.
[8]

Vikram Joseph: The thick bars of synth that open “Hardline” feel like the heavy air in a room you’ve spent too much time in, or a dense winter fog that clings tightly to you the moment you step outside. When the flickering beat and Julien Baker’s taut, saw-toothed guitars come in there’s a tangible release of tension, but even as the song gains a sort of desperate momentum, its grip never loosens. Baker’s music has always felt like a contract between herself and the listener, a safe, dimly-lit space to which both can retreat, and in which every anxiety and insecurity can be uncovered. Some songwriters struggle to preserve the emotional core of their songs as they scale up, but Baker’s growth has been a careful, iterative process, adding layers but never losing the intimacy and painful honesty that makes her songs so precious. Here, she alludes to self-destructive tendencies, masochism and co-dependency; “Would you hit me this hard if I were a boy?” is a devastating line, even more so when Baker undercuts it by insisting that it’s something she chose. And yet her songs rarely feel without hope. In lieu of a chorus, “Hardline” briefly explodes into flares of sound and light, little windows of post-rock grandeur, offering the sort of sonic catharsis that she’s rarely allowed herself even when her eviscerating lyrics seemed to demand it; intimating that there may yet be a way out of that room, no matter how far you’ve gone to barricade yourself into it.
[9]

Dorian Sinclair: The sheer bleakness of the lyrics for “Hardline” is astonishing, and I am speaking as a fan of a lot of music people describe as depressing. There’s a resignation to fate, made explicit with “I am telling my own fortune/something I cannot escape”, which is a line that walks right up the edge of being too on the nose and possibly crosses over it. The music struggles to capture the same sense of inevitability though; if it had departed further from the lyrical mood something interesting could have been done by leaning into the contrast, but as is it feels like it’s striving to evoke the same thing as the words and just falling a little short.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: The cadences of Stretch Princess’s “Freakshow” with the story of Fiona Apple’s “Fast As You Can” or “A Mistake,” and if this week has proven anything it’s that there’s an immense hunger for ruining everything. I’m just happy Baker’s music has found any dynamics whatsoever — even if, contrary to the lyrics, the arrangement finds the brakes rather too soon.
[7]

Michael Hong: Building in a Julien Baker song used to just mean Baker changing her voice, moving from conversational to an irrepressible wail. But in “Hardline”, with its drums and blaring guitars coming at breakneck pace, building means more than just Baker’s enormous voice. Building means throwing everything you have to fill that void and hoping you’ve done enough this time not to ruin everything.
[7]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: “Until then I’ll split the difference/Between medicine and poison.” This song builds and builds with a hundred devastations as it becomes more bombastic. If I had occasion to drive late at night, this would be a regular in my car stereo. It feels designed for dramatic contemplation, for moments where you are the main character and it fucking hurts. 
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Every Julien Baker song sounds like the worst day you’ve ever had. This, on its own, is not that hard to accomplish. Plenty of sad-sacks have made music before, and many will long after Baker retires. What makes Julien Baker special is that she makes each song sound like a separate, equally devastating day. While “Hardline” draws from the same well of anguish that has defined the past two-plus albums worth of her music — addiction, abuse, queerness — it sounds completely new within her discography. Most of the rest of her music stays in-between meditative and yearning sadness, the sonic equivalent of the cool, hopeless morning after a truly terrible night. “Hardline” is much more immediate, its sonic environment drawing to mind sutures ripping and mind-destroying hangovers. It’s a song that knocks you over and tries to keep you down, a joyous hopelessness that envelops you. It’s the kind of terrible day that, in retrospect, becomes almost beautiful in its suffering.
[9]

Samson Savill de Jong: This does everything right, but I can’t quite bring myself to say that I love it. Maybe it’s too perfect, something to be admired in a gallery rather than lovingly blu-tacked onto your uni bedroom wall, even its imperfections being carefully placed to make sure this dark song doesn’t feel too clean. I just don’t connect to the song in the way I think I should, and that’s all that’s stopping it getting the highest of scores.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: A rock song that gets more epic as it progresses, threatening to soar on its first chorus — and on its second, does so, before immediately fading out. I can’t decide if I like that about it, or not.
[7]

Alfred Soto: With lyrics as acerbic as Richard Thompson’s, Julien Baker has written a hate song to match the wind tunnel clatter of its opening moments: when I emerged my scant hair resources were decimated. It dawdles, though, when she pushes at the edge of her range.
[7]

John Pinto: Julien Baker’s music makes me think about the adults at my old church who were active in the youth programs but had no children of their own. Were they doing alright, setting up a little Behringer PA every Saturday for the informal service? Putting out crackers on paper plates and then going home alone? Kids don’t notice that stuff, teens are too overwhelmed by their own little phobias and puberty-wrought complexes to care. I’m wondering about this unrelated stuff because “Hardline” — a song which, to be clear, I like a lot! — sets out to devastate but seems to lack some vital substance. I suspect with more and more listens I’ll do a complete 180 on this opinion, and I get having your narrator be so depressed that the song feels weightless in its dissociation. But every time I put it on my focus drifts ever so, like with late-period Elliott Smith when the production would sometimes outpace the songwriting. The hooks on this one haven’t quite sunken into me. And yet! With each listen I like it more, so it may be that like with those church grown-ups, I’m hesitant to look too close for fear of seeing something that’ll destroy me. Fuzzed-out organ is always nice and more people should be putting it in their music.
[7]

Andrew Karpan: Another Elliott Smith goes electric. Julien Baker goes second wave emo with a symphonic slushie as big and tall as anything on Infinity on High. It’s the best thing I’ve listened to all year and ushers in a new sound for Baker, an improvement even on the last single, the twangy but too self-consciously indie “Faith Healer“. Grouping her with her class of post-Mitski critical darlings, I always found Baker’s music to be pretty but never durable. Powerful but never vivid. But here, the thundering strings command attention and when the guitar line starts, it’s so perfectly executed that the song feels larger but no less intimate. Asking for forgiveness in advance for all the future things I will destroy! It’s a message meant for you and a message meant for me.
[9]

Not feeling the heat.

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[4.62]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: “Gooey” this is not. If you tempered lo-fi hip hop with absolutely flavorless, mainstream, Diet Coke sponsored pop, you still might come out with something more interesting than this. “Heat Waves” sounds like it was designed to get on Top 40 radio ten years ago, and Glass Animals just now remembered to release it. And yet yesterday, when I started writing this blurb, it was twice as long, and a complete pan. But now, having listened to it four or five times, I find I can’t stop. It’s unimaginative but undeniably catchy. It’s ingratiated itself to me, made me happy to hear it. It feels like going to Little Caesar’s even when there’s a local pizzeria closer to you, because you don’t want the good pizza, you want the greasy cardboard that only costs five bucks. Is it nostalgia? Is it Stockholm Syndrome? Do I need to send a cease and desist to Glass Animals in light of the crimes they’ve perpetrated against my tastes and desires? Torn by this pitch shifted conflict as I am, my body and soul saying [8] and my mind saying [2], there is only one score I can give. 
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: As far as sad Glass Animals songs go, it was always going to be hard to follow their second album. Not everything has to be as colossal as “Agnes,” but even so, Dave Bayley’s dam-bursting dive into the personal on Dreamland doesn’t hit half as hard as it might have done. Case in point is “Heat Waves,” which, while mellow, and with a riff that could wooze its way into whatever nostalgia piece you wish (“Smalltown Boy” is a snug enough fit), mostly treads water. Perhaps it’s unfair to ask for more invention from something that is already idiosyncratic, but perhaps that could also have afforded it more power.
[7]

Oliver Maier: Weird how Dave Bayley doesn’t get the same flack as his female indie contemporaries for affecting an exaggerated singing accent, even though his is infinitely more annoying. Like most Glass Animals songs this sounds as if it was engineered to operate at maximum VPS (Vibes Per Second), and the diet “Smalltown Boy” riff and cardboard 808s don’t do much to improve it beyond H&M playlist tier.
[2]

Juana Giaimo: Sometimes you are alone cleaning your room while you mumble and invent melodies and suddenly one sticks and you keep repeating it because it’s catchy and fun, but given that you’re not a songwriter, you soon forget about it. That’s how I feel about the vocal hook of “Heat Waves”: it’s the same melody line repeated four times with different lyrics which makes it catchy and fun, but pop is not just that. Glass Animals is not the first indie band to make this mistake. The hip hop beat is quite generic, the falsetto backing vocals quite annoying, the deep manipulated twenty one pilots-style vocals of the beginning and the end have no place here, and the melody of the verses too forgettable. The fact that Dave Bayley, inspired by Beyonce’s Sasha Fierce, jokingly (or at least I hope he didn’t take it too seriously) created an alter ego for this album called Davey Wavey that represents a version of himself who is self-confident and comfortable with doing anything he wants, again proves that indie bands don’t understand that there is a lot of vulnerability in pop music too.
[4]

Jeffrey Brister: Jamie Woon with harder knocking production. I like the smooth soulfulness in his voice, but there’s not much here. Pleasant, inoffensive, filled with enough modern pop flourishes to keep things moderately interesting, but it passes by without consequence.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: Befitting a song titled “Heat Waves,” there’s a languor to this indie-pop song that results in me nodding my head and just plugging into the rhythm. And singer Dave Bayley’s voice is pleasantly wimpy, which makes sense on this record as well. 
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The last time I checked in on these guys they were making faux-indie stadium rock with extremely lite hip-hop beats — now they’re doing Maroon 5-core? What a lateral move.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: I had never heard “Heat Waves” when it topped Triple J’s Hottest 100 listener poll this past weekend, but I had a vague idea of its genre and I do know what that radio station’s listeners respond to. A friend suggested I write my blurb without listening to the track. And so: “Heat Waves” longs for the humidity suggested by its title, but the dance Glass Animals are able to produce evinces only a sterile aridity, like the too-cold air conditioning in a shopping mall you escape to on a broiling day. Synth chirrups attempt to compensate for the lethargy of the beats but the best they can do is distract from the doleful singing of an (I assume) wan gentleman who needs to figure out how to slide into a guest vocalist’s DMs. That main riff might lodge itself in your head but only at times when you have literally nothing more complex to think about than “what’s for dinner?” UPDATE: I have now listened to the song, and I have no changes to make to my blurb.
[4]

Alfred Soto: To go through the motions of a Justin Timberlake song in 2012 is an achievement based on their pedigree.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: The opening five seconds or so of this really rub me the wrong way, like a mid-00s lite pop-R&B beat underwater with a whingey Adam Levine (but I repeat myself) on it. The song immediately gets better when it dispenses with the tricks and begins throbbing politely. It’s warm, it’s hooky, it’s professional, and it is those things without being gross and sticky, things one associates with actual heat waves and are not required just in songs about them. Once more I am baffled as to its popularity amongst the Triple J demographic, but it’s certainly about as good as the average Rubens single.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Blow out your candles, for nowadays the world is lit by Adam Levine.
[3]

Vikram Joseph: Glass Animals are an eminently likeable band; it’s just a shame they’re not better. “Heat Waves” feels like it has the right ingredients in the wrong proportions, over-compressed and clumsily-produced, the whole thing ending up more over-saturated than it should have been. With its woozy R’n’B shuffle and late-night yearning for lost connections, I guess I was hoping for Channel Orange and instead got Channel 5. Still, I found the video — filmed on east London streets close to where I live in the warm, strange, empty light of the spring 2020 lockdown — quite moving, especially now, stuck inside its unwanted, darker, more claustrophobic sequel.
[5]

Aaron Bergstrom: Narrator: “Covid-19 has changed our world forever, and its tragic consequences will reverberate for years to come. That’s why we started the International Foundation For Bands Whose Sound Really Only Makes Sense In A Festival Context. Here at IFFBWSROMSIAFC, our mission is to raise awareness of bands like Glass Animals, who seem to have triangulated the perfect midpoint between Tame Impala and Portugal. The Man, and simply cannot survive outside of a tent in Indio or a farm in Somerset. Forced from their natural habitat, Glass Animals have been forced to resort to sea shanties and Australia ass tattoos. The situation is critical. Your support can make a difference. Please act now.”
[5]

Nice is different than good…

[Video]
[2.67]

Alfred Soto: Basking in a good review since “Humble and Kind” revealed him, as if doubt existed, as a hearty liberal in a town that sells reaction as amiably as T-shirts, Tim McGraw joins hands with Tyler Hubbard to sell crinkly-voiced sentimental mishmash. Not a single metaphor enlightens, not a single stress surprises, that’s the point.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: “There’s only a few professions more based in performance, more reliant on public acclaim — and more potentially dishonest — than politician.” Tom Ewing once wrote. “Pop singer is one of them.” Country performers are acutely familiar with the precarious demand of reconciling different audiences and different sensibilities into a unified whole, which might explain their attraction to songs like “Undivided”: this is, after all, a genre that understands and fears the contradiction between its claim to speak for all America and the actual fact of its extremely white-dominated industry and culture. Maybe that’s why it best captures a united America when it comes at it sideways, say on Rodney Atkins’s “Caught Up in the Country,” or Brad Paisley’s queasily cosmopolitan “Southern Comfort Zone,” or the careers of Lil Nas X, Darius Rucker, and Kane Brown. The guest on McGraw’s song, Tyler Hubbard, is one half of Florida Georgia Line, and that duo has apparently discovered that political tension can divide even their indiscernible gloop of Southern signifiers. Hubbard’s verses yield to his band’s expected earnest pluck, and it’s almost dumb enough that I think that this song could work if it were only a FlaGaLine track. Yet McGraw is smarter than that, and seemingly more cowardly: to what is his opening verse about “Billy [who] got picked on at school for things he couldn’t change” supposed to refer? (If Billy is gay, Tim, please just tell us.) He’s quietly made clear his commitment to the ideals of the Democratic Party, which makes me more certain he understands the political context into which he’s releasing this song: one where “unity” is not a value-neutral proposition, but a rhetorical weapon wielded by ideologues aiming to excuse violence and equivocate over the right of a people to choose their own government. “I’m tired of looking left or right,” McGraw sings, and I want him to read Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein. “Why’s it gotta be all white and all black,” says Hubbard, echoing Big & Rich on “Love Train”: “I see people gettin’ mad on CNN. Who’s right: Democrats or Republicans?” “I’ve got to tell you, it’s hard to unify when they’re impeaching a president who’s no longer in office,” says US Congressman Jim Jordan, defending a man who urged his supporters to entomb democracy as they stormed the Capitol. 
[3]

Edward Okulicz: Tired of both-sides-ism as lazy punditry? Would the sour pill go down better as a Train song? Maybe it does, but going from someone being picked on in the first verse to uniting the country straight in the chorus is dubious; it feels like someone decided to go from “Follow Your Arrow” to “Only Prettier” and forgot to show their working. 
[4]

Andrew Karpan: The observations about the Capitol Hill riots that so stirred Florida Georgia Line-man Tyler Hubbard to make his solo debut come from the same pot of profundity as “Accidental Racist,” but there’s also a certain smug self-awareness in Hubbard’s choice to give himself the track’s most embarrassing lines. In exchange for the mercy of his appearance, McGraw gets to sing primarily about bullied kids, a nimble little story he tosses off stoically and without feeling. (In the video, he compounds the effect by reading the lyrics off his phone.) For himself, Hubbard authors a set of almost electrifying yelps, a canny advertisement of his usefulness to any producers listening, jammed in between a stream of radically lazy sentiments like “why’s it gotta be all white or all black?” and “I just kinda wish we didn’t think like that.”
[1]

Thomas Inskeep: Ah, Nashville, where big (usually male, always white) mainstream country stars never take sides, but instead issue “can’t we all just get along” bromides. And after 1/6, especially, I have no fucking time for this. I really don’t need to “see through someone else’s eyes” when those eyes are attempting to kill in the name of white supremacy, Tim and Tyler, thanks. Maren Morris’s “Better Than We Found It” and Mickey Guyton’s “Black Like Me” get blatantly ignored by country radio — and in country music, radio is still the gatekeeper of the genre — while the good ol’ white boys get immediate, huge radio adds. Even more frustratingly, McGraw is one of the more openly Democrat-supporting stars in the country ecosystem, but his music is still milquetoast and retrograde. In 2021, fuck that; we don’t need more of this Kumbaya bullshit.
[1]

Katie Gill: This is the song equivalent of your mom asking why you don’t just TALK to your racist uncle who spams anti-abortion memes on Facebook. Because of COURSE the “we all just need to come together! unify! don’t hate on people!” song is sung by two cishet white men. Like, buddy, I’m bisexual. I don’t really want to unify and see the other side with people who wholeheartedly believe I’m going to hell.
[2]

Samson Savill de Jong: A song saying, in the blandest of terms, that maybe it’d be nice if we were nice to each other feels incredibly of the moment, which speaks to the profound weirdness of the newly minted Joe Biden era. Like Biden’s milquetoast centrism, this is actively inoffensive to all but the most looney of right-wing nuts, but given the genre and the church/hell line, it’s clear McGraw has the Trump crowd in mind. Of course, change comes from political action designed to pursue particular goals, rather than abstract notions of “coming together” with unreasonable people who cannot and will not “just listen” to people plead for their humanity; but unlike a politician, I’m not expecting Tim McGraw to come along with a radical agenda to fix all of America’s ills. That means the genericness of “Undivided” and its message don’t leave me feeling the mixture of mad, depressed, cold and exasperated that the platitudes of centrists like Biden (or Keir Starmer in my country) do. Instead, I just don’t care about it beyond thinking, in passing, “that’s nice.”
[4]

Al Varela: The song itself is fine, pleasant to listen to, nice hook, well-produced mostly, and its heart is in the right place, but your enjoyment of this song will depend entirely on whether you believe this idea of “unity” is even possible. The Capitol riots were instigated by white supremacists and extremists trying to overturn an election result because it didn’t turn out the way they wanted. I don’t think those people are looking for unity or to be together under God or whatever. I know it’s unfair to level the seriousness of this song with the event it’s responding to, especially since there were likely label concessions that kept this from leaning toward any one side for fear of alienation. But there’s more to this conversation than a Republican and Democrat disagreeing over a candidate. It isn’t an event that you can be in the middle over. And I think they know this, too. After all, they only got the liberal half of Florida Georgia Line on this song. If they really believed in unifying and learning not to hate over differences, Brian Kelley would be on here, too. Not that I’d want him there, but Tyler knows why he didn’t bring him along.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: “Accidental Centrist.”
[1]

No, we can’t get through January without Ed Sheeran either…

[Video]
[3.89]

Thomas Inskeep: Michael Rosenberg’s pal Ed Sheeran remixes his single to make it sound more like… an Ed Sheeran song. I can certainly understand the want to make it more commercial — Passenger’s records tend to sound much more plain-folkie than this, and less Radio 2-friendly — but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly good or interesting. Doesn’t help that Rosenberg has an incredibly grating voice and writes mealy-mouthed lyrics.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: Having lived through the bleak era of “Let Her Go,” I considered exposure to this might constitute a health hazard, but what it really sounds most like is a Belgian Eurovision entry. Not any one in particular — it’s more the vibe of the thing. I have enjoyed some of those lately. There’s some twee poison in the verses, but in the small dose presented, the chorus works. I like it a lot more than the average Ed Sheeran song but a lot less than the best ones. I may regret this score later, but what the heck, I have editing privileges, so:
[7]

Juana Giaimo: I’m not sure if this poppier Ed Sheeran mix makes it better or worse than the original, but either way it doesn’t generate anything inside me. The lyrics talk about missing someone and thinking about possible small talk as an excuse to talk to them, but with the bland production and his calm tone, I don’t sense any of those desperately lonesome feelings but just think he really wants to talk about how their mom and dad are doing. 
[4]

Katie Gill: It’s disappointing to see that Passenger’s lyrical skills haven’t grown from “only miss the sun when it starts to snow.” We’ve still got the same clunky rhymes, bizarre metaphors, and hilariously generic sentiments that made Passenger’s best-known song seem like the first term paper of Songwriting 101. Like, buddy, “Let Her Go” was around eight years ago. Why the heck haven’t you grown as a lyricist?
[3]

Alfred Soto: Me, I love vocalists who sing about horses and and offer dietary tips into a bowl of mushroom risotto.
[1]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Confession: when I saw the title “Sword From the Stone”, I kind of expected Passenger would allude to Arthurian legend at least twice, rather than just throwing it in at the end of the chorus. The lyrics are hilariously bare and underdeveloped, failing to rise to even the polite faux-melodrama Ed Sheeran’s instrumental provides. And speaking of the instrumental, this sounds like an April 2020 “in these uncertain times” commercial re-skinned, doesn’t it? Begging your audience to feel something won’t make us actually feel it, you know. Especially when you sound like you’re putting in as little effort possible yourself.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: “Gingerbread” is right; this has the same cozy, processed hygge of assembling a whimsical cottagecore structure of graham crackers, frosting and gummi drops, and also the feeling of being more tedious and less satisfying than you’d hoped. I love the idea of gingerbread houses.
[6]

Jeffrey Brister: Earnest to the point of corny music gets me like nothing else, even when the song isn’t very good. A smoky and yearning vocal, soft-focus adult-contemporary production, a melody that swells and rises with the arrangement and evokes walking down a leaf-strewn suburban street in autumn, a neat little drum-and-bass break in the middle which provides the only piece of musical information that this song isn’t from 2005–ugh, it gets to me in a way that I feel I’m too sophisticated for, but deep down feels right. Even the lyrics, which are unremarkable and plain to the point of being offensive, don’t deter me. Rosenberg hits that perfect melancholy break in the high notes! I can’t hate a song that does that!
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Did Kristian Leontiou go in vain? “Sword From the Stone”‘s lack of ambition is such that it would sound like Passenger had given up on it halfway through, did it not seem that he’d done so some time in 2004. Even Ed Sheeran’s pitiful breath of a breakbeat is an insult to David Gray (and Badly Drawn Boy, and Aqualung); Kodaline would turn this down for being too insipid. Done well, such bland acousticism can be moreishly savoury, but this is not done well.
[4]

After making a withdrawal from the “ATM,” we look into some diamonds…

[Video]
[4.86]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: “VVS” just capped off a 7-week reign at #1, and it’s similar to other popular non-idol rap songs from the past couple years in that it both comes from Show Me the Money and is a satisfying posse cut. Both elements feel crucial to why these songs are successful; regarding the latter, many of these rappers’ solo work suffers from sounding too much like familiar Western rap ideas, but hearing these artists alongside others allows for sustained energy. There’s a delight in hearing the anodyne guitar strums be nothing more than a backdrop for everyone’s voices (and the song feels more lively than the first time I remember hearing rock-guitar posturing in a contemporary-sounding non-idol Korean rap song). Miranni’s melodic vocalizing works nicely alongside JUSTHIS’s rapping, which resembles a slightly less garbled version of NO:EL. MUSHVENOM’s burly, theatrical verse is reminiscent of Han Yo Han’s on “Dding,” and it caps off a song that almost devolves into AutoTuned mush. It’s long, but there’s a sort of love for these posse cuts in Korea as a way to just showcase everyone at their best; I’m just thankful the hook is memorable. Besides, there’s been much, much longer.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: A big-ass hip hop posse cut with a bunch of rappers who actually sound distinctively different from each other, thank goodness. (American rappers, are you paying attention?) The most exciting of these is MUSHVENOM (who takes the final verse), because he sounds the most urgent – he’s not here to fuck around. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Distinctive rappers, no question, but the tuffness feels more affected than real. No reason for this brostep thing to stretch beyond five minutes either.
[4]

Samson Savill de Jong: Because I don’t speak Korean, all this sounds like to me is a caricature of American hip-hop and all of its worst instincts: the Auto-Tune, the “scoot scoot” ad libs, the repetitious chorus. The sense of genericness isn’t helped by the lines that are in English being extraordinary cookie-cutter. Generic songs can be saved by fun lyricism, and while skimming through the translated lyrics might show me that there’s not a lot of depth topic wise, it doesn’t really convey if they’re said in a fun or clever way. The rapping sounds technically fine, they all have a sense of flow, but that’s not enough to carry a posse cut, especially when it’s 5 and a half minutes long. This might be a great song to someone who understands the words, but everything else is pretty bad.
[2]

Tobi Tella: An exercise in posse cut patience, it teases becoming interesting with every personal reference to the come-up or invoking of Korean culture as a whole. Unfortunately, there’s a lot to wade through to get there and while there’s still a slight novelty to a guitar-influenced beat, it can’t stop these 5 minutes from eventually becoming a slog.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: This song made me realize we’re probably really close to the year music heads will start reassessing brostep. Not sure whether that’s points off or points extra.
[5]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Hip-hop pop punk hasn’t sounded this good to me in a while. Sometimes the difference between the constant strumming of the guitar and the drum machines becomes a little too noticeable, but this still gives me a feeling I haven’t had since the first time I heard Mike Shinoda in a Linkin Park song. That’s probably a good thing, even if this isn’t something I seek out regularly.
[6]

Up next, a certified “ATM” jam…

[Video]
[7.17]

Leah Isobel: This isn’t quite as exuberant or inventive as Bree’s past singles, which sort of sucks because this is her most direct appeal for radio play yet. The worrying possibility that her edge will be sanded off as she maneuvers closer to cultural dominance lurks in the background. But “ATM” is still great fun, powered by her sharp turns between seductive softness (the gasped “please” after the chorus) and steely determination (“…and I stay on his MOIND like a toupee”) — and that’s before Missy drops her best verse in ages. Besides, I can’t dislike any song that slots into my camming playlist as well as this does.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: “Said he wanna take me real higher/But I know he only want my vagina”: Bree Runway does have a way with words, doesn’t she? It makes so much sense that Missy Elliott guests on “ATM,” because Runway possesses all of the originality that made Elliott stand out in the first place. The beat here isn’t as exciting as other tracks on Runway’s mixtape 2000AND4EVA, but her voice certainly is. And Elliott’s verse, mostly rapped in a British accent (delightful), adds plenty to the track. 
[8]

Alfred Soto: Sirens, stop-start dynamics, wtf rhymes — anything can happen on a Bree Runway track, a strategy she learned from the mentor who tries outweirding her here. It might’ve been a triumph without the annoying-as-hell hook.
[7]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: The soundscape of this track is so precisely crafted. Bree’s whisper at the top feels like I’m watching Hustlers again for the first time. When the bass drum hits with “boom-boom-boom”, I feel like Missy Elliott is grabbing me by the throat to express her disappointment that I’m not currently dancing. The synths leading out as the percussion tease a sinister outcome, almost supernatural in their atmosphere. This doesn’t even begin to get into the wordplay, with rhymes like “ass soft” and “Van Gogh” making my head spin next to lines like “on his mind like a toupee” and “misdemeanor in the bag, that’s Birkin”, all complemented by a devastatingly catchy chorus.
[9]

Juana Giaimo: I can’t avoid comparing “ATM” to the amazing “Damn Daniel“. While “Damn Daniel” has those very ’80s vibes that made you move your feet, “ATM” sounds quite flat and boring with that minimalistic production. I enjoy the storytelling style of the verses (which was also featured in “Damn Daniel”), but the hook is so repetitive and monotonous that is rather annoying. 
[5]

Samson Savill de Jong: I can’t entirely decide if the hook here is earwormy because it’s fun and catchy or because it’s annoying and catchy, but it’s undeniable either way. There’s nothing new being done here (I feel like I could find every one of Bree’s lines in her verse in other songs if I looked heard enough) but it retains a level of fun that means it works. If you can get Missy Elliott on a song and keep pace with her, that’s gotta count for something. 
[7]

Why we gotta be so rude?

[Video]
[3.33]

Katherine St Asaph: I’m dubious about the Mandela effect, but I swear I have an actual memory of hearing this as a child, in the dentist’s chair.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Suddenly, like that, it’s 1994 and Big Mountain proffer slushy reggae to an ungrateful citizenry.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: A syllogism: 1. Pop-reggae is terrible. 2. “Why Oh Why” is pop-reggae. 3. Ergo, “Why Oh Why” is terrible. See? Logic is simple.
[1]

Will Adams: As unfashionable as it may be, I understand that there exists a market for cod-reggae. It’d be better served by a song that’s not this drawn out and dogged by Joel Shadbolt’s strained high notes.
[4]

Juana Giaimo: I mean, there are definitely more annoying songs than this one, but I’d definitely skip it if it came on a playlist or on the radio. Saying that reggae is repetitive is maybe not understanding the genre at all, but “Why Oh Why” is really the safest form of reggae I can think of. It’s peaceful, it features the harmonic backing vocals and it’s introduced with “love over all”, as if we weren’t completely cynical after a year that showed us many times how humanity can be really shitty.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: When you have as much of your country behind you as L.A.B. seem to, perhaps it can go to your head. “Why Oh Why” is underwritten and overlong, as if simultaneously grandiose and complacent, and to the extent that it could be library music tagged “Kingston Town”. It is to reggae what Steve Jeffries’ “Soul Singer” is to soul, but somehow charming for it. Ultimately it isn’t trying to sell you brown sauce; its worst crimes are reverence and sincerity. They clearly dearly want this to be good, yet end up being called “BBQ reggae”. Even if that’s not quite a gift horse being looked in the mouth in 2021, it is a horse trying its best.
[5]