The Singles Jukebox

Guess who’s back with a not-exactly-brand-new rap…

[Video][Myspace]
[6.00]

Alfred Soto: Not MY disco song, thanks.
[4]

Iain Mew: Cool noises! Shuffling cool noises, flapping cool noises, metallic cool noises, backwards cool noises, space telephone cool noises. So many cool noises that I can’t help but think they’d be served better in some kind of interactive cool noise player, rather than forced into an attempt at linking them together in song.
[6]

Alex Macpherson: Vitalic hasn’t updated his sound exactly (or, well, at all), and “Your Disco Song” is definitely not on the same scale as the towering, monolithic bangers with which he ruled 2001-05. But, unusually for a dance producer, his music still sounds as though it was manufactured in isolation, meaning it dodges the banana skin of sounding too dated; and those synths are still steely and visceral enough that this easily passes the all-important “would rave to” litmus test.
[7]

Michaelangelo Matos: Throbbing synth-fizz instrumental that never stops undulating and/or giving. I’m guessing it would be pretty just played on piano, but thank heavens it’s not.
[8]

Anthony Miccio: Attempting to make “Poney Pt 1” more accessible with extra filtered vocal hooks and assorted foofarah ignores that its pounding simplicity is what made “Poney Pt 1” a classic in the first place.
[5]

Fergal O’Reilly: An initially underwhelming tour of Vitalic’s usual touchstones, i.e. monged robot vocals, elastic fuzz bass, sounding like Moroder if he was insane and killed women etc. It ostensibly lacks the immediate, consciousness-invading union of exhilaration and terror of his earlier work, but the messed up second vocal is bizarrely compulsive, and the characteristically doomy synth line on the breakdown burrows its way in deceptively quickly.
[8]

Tom Ewing: Very much relies on the “OMG new Vitalic material” factor to make an impact: the sad robot vox surely wouldn’t cut it alone. Ravers of a certain age will be pleased to know he still makes his bass melodies sound like a monstrous robot claw slowly squeezing a huge iron tube of sonic toothpaste. A narrow victory.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Something so new 5 or 8 years ago now feels torn and rusted, which makes the glitch artifacts a symbol of the once gilded age.
[6]

Talia Kraines: This is almost like a distorted muddle up of “Zombie Nation” with “Shiny Disco Balls” (although it might be the video making me think the latter). It sounds big, but neither does anything really new nor has the drama needed to excite.
[5]

Chuck Eddy: I never understood what some young critics loved so much about OK Cowboy back in 2005 (finished Top 100 Pazz & Jop, as I recall) and haven’t listened to the album since. But if this is any indication, maybe it’s the way Vitalic smudges his electro up and makes it all blurry? Assuming that’s not a new deal with him. Either way, it’s a distancing gimmick, and an annoyance.
[5]

Kat Stevens: The maximal thumping is a step up from the current glut of buzzsaw electro but it never quite manages to escalate to Zeus Demolishing Planets With Thunderbolts levels (which Vitalic is absolutely capable of attaining).
[7]

Martin Skidmore: I’ve loved lots of Vitalic’s tracks, and this mostly lives up to expectations, with a rich, even mesmerising electro groove and strangely processed vocals drifting in and out on top. The beats build gradually, high synths shimmer, and it develops into maybe my favourite techno single of the year so far.
[9]

Renato Pagnani: The title almost carries a condescending tone, as if Arbez is saying, “This is what you asked for,” and then washing his hands clean of the result. Justice took this sound to its logical (and maximalist) conclusion, and Arbez seems kind of stuck now. Turn things up even louder and he risks entering fuzz-disco (electro-static?) territory, which might not be such a bad idea at all. He can’t go minimal all of the sudden; subtlety is not one of the clubs in his bag. So he does what he knows best, and admittedly this is still pretty engaging — I could definitely see myself being pretty amped if this came on at a club, but I wouldn’t lose my shit over it.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Taken in isolation, the nightmarish squelch of the synths and the downright creepy molested robot vocals would both probably be compelling song ideas, but overlaid they make it sound like a bit of a mess, as if one is a mere afterthought to complete the other because the recipe (perfected, of course, on “My Friend Dario”) called for it. I prefer the music, so someone mix an instrumental, please.
[5]

Spencer Ackerman: The narrative suggested in the video is that it’s “your” disco song in the sense that everyone needs a disco song for the drudgery of routine, from being street-harassed to enduring client meetings to sitting through a trip to the hairdresser. Far from disco’s typical escapism, the message here is that disco is as routinized as the awful thing it’s supposed to provide escape from. So disco sucks because life sucks.
[6]

Martin Kavka: The warmth of disco has always had alienation as its dark underbelly. Electro importantly places that front and center, but in this case it occurs at the expense of any and all eroticism. All I want to do now — after four listens — is curl up in a fetal position in the corner and suck my thumb. Nevertheless, if I ever lose my hair to cancer, I’m going to carry on as normal by wearing that disco-ball skullcap from the video.
[4]

Doug Robertson: Who needs soul and humanity and all that emotional stuff when you can have the cold mechanical heart of a ZX Spectrum making love to the precise beat of a glitchy drum machine? Ones and Zeroes are all you need. Everything else is just noise.
[8]

Additional Scores

John Seroff: [5]
Andrew Unterberger: [4]