The Singles Jukebox

Listened to “Kim Wilde” the other day, still holds up…

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[6.00]

Spencer Ackerman: I love this. A simple but powerful guitar hook paired with a dreamy St. Etienne-esque chorus, sung by a talented woman whose voice conveys aloofness and longing at the same time. Just absolutely wonderful. Oh shit, she’s the girl from Ash!
[9]

Alfred Soto: Unfamiliar with Ash’s music, I brought no preconceptions to this regressive but extremely enjoyable piece of indie fuzz. The bass line is so familiar that I can’t place it, but Hatherley’s lifting the drums from PiL’s “Memories” works as both ironic and erotic gesture. I find the whole package so fetching that I wish Hatherley hadn’t taken the easy way out by likening her lover to a decoration. Indie doesn’t need any more wallpaper.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: If you took away the layers of honeyed backing vocals and oohs and sighs, this might fall apart, or at least revert back to the indie-girlpop chug of the verses. But that chorus is so lush and engaging it lifts the whole song up – the contrast is effective, the melody is catchy and Hatherley has never before sounded this confident and varied in her singing. All the swooning and sighing of a summer packed into four minutes – glorious.
[9]

Kat Stevens: There’s a shiny indie-disco chorus lurking on the other side of the Dodgy (with a capital D) verse riff, but it doesn’t have enough oomph for a genteel Edwardian picnic, let alone the dancefloor.
[5]

Matt Cibula: Wasn’t feeling this much until the disco touches came in, then kinda liked it. Got bored again though. It’s probably my fault, not hers.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Hatherley makes perfectly pleasant rock songs with nice guitar lines and opaque lyrics and not much of anything to make them actually stand out. Coming from a band like the intermittently brilliant Ash, who at least realize the value of excess, it’s a shame that everything I’ve heard from her solo work so far is so milquetoast. It is a nice guitar line though, bonus point for that.
[6]

Chuck Eddy: Words that may or may not mean something, sung too passively to connect, over riffs that start off punchy but quickly wear out their welcome.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: I reviewed one of hers a few years back, and gave it zero. This is less shambolic, with a fuzzy riff that approaches the hypnotic, and her singing is pleasant enough in a laid-back and almost summery way, though it could do with more of a tune and something more like a chorus. Still, a very big improvement.
[4]

Talia Kraines: Starting with some moody guitars, the euphoric chorus suddenly shifts the song towards feelings of a hazy, dreamy summer. Surprisingly hypnotic.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: If only the guitar and bass riffs weren’t buried so far in the back, this could be a great mid-90s alt-rock song. As it is, Charlotte’s voice humbly floats over a sea of hazy guitars and lazily propulsive drums, only letting “White”‘s secret identity as a Weezer song peek through at the end of each chorus and in her perfect disjointed delivery of ‘my hair / is red / it grows.”
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: Roughen this track’s edges and you’d have a perfect example of the circa-’93 indie I figured would stay good for the foreseeable future. How little did I realize. Still, I like the way this is buffeted — the way it shifts from verse to chorus almost imperceptibly, like a Steely Dan you could almost imagine making it onto John Peel. (NB: I am an ignorant Yank.)
[8]

Hillary Brown: Mid-90s-ish without the snap of what lasted from that era.
[4]

Alex Macpherson: Beige, more like.
[4]