The Singles Jukebox

Change the hair color and punchability and squint a little and he turns into Macklemore…

[Video][Website]
[6.78]

Josh Langhoff: King Romeo’s aptly named Formula Vol. 2 album lulled me into a stupor, but it’s my own fault for not knowing the language because the guy’s a laugh riot. Or at least a smirk riot. “Propuesta Indecente” had sports car sex and nude body appreciation, but even those pale next to this cuckoo’s fantasy. He opens by insulting your boyfriend, compares himself to a pirate and you to his stolen gold, then calmly — always calmly! — tells you not to be surprised when he sneaks into your room and lays claim to you. You knew this would happen, don’t get mad. (Judging by the video you’re very wealthy, so you’re probably taking this all with a grain of salt.) As with most quiet storm music, one isolated Romeo song sounds better than a whole bunch in a row, but that’s based on listening to Formula in the daytime. I get the feeling I wasn’t using it right.
[6]

Alfred Soto: This mild-voiced crooner goes a shrewd Sade route: coating the mild voice with mild accompaniment but with few of Adu’s dusky notes and the band’s occasional sharp corners. 
[6]

Mark Sinker: Rippling amused light high latino voice cheeky-boasting abt stolen love and hearts caught on a dare, a bold bad wicked secret swerve quite away from the safe and the good and the wise. Here I was elbow-deep in bone china and bubblewrap, packing several lifetime’s histories into boxes, lost in half-thoughts of choices made 40-odd years ago (this house); and 90-odd years ago (this china, carefully picked out in love or pragmatic aspiration); and even 200 years ago, when the china was made, a literal empire age before it became so cracked and so brittle. Was it a fancy purchase, or cheap and whimsical, when my grandparents found it? No one remotely left to ask, just guesswork and stubborn opacity. And across the puzzle, this one voice, absurd, liquidly perverse, just flimsy-flighty enough to maybe slant-touch on everything you know you can never now know, about people tied to you but vanished; forever unaskable.
[8]

Jessica Doyle: The start is a shimmer, and the rest of it lives up to the promise. I may be imagining the tremble in his voice; it may be a compressed file or subpar speakers or something else mundane. If so I don’t want to be corrected.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: This is a remarkably pretty record, marked by Santos’s cool, summer-kiss falsetto, and the lovingly picked cuatro that echoes Santos’s voice. In its spareness — and in its prettiness — it recalls Robin Thicke’s “Lost Without U,” which makes sense since bachata is kinda-sorta Latin R&B anyway.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: In one corner of the universe, legendary blogger and forger of the term “caucacity” TheKidMero suggested that Drake should move into bachata because it was a domain of soft male effeminate longing that suited his brand much better than rap ever could. And for Romeo Santos, nothing has changed this territory and how you navigate it. Every inch of this song is draped out in none more saccharine, to the point I half expect Aubrey’s nasal “AUW” to pierce in and drop some ramble about seeing ex-girlfriends in the side of his toaster. Santos, however, is ever the graceful phantasmal glider, the edges of his falsetto shying away from touching the dainty edges of the production from fear that all could be revealed to be the real world once more. It’s crystalline to an impossible standard, and it boggles the mind how one is able to sustain this sort of illusion.
[6]

Megan Harrington: There’s a strange, almost robotic, nasally quality to Santos’s voice that is sublime against the tinny production. It sounds like being buried alive, growing weak and weary as the air gets thinner. I fully expect Santos to reveal he’s Death if I swoon. 
[7]

Brad Shoup: Much to swoon at here; can you smell the chloroform? The slap bass contributes some startling knocks; an angel cries from the bottom of a well. You can’t run if you’re hypnotized, I guess.
[6]

Anthony Easton: The percussion, like rain on water, is so delicate, and Santos is smart enough to let his ballad-singing skim on top of it. This is effortless.
[8]