3LAU ft. Bright Lights – How You Love Me
Anthony, explain seventeenth century devotional poetry to this fellow.
[Video][Website]
[4.38]
Crystal Leww: This week started with us covering a Duke Dumont single with an uncredited Yolanda Quartey. You can compare and contrast her experience with that of Bright Lights. EDM’s definitely not perfect at crediting vocalists, but there’s something to be said about how Bright Lights, after years of penning pop songs, has been able to spin her (credited) vocal work with EDM heavy-hitters like Zedd, Hardwell, Porter Robinson, and Savoy into a massive tour with the latter. She’s become an invaluable voice in the genre, much like Matthew Koma, with a string of feature credits that are truly enviable. 3LAU’s production on “How You Love Me” is fine; it’s pretty typical as far as EDM songs go, but Bright Lights brings this to life with all her girly-ass energy, pleading with the object of her desires with the life-or-death intensity that something like this deserves. I don’t care about whether or not the synths read as aggressive, the fact that Bright Lights is credited, celebrated, and vital to this makes this, not “I Got U” or “I Wanna Feel,” the girliest shit on Seattle dance radio right now.
[8]
Anthony Easton: ‘This is like 16th and 17th century English sonnets and devotional poetry–more about the rhetorical strategies of form and culture and less about the subject at hand; more about the idea of love and less about love itself. Sometimes this provides fascinating examples of self-hood. Sometimes its just boring solipsism. These strategies fail here.
[3]
John Seroff: Spotify frontlists this as song number four on the sixty-five track album comp “Future Trance, Volume 68”. Given the mechanical nature of this exercise, its throbbing lack of definition, shmaltzy vocals and woodpeckering dopplegänger beats, I suspect that perched on the lips of that xeroxed beast is the best place for it.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Not a single sound you’ve haven’t heard and many sounds you will again.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: Maybe I was wrong about that Tinashe song. Here’s another sound to go with half-heartedly pretending to be in love.
[3]
Scott Mildenhall: The sound of banging resignation, a pummeling sorrow akin to Cedric Gervais’ “Summertime Sadness” remix, only with a distinctly indistinctive vocal making an open-ended plea/threat more suited to the ominous. Were there a better match between each part 3LAU might be on to something; as is it’s somewhat aimless.
[5]
Brad Shoup: I feel like you could make a top-notch Eurodance children’s book out of this.
[4]
Mark Sinker: So I’m cosigning all manner of TSJ-hoisted nonsense because I’ve been elsewhere while everyone did time getting jaded at it all. And here’s some more, because I can’t help that: straight from the small and secret uncanny valley that divides goth-tinted shoegaze from arena Eurobosh.
[7]
Crystal’s thorough and name-check heavy breakdown on this makes me wonder if, as with bachata, I might likely be better prepared to appreciate the nuances of contemporary EDM if I deep dived into a week of sixty-five track album compilations… but dag man, that just sounds like the most dispiriting sort of immersion. it don’t MOVE ME you know?
No one needs to be an expert in everything! To be fair, I am a longtime EDM bro, but tbh my love for this song could be boiled down to “I WANT TO JUMP UP AND DOWN TO THIS WITH LIGHTS.”
for sure; part of what i like about the jukebox is the panoply of well written, uninformed opinions side by side with mini-essays that presume an encyclopedic awareness of truly obscure sub-genres. #nojudgements, I love that shit!
I’m mostly calling you out because it’s humbling when you hate listen to a track ten times and finish by throwing up your hands and saying “WELL NO ONE COULD POSSIBLY SAY ANYTHING MEANINGFUL ABOUT THIS” and then, hey, whattayouknow
that said, the continuing popular success of this brand of carbon copy commercial club cut is utterly baffling to me; this stuff was everywhere the last time i got a wild hair about writing for the jukebox and (hough more than a year has passed) it’s pretty much exactly the same song I remember from 2012 with hardly even a new coat of paint.
and i’m longtime EDM bro enough myself to remember buying aphex’s LAST album off the racks.
John, I will always vote for immersion. I like to just jump in and thrash around until I get my bearings.