The Singles Jukebox

I think we can all agree that’s a pish name for a band, if nothing else…

[Video][Myspace]
[5.18]

Chuck Eddy: Crooner sits alone waiting by his phone, sounding too shy and reserved but expressing melancholy anyway, probably thanks to how the pretty minor-key melody counters pretty forward-motion synths; the song actually loses something when it stops being sad. Sorta takes me back to the early ’90s Pet-Shop-wannabe moment of Sensation’s Burger Habit and the Beloved’s Happiness — a moment that I didn’t even realize I missed.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Australian label Modular knows what it’s doing all right; having found success with the dance-rock hybrid of Cut Copy and the pop-dance hybrid of Van She, it’s signed Bag Raiders, a combination of the two so precisely engineered it might have come out of a German laboratory. “Shooting Stars” is a wistful synth-driven pop confection with a soaring chorus and an allergic rejection of innovation. But even if synth-pop duos have, over the last decade, become as Australian and as generic as meat-and-potatoes pub rock, when it works, it works, and it’s tough to deny that this is indeed a very lovely little song. It’s certainly enjoyable enough that they have it in them to use that hook-writing talent for something a little less paint-by-numbers in the future.
[7]

Anthony Miccio: It’s hard to even call this a mash-up of singer-songwriter Moby and uptempo Cut Copy; the former actually fades out before the latter begins. As the reference points suggest this is pretty low impact as far as techno-pop goes, but the restraint isn’t stultifying.
[7]

Pete Baran: Annoying indie dance number which has a breakdown two minutes in which feels like the end, since the first couple of minutes have been that boring.
[1]

Martin Kavka: Pop has seen a lot of fooling around with verse-chorus structure in recent years; Girls Aloud’s tendency to go from chorus to chorus to chorus is probably the best example. Bag Raiders’ take is to record a song that is all verse for the first half and all chorus for the second half. But once the chorus begins, the “verse” half has deadened my desire so much that I’ve stopped caring. Even worse, the narrative of the video seems to claim that the collapse of tall buildings makes authentic existence possible. Is 9/11 really that long ago, even for an Australian act?
[1]

Frank Kogan: Electronic dance that’s dressed in inexpensive pastels. Don’t know why the singer starts out so glum – I suppose it’s ’cause he feels inferior to the lights in the sky. Fortunately, elevated by feelings of love, he himself lightens up by the end.
[7]

Michaelangelo Matos: Always wondered why more of these kind of nagging tweaky synth-riffs didn’t make it into quasi-pop. A guess: they work better when layered one after the other, in succession, than when they’re underpinning words. This one doesn’t improve with time and repetition, either.
[5]

Erick Bieritz: Modular deserves a lot of credit for pushing the oughties electronic pop reclamation project since before almost anyone outside of Oz thought of these things, but for there are some clunkers in with the smash hits. “Shooting Stars” is the diminishing returns of the scene, great little processed twists on familiar riffs that nonetheless fail to excuse a middling chorus and dull hook, which was the same widely overlooked problem with the weaker half of Cut Copy’s “In Ghost Colours” album.
[5]

Mallory O’Donnell: I hate to think about music in terms of ratings and numbers and all evaluation methods and the like, but this right here is the perfect, almost the prototypical “5.” My feet and my gonads want to react positively with everything that happens here, but every part of me that is wary is so very wary of it all. It’s not simply that everything here has been done better before, but that it’s been done better before without making it so painfully clear that it was going about the process of doing it. The very definition of something that will cease to matter a half-second before you’re done thinking about it.
[5]

Ian Mathers: I quite like the first two minutes of this, where the vocalist mutters away like a shyer Bernard Sumner over a nagging, kind of chintzy synth riff. For such a florid production, it’s surprisingly withdrawn and as a brief interlude I actually think it makes a lovely song. The second half, where the production goes a bit OTT, the singer starts trying to emote and the melody is entirely different, might be okay on its own merits. But I’m sufficiently miffed that it’s stomped all over a perfectly good and very different song that it’s hard for me to tell.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The mosquito riff and use of space find the right balance between serenity and obnoxiousness, and when the song turns into a disco thumper in the last third, thanks to the riff from Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” it’s earned the right to burn into your earhole.
[7]