The Singles Jukebox

But does it rock?

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[3.64]

Mark Sinker: Just two and a half minutes; seems decades longer. And Orange is the New Black made much better use of that chord sequence. The reason this format feels over is that it is over. 
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: These bands aren’t formed, they’re grown, they’re like apples at this point. I guarantee you this band came on a stalk, and like his many brothers and sisters who populate the Earth, they will fall from the branch, already rotten, and nourish nobody and nothing. Crab-apple type bands.
[1]

Alfred Soto: These guys sure enjoy the sandpaper-dry late period production beloved by U2, and the singer doesn’t want you to forget he suffers from Bono-itis.
[3]

Cédric Le Merrer: “In early 2015, Catfish And The Bottlemen seemed poised to hit the big times but were quickly relegated to footnote status when similar sounding band Benedict And The Cumberbatches stormed the charts with their first album Checking All The Boxes.”
[2]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m not sure which is worse, their name or this single. Alfred said that their “sound should ring bells if you loved late nineties American college rock.” It rings bells, yes, but not because I loved that; rather, because I loathed it. This is a ’90s A&R man’s idea of a good idea because he’s a lifelong bizzer.  
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: As a Kathleen-adjacent person, I shudder at all the women who’ll hear “YOU GIVE ME PRAOUGH-BLEMS” bellowed at their name for the next few months if this becomes a hit. But alas, the song is too scrappily eager to be boring.
[5]

Will Adams: “Kathleen” is the type of filler, full-bodied rock I can plop on a mix CD and let breeze by me as I cruise a highway. It’s the type of pleasant, mood-setting song that I don’t examine too closely to avoid seeing its cracks — strange enjambments, overwrought lyrics — but is best experienced as a warm blur.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: It is weirdly comforting that the British guitar rock of today is more or less the same as what it was when I was a teenager — driving, shouty, full of bands with super stupid names (Cajun Dance Party, those were the days). “Kathleen” is a copy of a copy of a copy times a lot, but it does its job of providing quick-moving, angsty rock to young people who need it. Until they eventually move on from it. 
[5]

John Seroff: As renowned near-septuagenarian Neil Young once said, “ROCK N ROLL CAN NEVER DIE; it will just muddle into an undistinguished sequence of highly recognizable tics and licks that hiss with all the fury and lasting impact of spilled water on a hot stove top.” 
[4]

Brad Shoup: Just think, once they were Catpole and the Bottleboys, and now look at ’em! The longwave moaning is the best part — it’s just as familiar as all the Stroking from the band and all the Casablanking from the singer, but the moans are a kind of reset, a gutclutch, that I’m always happy to hear. 
[6]

Anthony Easton: Crunchy, spitty self-loathing: it’s the 90s all over again before we realized Travis was kind of shit. 
[3]