It’s Best Mates Tuesday!…

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[3.12]

Iain Mew: You know how some songs have rubbish guest appearance sections but you don’t mind sitting through them because they’re short and the song they’re on is great? It doesn’t work when every part sounds like a rubbish guest appearance.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: In which Far East Movement demonstrate how they’re perfectly willing to beg for Ryan Tedder’s gruel.
[1]

Alex Ostroff: Lovestruck pop-rap can be a magnificent thing, but I’d prefer if it were done with a bit of finesse. The laidback groove and casual wordplay of Lupe Fiasco’s “Paris, Tokyo” is usually more my style. That said, after being bombarded by “Nothin’ On You” for months, I finally surrendered to B.o.B’s charming trifle, so I’m not entirely immune to “Rocketeer” and its ilk. A line must be drawn somewhere, though, and that place is anything involving both hashtag rap and Ryan Tedder.
[4]

Kat Stevens: Elton John must be on holiday because there’s Ryan Tedder, bashing away at the joanna in the Queen Vic while FEM are slumped against the bar, slobbering their way through well-intentioned but ultimately banal lyrics to order to impress whatever Mitchell girl is wiping glasses behind the bar. Only one of their chat-up lines would work on me: “I hope this works out – CARDIO!”
[3]

Renato Pagnani: “I’m like, ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’” I’m like: no, no, no, no.
[1]

Alex Macpherson: From getting slizzard to getting sensitive is surely not a move anyone was clamouring for.
[2]

Frank Kogan: Depressing. It’s way too soon in the Far Easters’ public life to show their range by getting sensitive, even if Tedder’d done it well rather than inflicting the same blank beige prettiness that’s created anemia across the charts for over a year.
[4]

Jer Fairall: Poor Ryan Tedder, going from the most in-demand purveyor of banal radio-pop balladry to the guy who answers the call when Bruno Mars isn’t available in only three short years.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: This has nine writers and six producers (Bruno Mars is in both sets), plus a guest vocalist. And it isn’t about the Dave Stevens comic character. The song is a bit like Mars’s “Grenade”, but sensibly he’d kept the stronger number for himself.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Impossible to get out of the head after having heard it once on the radio, which probably means I’m overrating it. Or maybe that’s just residual affection for a movie (and a comic book) I liked when I was younger.
[6]

Tom Ewing: Intriguing post-“Like A G6” division of spoils. The Cataracs and Dev take the sound, Far East Movement take the name and soar off, all flighty and pretty. More like a kite, then, but kites are great! And so is this, almost — they do the heart-on-sleeve stuff with boyband panache, and the combination of rolling piano and squeaky keyboard noises is a winning one.
[6]

Zach Lyon: There are always some one-hit wonders that go off to have many, many more hits, even international success (Katy Perry); but their careers are still painted with that veneer of confusion – every new single is borne from the question of “where do we go from here, to keep this up?” In most cases, they release one more song that charts pretty well (#23 right now) but not well enough for anyone to stop defining them by “Like a G6” in “100 Greatest One Hit Wonders” lists. Hopefully, I mean. Because this is a compendium of utter shit. The hashtags, the references to “G6”, the Tedder chorus that makes everything else Tedder has ever done seem actually-alive by comparison – these minutiae have all been better eviscerated by Maura Johnston, so I’ll go for it from a macro perspective instead: “Rocketeer” sounds like it was written for the express purpose of wooing stock photo models.
[0]

Chuck Eddy: Should perhaps go without saying that this is one of the lesser cuts on Free Wired. But it still hits me as a reasonable “G6” followup, not to mention a passable Far West Hemisphere substitute for G-Dragon and T.O.P.’s brilliant K-pop “High High” (since both songs deal with highness-in-the-skyness.) I’m neither here nor there on Tedder as a human being, but his vocal here is airy and weightless enough to support the subject matter. Also like that they mention Tokyo — if Asian-Americans are gonna take over pop music in 2011, and I’m crossing my fingers, overtness is welcome.
[6]

Doug Robertson: For a brief second, this sounded like it was going to be a cover of “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka. It would have been a lot better if this had been the case.
[4]

Alfred Soto: This trifle might work as a Black Eyed Peas replica had Ryan Tedder’s jackhammer falsetto and piano not reminded me of Drake imitating Stevie Wonder.
[2]

Additional Scores

Mallory O’Donnell: [3]
John Seroff: [1]