The Singles Jukebox

And we start Readers’ Week with a song suggested by two readers, so expect quality and/or controversy. Thanks Rex and Jesse!

[Video][Website]
[6.32]Megan Harrington: Martinez juxtaposes the language and imagery of childhood (washing your mouth out with soap, bubble baths, games, accidents) against the narrative of adulthood, giving the decay of romance a girlishly pink cheek. It’s creepy, but Martinez gives voice to girls who are aged up by predatory adults. Hers is a liminal world, physically defined by youth but emotionally yanked into maturity. Her desperation to say the right words, to stay the right time, to impress and satisfy is crushing.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: The strings bring pathos, and it’s to Martinez’s credit that the bath bubbles don’t bring bathos. Making your drop a soapy one is absurd — absurd innovation — but it in no way precludes or inhibits sadness. Onward they drip, drop, splish and splash, all while a half-numb Martinez goes nowhere. She sounds trapped inside the song, completely immune to its pulse. Vocally, a little can go a long way; of the whole piece, it’s only the metaphors that are perhaps too overwrought.
[8]

Kenny Komala: Growing up, whenever I said those bad words, my mom sometimes threatened to wash my mouth with soap. Little that I knew that she was preparing me for the ultimate bad word: “love.”
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Calgon, take me to the drop! Bubble pop EDM would’ve been an appealing novelty on its own, but pairing it with this understated plaint about feeling like an overflowing sludge-pit of feelings is inspired. All you can hear unless you pay attention are the sound effects; it’s production as defense mechanism, and quite smart.
[7]

Rex: I know it’s not healthy to go over and over mistakes and it does no good. But whenever I end up hurting someone, especially someone I care about, it just keeps replaying. Melanie Martinez sounds like she hurt everything she cared about. I deal with my guilt by resolving to do better, but in “Soap,” like on the rest of Cry Baby, there’s no improvement — just consequences.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Keeping a bath going as a metaphor for making something wantable out of a relationship is something for sure: when the bubble asserts themselves, I imagine an embarrassed Martinez under the waterline. The result is something intimate, but not painfully so: just honest, and carefully measured despite that honesty. Even with that chorus, there’s nothing revulsive about Martinez’s narration; she feels sickly, sure. But those strings speak to clarity, at least as much as can be mustered. Her head’s above water, for sure.
[8]

Scott Ramage: A joyless exercise in modern pop that ticks all the boxes: hushed Lorde tones, Lana Del Ray redemption narrative, even the glassy crystalline tones in Martinez’s voice echo Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry. The EDM-lite breakdown and bubble pops are unpleasant textures, but it’s the lyrics that are truly objectionable: the banality of “I think I’ll fill the bath with bubbles/then I’ll put the towels all away” suggest a novelty song at heart, written around a sound effect than a sentiment. She’s lying in cold water while her peers opt for a power shower.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: I’m so used to bubble sounds popping up alongside pastel sea life and generally fizzy electronic music that hearing them (heh) pop up on an unsettling number like “Soap” is a bit of a head turner. Thing is, they also come closest to turning a gloomy number into something a bit too silly, but Melanie Martinez finds a way to make those sudsy sounds blend in with the shadowy beat and strings. Water rendered as something to fear.
[7]

Conor McCarthy: If I heard this in a club I would boo the DJ. But is this going for the club, or teen-pop, or the alt-teen section? Or for teen-pop that wants to be the alt-teen section that got a hold of the club tunes? It’s a mess that needs a good scrubbing.
[2]

Alfred Soto: The rueful midtempo electronics complement too well the perfect, perfect title conceit. To match thoughts too angry to suppress and remarks too hurtful to apologize for requires angrier music. I might be wrong.
[6]

Will Adams: I was enjoying the murk-pop of “Soap” and Martinez’s steely (and reminiscent of Sofi de la Torre) delivery. And then I reached the instrumental break with… bubbles as a lead synth. Oh, well.
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: “Soap” contains some beautiful melodies, and my 11-year-old cousin seems to like this album — she’ll be ready for Laura Marling soon, god willing — but the song is bogged down by a frustratingly 2015 aesthetic. For one thing, there’s the thunderingly literal-minded soap-bubble sound effects that mimic a drop, as well as the self-consciously cutesy lyrics that ruin what is actually, at its most basic, a relatable idea. At best, it feels like “The Fear”-era Lily Allen; at worst, it feels like “Hard Out Here”-era Lilly Allen. A bigger reach is calling Martinez a less angsty Halsey, as Anthony Fantano (groan) has done in the past. But unlike Halsey, who I still imagine maturing as a songwriter and gaining a cult following, I don’t see Melanie Martinez having staying power for very long if she continues with songs like this.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Last time I heard a pop song mentioning getting electrocuted in a bath-tub it was Deftones’ “Digital Bath,” so by association I have to pay attention to this song. But whereas Chino Moreno is an arch-villain and devoid of much compassion for the victim, Melanie is startlingly uncomfortable. Her vocal performance is thankfully bland in a way that she could blend in with many other girls who turn in songs with uneventful routines, but the unease and self-loathing that’s filling the song here makes this a pop record where I truly do not like to think about why it registers. The little “soap!” she peaks on towards the end has a sense of humor that spares it, right next to the PC Music-esque bubble-pop break and splatter bit that makes the experience of “Soap” un-fun to the fullest.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Nothing matches the weirdness of the first few seconds, even the knocks and drips that are a bit too thematically on the nose. Her voice has potential though.
[6]

Gaya Sundaram: Have I ever heard such clear, yet incredibly soft, enunciation before? If so, it clearly isn’t as memorable as Martinez is in “Soap”. I’n im love with how she tiptoes around those consonants, her barely-there admission of fault allowing the bursting bubble sounds to really pop (pun fully intended).
[10]

Austin Brown: Tasteful EDM-derived buildup? Check. Lana Del Lite sibilant delivery that gets me every time? Check. Dramatic strings? Check. PC Music bubble sounds that function as a drop? Wait, what?
[4]

Iain Mew: On an album full of attention-grabbing lyrics, I didn’t register the metaphor of “Soap”‘s verses until listening again on its own, but it’s a clever and precisely constructed one. A relationship is a bath, she has to work constantly to keep it warm and comfortable, and if she puts too much in, it overflows. Then the chorus doesn’t so much mix metaphors as smash them into each other, her loving words going from warm water to being something dirty that needs to be washed out. The switch works because the song is about impossible, incomprehensible situations and because the sonic drip, drip, drip of bubble effects captures a flat hopelessness in a way that allows Martinez an underplayed performance that smooths the joins.
[8]

Joshua Kim: Maybe there’s something admirable about a young artist being so committed to a particular concept but on Melanie Martinez’s Cry Baby, it’s frustrating how often the lyrical themes and instrumentation can feel slight or superfluous. “Soap” is one of the album’s better tracks but these lyrics are way too on the nose to feel personal. The bubbly drop is a nice touch but it feels less like what the song needed and more like conceptual baggage robbing the song of its actual potential.
[5]

Tomás Gauna: Martinez hasn’t done anything that many others haven’t done before and better. The aesthetic is like a mix of Marina and the Diamonds, Purity Ring and FKA Twigs, but for like, people who think Ed Sheeran and Imagine Dragons are ‘indie.’ The sound of the track itself tries to go for a SOPHIE-ish trappy banger, but ends up with something that sounds like… I don’t know, Nico Niquo? But I do like Nico Niquo, and I don’t think there is anything super offensive about this song in particular. But it’s not that good, really.
[4]

William Love: I never thought I would use the phrase “this song sounds wet” in a sentence, but this song sounds wet. Like a really ambitious producer took the master and ran it with the whites in the washer. Ignoring the overly literal soap metaphors, Martinez’s vocals don’t hold up next to the phenomenal trap-lite production. As much as I don’t want to say that someone like Katy Perry would have killed this track, “Soap” demands a louder, more emotional voice. Martinez comes off like an anonymous blog pop queen, and she’s much more than that.
[7]

Luca Faustini: A couple years ago big room drops featuring weird sounds for the sake of it (from the woodblocks that started it all to the Korg M1 pan flutes that made everyone say ENOUGH) were all the rage, but here the dripping water samples are much more than just a gimmick. The lush underwater production, with its dampened strings, piano and pads, that elsewhere would just be a nod to the times, does an excellent job at painting the picture of the lyrics in sound and managed to drown me with it. Even Martinez’s muffled voice, that would otherwise sound unremarkable where everybody and their girlfriend is trying to sound like Lana Del Rey, is exactly what the song needs. The world needs more meticulously crafted songs like this.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: Love the lyrical conceit here: Martinez said something she wished she hadn’t, so now she’s gonna wash her mouth out with soap. Her delivery matches the lyrics, too, a bit dreampoppy, leaning on the pop side of that equation. Typically, “water” effects on a song are obnoxious, but those here actually work, as does the light electro-pop production.
[6]

William John: “Soap” is worded with such heavy-handedness that could be overlooked were it not for the (literal) drop. Martinez, evidently worried we would miss the bathroom theme in a song which alludes to overflowing bathtubs, bubbles, soaking, and prune fingers, throws in a dripping faucet breakdown for good measure. There’s precedent here; Sia, for instance, has achieved great commercial success building songs around singular metaphors (titanium, cannonballs, diamonds), but at least she wasn’t gauche enough to sample the sound of a chandelier crashing down on her hit.
[2]

Daisy Le Merrer: Bubbles pop; the two words are inextricably linked. Melanie’s Martinez’s song is all bubble percussion and sweet sing-song melody. It sounds great in a creepy way which reminds me of Grimes’ “Go”. The singer washes her mouth with soap, which you could interpret as using pop to stop herself from saying what she really wants to say. You could also say her unuttered words come out as bubbles. It’s pop as sublimation. Either way it’s a great and mysterious song, the kind you can project a thousand specific meanings and feelings onto.
[8]

Josh Winters: The bubbles burst so ominously it’s as if they’ve been contaminated with radioactive acid, closing in on you so frantically you could almost taste them on your tongue. Martinez doesn’t see this as a cartoonish gimmick; in her beautiful dark twisted fantasy, she subverts it to unsettling effect.
[8]