And the video looks like a tribute to the videos VH1 would air in the early 2000s…

[Video][Website]
[5.18]
Michaela Drapes: Wait, this song isn’t about “loud music” at all!
[2]
Ian Mathers: For a song about music (and music fandom) as sex, that sure is a compressed brickwall of a chorus. It’s kind of compelling, but I actually prefer the quieter, kind of wistful verses. I guess she’s done with country for the moment, then?
[5]
Anthony Easton: I never know how people fuck to the Stones or Led Zep; it’s mostly hip bones grinding into bruises and sore muscles, which you know is most likely the point, but a little too efficient for my tastes. This is what this is about, right? Had trouble discerning movement or meaning in decent lyrics hidden by a horrible chorus, and a generic dancey pop base. Liked her better when she did country, and this would have been perfect as an Eric Church style burner.
[6]
Brad Shoup: This can’t help but come off backhanded, but I’ve long admired Branch for her grasp of structure. Even her wimpier singles are hella snappy and punch the floor at chorus time, when that Alice-in-LaLa-Land voice takes on a power that surprises me damn near every time. So it’s a shame she suddenly feels the need to rep her bonafides via big-upping dinosaur rock (esp. “Start Me Up,” nearly as plastic as the dude Branch is describing). By her standard, the first half of the song is experimental, with hushed, ornate delivery, a neat drum pattern and that eerie Zep quote. But her grander instincts take over, and where “loud music” could’ve been fucking, it’s instead a tribute to the songwriting process. But it’s still Michelle Branch, and it still packs a wallop.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Even less functional as loud music than The Mountain Goats’ “Dance Music” was as dance music, though the latter had a lot more going for it than a tired rock-‘n’-roll-as-carnal-metaphor lyrical trope. Beyond that, it is harder to tell what’s less necessary: Michelle Branch still trying to prove to us that she’s really a rocker chick like it’s 2002, or Michelle Branch coyly hinting that she has sex like we didn’t know that she’s now 28.
[3]
Alfred Soto: If Branch ever recorded loud music, I’m unaware. She hasn’t yet either, unless she thinks Ray of Light-era electronic effects and power chords from Linda Perry’s refuse pile count.
[3]
Jonathan Bradley: Branch uses classic rock signifiers the same way a Levi’s commercial would, but guitar music is so tightly bound up with a morass of boomer cultural mythos anyway that it might as well be wielded to shift blue jeans or pop songs. “Loud Music” feints at the romance of liberty and eternal youth but bolts them to the far sturdier ideals of palm-mute guitar and a satisfyingly slick chorus. “You know you had me at ‘Cool t-shirt, babe’,” is the lyric’s attempt to introduce character into snapshots of a rather boring couple. The nuance is failed and unnecessary: I was already sold.
[8]
Zach Lyon: The musical equivalent to a pre-faded rock t-shirt you might find on display at a shopping mall. That’s probably what she was wearing, too.
[5]
Sally O’Rourke: Michelle Branch would like you to know she’s ready to rawk. Not that you’d know from the antiseptic “Loud Music,” which features guitars and drums but little else in common with Hendrix and the Stones. Instead, Branch helpfully cites the last half-dozen or so tracks from the JACK-FM playlist, as if to rock by association without having to get her hands dirty. Still, props for incorporating the best part of “Immigrant Song” without making us have to listen to Led Zeppelin.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: I know I’m the only person charmed instead of annoyed by all those teenagers on Tumblr and Youtube insisting that classic rock is the greatest and everything since then sucks balls. I just can’t help thinking of them as the modern version of the kids who, when classic rock was a live thing, believed that the nightclub cabaret was the only worthwhile form of music and bemoaned music’s sad descent from the golden age of Gershwin and Porter. Let the kids have their nostalgia, I guess my point is. This is just as authentic an homage to the glories of 1969 as Opeth’s.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: God, I missed Michelle Branch. The past few years have been dismal: a country tangent with the Wreckers and later solo that, while not trend-chasing (if it was, she sure as hell wouldn’t have quit post-Taylor) wasn’t especially compelling; a few compilation-album tracks that were even less so; a Timbaland track without the prismatic synergy he had with Aaliyah, Nelly or Justin. So hearing Michelle’s buttery guitar and cheerfully snagged voice, plus a gorgeous descant she picked up somewhere along the detour, is just short of magical. That she also bought a Rockist’s Handbook in her absence and isn’t making loud so much as medium music doesn’t even matter. Of Branch’s former peers, Vanessa Carlton’s built herself a pretty cage of piano keys, Avril Lavigne has cryogenically frozen herself as a preteen, and who knows what Nelly Furtado’s doing anymore? Michelle’s all we have left; fortunately, that’s plenty.
[8]
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