The Singles Jukebox

Pop, to two decimal places.

Nervo ft. Afrojack & Steve Aoki – We’re All No One

They’re identical sisters. But enough about Afrojack tracks…


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[6.86]

Brad Shoup: After the light chaos of the beginning, we get a fine update of classic major-label disco strut. The lead Nervo snarls like Tommy James produced by Jim Burgess. The text is set up to glorify the fame-gaze until, cleverly, Nervo reveal we’re actually gazing at someone else. A little past a third in, we become aware of a man’s attention-bid of a cough: the appreciation cycle perpetuates but we are, sadly, no closer to Katherine’s percussive pop wish.
[8]

Anthony Easton: You know those five poses that women on Facebook use to indicate attractiveness? The women in these photos use all five in quick succession. The pro forma nature of bodies and image-making seems indicative of the work here.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: First time I heard this, I discounted it as amateurish and rough. But, readers, it always pays to take a second or tenth listen, because Nervo’s desirous, untrained haze of a vocal attack hits at the cold lie at the heart of “It Gets Better” as a musical genre while still expressing white-hot desire to break through and be something beautiful. That the last minute throbs with seething desire underlines the point.
[8]

Sally O’Rourke: Finally, a rebuttal to the “Firework”/”Beautiful”/you’re-awesome-just-for-being-you school of ego-stroking pop! A song that acknowledges failure and champions hard work as the route to being taken seriously? That’s a sentiment after a critic’s own heart. “We’re All No One” is almost as good as the lyrics promise, too, even if the chorus is the only part that succeeds at being truly anthemic.
[8]

Iain Mew: More than any of the songs they’ve written themselves in the past (“Negotiate With Love”!), the chorus here reminds me of “We Are Your Friends”, through direct resemblance and through the way that it insistently and forcefully repeats itself until irresistible. The squelching and squeaking on the electronics elsewhere keep things interesting, even as they’re just filling in the gaps between choruses.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: The lyrics are pseudo-meaningful pap (she can’t have interpellated him if he made her do it, or if she can, that’s closer reading than either I or Nervo did) that gets nihilistic in the same place The Secret does. That said, this is appealingly rickety, especially from a producer whose “Give Me Everything” is the least rickety single in recent chart memory. Nervo’s singers have Dev’s appeal: they’re not blank note machines but everywomen, but people.
[7]

Doug Robertson: This is a song better experienced than listened to; it needs darkness and swirling smoke and occasional laser flashes to be fully enjoyed. It’s a triumph of electronic gloss over substance, while lyrically it’s as trite as you would expect from something that focuses solely on the sheen. That may sound like a criticism, but it’s not. Not everything has to mean something, and what it does to your feet is just as vital as what it does to your feelings or your thought.
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