The Singles Jukebox

…and mirrors.

[Video][Website]
[5.75]

Iain Mew: Rattling off bleeps in dazzling sequences like someone effortlessly racking up high scores, Didrick sets a scene of triumph and newfound heights. The result is that the conviction Fondell brings to lines about feelings not expected in a million years sounds perfectly in place.
[8]

Cassy Gress: That E minor-C major-A-major chord progression repeating through the choruses is an odd one. It’d have better effect used once or twice as a pre-chorus because as it is it’s reminiscent of a series of hopeful moments gone wrong. Otherwise, the song consists of mostly forgettable shimmery ice walls and 8-bit bloops, and Amanda chews on the vowels and pushes her passagio through her nose hard enough to take me out of the song entirely. Now I’m just idly wondering when that style of singing stopped being a novelty.
[4]

Ryo Miyauchi: Let’s just stop trying to make this into some serious, life-changing epic and skip right ahead to that sweet, dumb chiptune rush.
[5]

Will Adams: I imagine that someday I’ll tire of this maximalist approach to dance music: of fluttering 8-bit arpeggios, bright synth chords, and vocals that sound like they’re soaring over glaciers. For now, “Smoke” feels like riding another crest.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: Fondell’s voice is obnoxious, pulling the same shapes as Paloma Faith, which unfortunately seems to be becoming de rigeur for dance/pop hook-singers these days (especially from Europe, which still currently includes the UK). I like the d’n’b chorus once it kicks in. How about a whole song that’s just that, without the vocal?
[4]

Alfred Soto: Fondell’s big gulping voice doesn’t always navigate Didrick’s chord changes with ease, but falling in love’s like that sometimes. It would’ve been a winner too had the synth sounds been fresher.
[6]

Will Rivitz: This is the kind of happy-go-lucky electronic pop I’m sure the bloggerati would sneer at if ever it reached their inboxes, but I think this style of music is the bees’ knees, so maybe I’m a bad music writer? Either way, this is a superficial cross between Madeon and Fred V & Grafix – given the source material (Madeon’s hit or miss, but his hits hit hard; Fred V & Grafix are easily top-five favorite artists in my book), it could have been a lot better, but by the same token, given the source material, this was never not going to be right up my alley.
[8]

William John: Teasing out angst into something preposterously theatrical is a very teenage action and one of which I approve of conceptually in pop. “Smoke” heightens the melodrama of unexpected romance with a patchwork of production ideas, some intriguing, others garish. It fails to coalesce mostly because of the guest singer Amanda Fondell, who seems to have used her time in the vocal booth as gurning practice.
[3]