The Singles Jukebox

We’ve now hit our quota for car songs and it’s only August!

[Video][Website]
[6.22]

Anthony Easton: The beat of this is just fast enough, they make no effort to make it sound like a car, and there is a kind of melancholic, but also a long-past summer dusk quality. It’s fun, but it is also kind of decorative in its prettiness. The line about being high and being bored, the rhyming of “lighter” and “like her” is more clever than it needed to be — if we just rested on that chorus, it would be enough. I like that the black car isn’t a euphemism for black dick (full apologies to the Divine Ms. Jones). The double track near the end, and the concluding piano make it sound more like the conceptual working out of the semiotics of pop, rather than pop itself — but it is kind of an impossible miracle when meta-concerns about pop and an actual kind of genius pop song merge into a singular entity. An extra point for how the chorus hasn’t left my head for more than a week. 
[10]

William John: Opening with a reference to a movie scene and magazine; as perfectly blunt an image of desire I can imagine in the second verse; a general predilection toward melodrama, which seeps through a boilerplate Scandi backing; an ability to neatly distill three-act romance into a few lines clearly manifest. Welcome to the 1975 Club DMs, Miriam, please stay and talk to us about your feelings.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Until the backup choir and the de rigeur echo, a solid tune with a strong hook (I even liked the “lighter/like her” couplet) whose martial beat takes us nowhere.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: So settled is this in its unhurried tempo, it can seem an age before Bryant’s resentment comes through. She never sounds like she’s having the time of her life, but you could be fooled into thinking she was recounting it for a fair portion of the song. The woos and yeahs might even seem to corroborate that to begin with, but by the end they seem surely a spiteful toast to freedom made in intentional earshot of the second party. The layers unfurl with subtlety — surreptitious force.
[7]

Cassy Gress: This just doesn’t quite congeal the way I’d hoped. “Thousand miles apart in heart and soooul (oo-oo-oo)” (and the other lines with that same melody) flows together so neatly that the oo’s seem like a little flourish. But on the chorus of “We go driving in your black car / Pick me up and love fast,” my brain keeps wanting to add more syllables onto the second part, or change the phrasing somehow; as is, the phrases mirror each other but feel cut off. I like the ennui filtering through finding a girl attractive based on how she asks for a lighter, but, assuming I’m hearing it right, I’m a bit turned off by the bluntness of “some sort of erection / maybe we just need addiction.”
[5]

Brad Shoup: The city’s even more a church to Bryant than it was to M83; she speeds around with an actual organ in her ears. Movies and magazines are two very boring ways to signal a rare scenario, and the tale of dancefloors and drugs and need that follows is suspiciously relatable.
[4]

Tim de Reuse: Bryant’s swooping, confident delivery lends the chorus an immediate infectiousness – the entire song is carried on the way she sculpts the words “Black Car,” bending and stretching them into a delicious cadence. The bombastic, roomy instrumental behind this killer performance unfortunately stifles the range of her expression behind excessive reverb and inexplicable octave shifting.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: A powerful, ennuied but oddly soulful performance from Bryant, she’s focused… really has her eye on the road here. The instrumental feels boomy and aimless, dare I say directionless? But if it’s Lana Del Rey at double-speed, it’s fairly good at that.
[6]

Will Adams: The further Bryant drives, the more obvious everything becomes. The spare opening achieves the same ennui-via-reminiscing that Lana Del Rey does, but then the choir comes in and the organ’s dialed up to a nine. Eventually we reach the bridge, when she gives up on showing and simply tells us, “We’re dying for connection.”
[5]