Memo to music video directors: none of y’all are in fact Maupassant.

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[5.33]

Alex Ostroff: I don’t doubt that dubstep has interesting places yet to be explored. Places more innovative than one phrase endlessly deconstructed while sirens and wobble come and go at a predictable pace, before the breakdown as inevitable as is it is underwhelming. ‘Flashing Lights’ isn’t worse than anything else — it’s just not noticeably better. The production is crisp, and when played in the right circumstances [read: a club], I probably wouldn’t object to its presence. But two years after Chase & Status shopped their bag of tricks to Rihanna et al., I need something more from them than “slightly more epic than ‘Hold It Against Me’.”
[4]

Iain Mew: The whooshes sound like cars speeding by and the breakdown sounds like lorries trundling past. The song doesn’t do enough with them to be much more exciting than standing by the side of the motorway.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Someone, whether here or in the YouTube shallows, has penned a screed against the loserfication of dubstep, market forces slapping the substance out until all that’s left is a sullen heap of Linkin Park and recreational downers. I am not that someone, having failed to write screeds against Nero and Skornlex and having invoked Orin Scrivello for the less melodic stuff. So while I know how little these muddling moans and guitar drones mean, it doesn’t stop me from head-hanging in rhythm.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Really reminds me of “Sunlight” by Modestep, in which basically one dour phrase is battered about on the dubstep seas. And just like “Sunlight,” the track begins with a guitar fakeout (in this case, the Staind Special). If they were building toward sense annihilation, I clearly missed it.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: You know when using the same vocal clip over and over again works? When the words being sung mean something.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: The tricks on this are standard issue C&S by now — in fact, they’re largely the same as those used on their remix of Nneka’s “Heartbeat,” but while I’m listening, I almost with I had synaesthesia. This is punch-drunk, 3am bleary-eyed excellence. Repetitive, yes. But rather than just running one vocal loop into the ground, it changes in intensity, drops out, charges back and jolts me awake every time I listen to it.
[9]