The Singles Jukebox

Pop, to two decimal places.

Los Embajadores – Peso

Vid NSFW, especially if your workplace is weird about malls.


[Video][Website]
[5.70]

Andrew Casillas: This is… pleasant.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Globalization means that music is increasingly stratified not by locality or by language, but by class. Los Embajadores make perfectly lovely music that would fit right at home in any mimsy middle-class indiepop playlist alongside acts from Germany, London, or New York. Which isn’t to suggest that they should be imitating Chilean working-class musicians — not being from Europe or the U.S. doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to be middle-class — just that boringness knows no national boundary.
[4]

Anthony Easton: Gorgeous, sparkling, and on the edge of danceability, with a crisp and precise electronic section and vocals that sound almost like a tango. 
[8]

Will Adams: I couldn’t really get my head around this until I saw the first half of the video; this is exactly the song that would accompany pensive gazing in a mall while wearing a floor length gown. But then I was brought into a porn theater and I got totally confused again. This is a song that immerses you in its prettiness for three and a half minutes and then completely vanishes from your conscious.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: The glassy disco production pulls me in, but it’s the fragile singing that makes me want to follow along.
[7]

Pete Baran: There is a school of thought which conflates “foreign and moody” with “sophisticated”, which “Peso” is ready-made for. The problem is that foreign and moody can also be read as a wee bit boring. Luckily, whilst it is a wee bit dull, the whole affair is rescued by the track being sophisticated.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The roller rink organ and twang guitar complement a voice besotted with Hope Sandoval-isms.
[4]

Brad Shoup: Like a good evening walk, this would be twice as enjoyable at half the tempo. It sounds like some Hopelandish ish, but I swear I believe it. The organ picks up, I begin to thrill to a change of pace, and the riff burrows south with solemn resolve. Maybe it’s trying to tell us something.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: This can’t be a real single. This is clearly an elaborate trap, engineered to all my tastes (female vocalist with glass filaments in her breath, piano drift, gentle-but-insistent beat, sounding like two Sarah Brightman tracks at once) and designed to drug me. If I don’t blurb tomorrow, call the cops.
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: A long, long time ago in a scene far, far away there was a music that they called “Balearic.” No one knew what that really meant, but it covered the comedown from even the most riotous night, walking alone or with one (or with two, oh my) as the sun began to lick the edges of the beach. No one knew what it really meant, but surely it meant this: a simple, seductive, cooling, timeless, balmy groove that traces the hours between leaving the club and the first twinge of regret.
[7]

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