This morning we’re mostly still not over you…

[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Katherine St Asaph: Here are some facts about “Tonight I’m Getting Over You.” It is a triumphant Max Martin song about a feeling that, as The Awl puts it, is rather like diving into a pail of garbage, except to this boy the garbage is you. (The boy, in the video, is named Brandon Gray. He does not normally look like this.) It’s as glittery as Patrik Berger producing Ke$ha and as earnest as early Britney, sung in the fervent quaver of an ingenue who’s been forced by feelings to belt. (Carly almost reminds me here of Tammin Sursok, of all people.) The echoes on her voice have got to be the platonic ideal of something. Or maybe the lyric is. It’s triumphant enough that it whizzes past “too happy to be straightforward,” maybe; it’s vague enough to describe nearly any love-life failure, specific enough to make you scurry into facts instead of explaining which lines slapped you in the synapses and why and who. The credits have Max but also a bunch of newcomers who appear nowhere else, so I’d bet this was a repurposed demo; maybe an old Lukas Hilbert track with Tryna Loules, whose one findable single does not live up to the title “Shit Men,” or by Shiloh Hoganson, another pop-punk-adjacent Canadian you shouldn’t Google too hard. I want to hear that demo. It’d make a terrible karaoke song, unless you’re prepared to choreograph the rests in the chorus with shimmies or curtsies or maybe dancing till the morning with somebody new, which’d require you to be over Brandon Gray already and therefore not singing this. I want to sing it anyway. It’d make an excellent mashup; if you take it up a half-step, it syncs perfectly with “Dancing on My Own.” The verses can be rejiggered, the prechorus can be the bridge. Even the sound effects would sync: perfect switcheroo “I want to touch your heart, I want to crush it in my hands” — cracks and snaps. Once-blunted climax “We’re not lovers, but more than friends” — punching the air where he’s not. I know it’s stupid, but I just want to hear it for myself. It would make an amazing pop-culture touchstone, even though pop culture’s already relegated it to “that ‘Call Me Maybe’ girl’s dubstep Hail Mary.” (There isn’t even any dubstep.) Most likely it’s meant as nothing more; but pop music has a way of absorbing people’s stories, and some girls will use this to pull through. Maybe.
[9]

Rebecca A. Gowns: I love this song. It has the appropriate amount of build-up in the first verse, then the beat drops and it turns into a transcendent 2013 hit, the perfect sequel to Call Me Maybe (in both form and lyrical content). Can’t beat that combo of melancholic and severely danceable; in that sense, it reminds me of “Single Ladies,” an anxiety-inducing pop song that I want to (and hopefully will) hear everywhere.
[10]

Ian Mathers: I’m not accusing anyone of insincerity, but surely “We’re not lovers, but more than friends” is going to trigger memories (old or new) of angst in the maximum number of listeners, right? I wonder if this one will trigger Robyn-style debates about how she’s actually feeling/what the situation actually is, etc. Certainly, like Robyn she’s covering a deeply nuanced range of emotions here, even if her voice isn’t quite as compelling and the boshing feels a bit more out-of-the-box. Those are minor quibbles, though; if those aforementioned memories of angst weren’t awfully dim in my own case I could see playing this on repeat a lot.
[8]

Anthony Easton: I like how brusque and no-nonsense Jepsen is about fucking. Even in her best-known single, what came across as a summer pleasure bubble had a sweaty little nugget of interlocking bodies in the middle of all that gossipy pleasure. This does it even better — that grindy manic production makes it so explicit exactly how she is getting over the paramour in question.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Kiss avoids the dubstep clichés on display here. Was the underwhelming response to “This Kiss” enough to scare A&R men into thinking what worked for Taylor Swift would for Jepsen? 
[5]

Al Shipley: If you come out of left field with a pop confection more effective than anything Max Martin and his pals are doing, they will find you, they will assimilate you, and it won’t be pretty. 
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: This should serve as the template for every producer wanting to cash in on the brostep boom but in a tasteful way that still lets the singer shine through. This also plays it just a little too safe with the EDM touches, especially for a song about letting it all go on the dancefloor.
[7]

Brad Shoup: While I should note that I’m recovering from a cold, that roiling brostep is a sickmaker for sure: an angered stomach perpetually hollowing. There’s no triumph here, just Jepsen sussing out the merits of a few mantras. Give me 24 hours and a couple sandwiches and maybe this will have settled.
[7]

Zach Lyon: This song has me realizing that I may definitively prefer these sorts of breakup pop hits with the torch on top and the triumph bubbling under, rather than vice versa (despite my weakness for every music crit’s favorite angle: this ridiculously happy song is really quite sad). This way we get to hear Jepsen’s voice at its strongest, when it’s packed to the edges and the edges are burnt and quivering with nervousness. As a Max song you might call it a vintage success; the chorus breakdown is a perfect bit of pre-dubstep-craze EDM, totally familiar but still a fresh construction, ready-made to be played out. More importantly, all the parts work, even if you never forget they’re separate parts — that’s Max for you.
[8]

Crystal Leww: Carly Rae is back to save us, so we can stop this bad “Harlem Shake” nonsense now.
[9]

Scott Mildenhall: It would be easy to describe this as anthemic, if only as a result of a mishap involving autocorrect and the word anaemic. A shame, because it’s actually only the production that merits that description, Carly left to sail far, far above what essentially sounds like a demo.
[6]

Will Adams: “Tonight I’m Getting Over You” is what I feared the entirety of Kiss might sound like before it graced my ears: cookie cutter 2012 pop that insists on being as loud as possible. It’s not that Carly can’t be anthemic – much has already been made of the particularly amazing “I wanna crush [your heart] in my hands.” But the dubstep belches and pole vaulting synth clash with her voice. I should be grateful that there is still investment in breaking her in the U.S., but that job could have been done just as well with “Turn Me Up.”
[5]