The Singles Jukebox

What a noisy Land’s End catalog!

[Video][Website]
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Anthony Easton: “THIS IS ABSOLUTLEY AMAZING!!!!! I GOT GOOSEBUMPS AND ACTUALLY CRIED <333 IM POSTING THIS ALL OVER TWITTER (If you dont mind) <333” – SamPepperLover. That’s the first Youtube comment — and the effusiveness mixed with the politeness is sort of why I hate this. And then I feel guilty for bringing a machete to a knife fight. I wish that SamPepperLover gets through the fandom with what she needs, and it would be unsporting of me to crush her desires.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Missing its romcom, where the heroine, sulking on her lunch break after catching the douchey-but-reformed! lead guy canoodling with a blonder, gigglier lady, is sprayed from the tenth floor with a shower of petals and serenaded by a surprise flash mob, each carrying a dozen cologned roses. He’ll emerge from an alley with a pout of repressed emotions; they’ll embrace. The falsetto would swoop above the scene like the camera lens. Each backing-vocal pulse would mark a footstep and each percussion whisper a heartbeat. For a movie, fantastic; for real life, a red-flag weavery (likers-of-guys, if he says “no one deserves this,” he might be right); for a song, workmanlike pap.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: The lyrics of this appear to be pieced together from the dialogue of one of those overly wordy drama-comedy series featuring perky teenagers who talk like adult geniuses. This would be fine if you had a whole hour, but cramming them into a little pop song and forcing it out of the mouths of these bland ciphers it comes across as logorrhea, nothing more.
[4]

Alex Ostroff: Barely-legal Brits howl “you” at the moon and apologize for making a mess on your carpet… erm… innocence. The string quartet that underpins the entire song is cheesy, but not nearly as much as the drums that appear out of nowhere for the chorus. Taken out of context, the repeated “It’s got to be youuuuuuu”‘s are ready-made to soundtrack television spots promoting the 2012 Olympics. But they’re “cute” and there are five of them — hope they’ve figured out which is ‘the sensitive one’ and which is ‘the brooding one’ and which is ‘the blond one’.
[3]

W.B. Swygart: It’s very easy to see the fingerprints of S. Cowell, world’s foremost champion of ballads about Not Speaking Unless Spoken To and Always Holding the Door Open for a Lady, all over this. However, I’m tempted by an alternative interpretation – One Direction have in fact made the great lost PM Dawn single. “I’m the foolish one that you anointed with your heart”, “What a mess I made upon your innocence” – tell me you can’t hear these words coming out of Prince Be’s mouth. The song tries to hold back its massive explosion of strings and can’t bear to do it for more than 30 seconds; the “one, more, one more time” bit is the estranged son of the “dun-daaaa da da-da” bit from “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”; and I’m kind of missing a third thing, so let’s pretend Niall playing a guitar in the video despite there being no guitar in the song is the 21st-century equivalent of the kaftans in the video for “I’d Die Without You“. It doesn’t really stand up in comparison to its forefathers, but its ballsy ridiculousness is quite adorable. Albeit the autotune on the chorus is fucking atrocious.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Why on earth are these ugly dudes so serious? What’s with their idea of a hip-hop beat? What’s for lunch?
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Brad Shoup: You have to wonder if there’s a game between pop songwriters and producers, one in which the latter tries to make the weirder texts from the former palatable. Until I saw that the producer and songwriter were the same man (Steve Mac, with writing assistance from August “U Smile” Rigo), I thought I had a winning theory. But now I’ve got no angle to approach an extended apology for ejaculation, backed by the Portsmouth Sinfonia. The lyric reads like high-school composition, which is in its favor, and whether you buy the titular declaration, their effort isn’t in doubt. 
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