And Katherine brings us an L.A. pop-rock band and a short autobiography, maybe…

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Katherine St Asaph: Bullet & Snowfox is the project of Kristen Wagner from Shut Up Stella, the greatest teenpop band to never release an album. There’s cachet around teenpop and all things teen, much of it misguided and some of it actually predatory; the Radio Disney model, relentlessly peppy-bowdlerized; the Taylor Swift model, crushingly idealized (for everyone who grimaced at “Welcome to New York”‘s glibness, that’s how it felt for high school) or the Sassy/Rookie model, which is awesome for the few who can live up to it. But Shut Up Stella made music that felt how being a teen actually felt to me: aimless, pointless, stranded in parking lots and SAT-test rooms and small towns and shitty relationships you can’t get out of, constantly drunk or high because it kills the hours faster, adult kids who aren’t alright: these are the days that we won’t remember, and if we ever wanna go back, we can smoke a pack and pray for a heart attack. They mattered to me; they could have mattered to the world. Then came promo and pilots and fights and Ryan Tedder cowrites; they split, perhaps acrimoniously, and all three went their own ways into hardworking obscurity. This is where the cachet ends; the pop industry doesn’t care, the pop music press is either uncaring or too dead to care, the music-criticism press is crumbling like an island of baking soda, and even the poppiest, teen-est, major-est artists might end up with… well, with dead-end teens and striving careers, reinventions and small success. Jessie Malakouti’s gone through about five reinventions, now picking up a sprinkling of radio adds as Eden XO; Fan_3, now Allison Jayne, fronts spiky/drifty band Yell For Help; Wagner’s been in Bullet & Snowfox since the beginning. Specifically, since 2009, when I was writing a game called Broken Legs, needing a snottier soundtrack than Sarah Brightman or Kate Bush, reading a little much pop criticism — including this very site — on some willful Google whim. For months they were all I listened to; then came Bullet & Snowfox, whose Metric/Franz-loving dance-rock was both sticky and closest to what I’d loved. It was the first pop I’d adopted in years, and I suppose I told myself it was “different”; it also led directly to admitting I liked other pop, then indirectly to this crappy career. If it hadn’t happened I would have been laid off in August of 2011 with the rest of the copy desk I was on, which is more reassurance in hindsight than many people get; but if I’d gotten into chess or church or opera or coding-coding or anything else I could have, would that have been right? Which brings me to “The Heart.” Shut Up Stella was managed by Kay Hanley, and “The Heart” is Bullet & Snowfox’s best stab at her early-’00s sound — a heart-stab, with hooks everywhere, relentless energy, closing-credits ebullience, perhaps underlying darkness but mostly hope: hope that’s earned. I often struggle with describing bands I adopted before adopting the music-writing vocabulary and canon, the comparisons and promo lines and dismissals to wield against them; they feel different, and they feel important, but they also feel lonely, because there are fewer and fewer ways to get your fandom across to another human. (An editor, who will remain unnamed, once looked at me like I was some moronic dilettante and gave me the “andnoneforgretchenweinersbye” brushoff when I suggested in person that Hanley was formative.) I mean, how do you do it? How do you score an artist so intrinsic to yourself today, with all your fucking faults, with a song so surging it affirms them anyway? Like so.
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Brad Shoup: Pneumatic pop-rock straight out the Legally Blonde 2 soundtrack, a splice of Neil Diamond’s “America” and Ladyhawke’s “Black White & Blue”. This could make you nostalgic for any of thirty years.
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Alfred Soto: The second single we’ve reviewed to cite Woody Allen’s smarmy defense, it also isn’t as fun as Selena Gomez’s, which at least zipped through its incoherence. “The Heart” plays like “Breathless”-era Corrs on Quaaludes. 
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Edward Okulicz: This is an underappreciated genre, and this chorus is a massive rush of desirous power-pop. Not sure if I’m overrating it because it draws on decades of terrific ladies with shiny guitars that radio never quite got behind — other than maybe Hilary Duff — but could always be relied on for a soundtrack single. Might be a [10] if I get the idea that the verses stack up (they probably don’t) or if I imagine Kay Hanley belting it out while on top of a tall building like the ending of 10 Things I Hate About You.
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Zach Lyon: A general rule: if it comes within several hundred miles of maybe fitting in on the “Josie and the Pussycats” soundtrack, it’s just fine.
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Patrick St. Michel: It’s the big, climactic song to make the end credits of a movie — something with national distribution, but not a summer blockbuster. It seems a bit too high-energy for the part where you find out who the grips were, but it sticks with you. Would probably sound even better live. 
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Anthony Easton: So sugary, it might give me an insulin shock if it lasted longer than it did. 
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Will Adams: Totally forgettable pop-rock pummeled with cliché, sure to make any Disney Channel Original Movie music supervisor squeal with glee.
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Sonia Yang: “Sweeter than Fiction“‘s more world-weary cousin who seems to actually know what her heart wants.
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Thomas Inskeep: I appreciate what they’re trying for here — big mid-’80s closing-credits uplift — but with lines like “the heart wants what the heart wants/and I want you” it’s all so painfully clichéd (music, lyrics, and all) that none of it works. 
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Scott Mildenhall: The one thing letting “The Heart” down is Kristen Wagner’s voice. She doesn’t really sound like a singer. It’s not even a technical thing, it’s just the tone, and that tone, when exposed in the verses, veers eerily close to Rebecca Black’s in the seminal “Person Of Interest”. She just about gets away with the chorus, swept along by the music, but even that suffers with her yawpy expressionlessness.
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Megan Harrington: Often we’re forced to choose between our best selves and our realest selves. Women especially are forced to pick one face and present it, to stifle any second or third dimension because it’s too confusing to be two things at once. “The Heart” is both quietly unsettled on the verses and a cliché sledgehammer through the chorus. Bullet & Snowfox refuses to pick a mold and we get a song that’s a little bratty, a lot in love, and the most ready for an impromptu karaoke. 
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