Danny Fernandes ft. Josh Ramsay & Belly – Hit Me Up
We are hungry for the great 90s boyband revival single. This isn’t it, though.
[Video][Website]
[4.40]
Brad Shoup: Josh Ramsay’s work on the chorus punches things into *NSYNC territory: the self-sufficient joy of singing, the power of the moral high ground (the enraged scream is a scary-nice touch). But it can’t mitigate the awful shaming of the under-sequenced verses, or Belly’s tax write-off of a rap.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: Josh Ramsay’s chorus bears so much resemblance to Michael Jackson’s paranoid 90s that it almost tricks me into hearing the rest of the song as that tightly wound and darkly glamorous (the sheen and trashiness of the video helps), but hey, props to them for even trying.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Teen pop turned aggro when “Bye Bye Bye” roared up the charts. By then N’Sync weren’t interested in your heart — they wanted you to smell their cologned assholes. The processed guitar squealing behind Josh Ramsay is an adequate Lance Bass-Joey Fatone substitute; if Justin and J.C. had wanted B.T. to go farther they’d have done the same thing. What will Fernandes and co. do when it’s time to recast 2011?
[6]
Jer Fairall: A fair bit of Asian pop that I’ve heard via the Jukebox this year suggests a delayed piling-on of the boy band onslaught of the turn of the century, something I’m willing to forgive due to my ignorance of the speed with which massive North American trends tend to saturate further reaches of the globe. Here in Canada, though, I know for a fact that we had as our own sorry excuses for the Backstreet Boys in the form of B4-4 and Wave, making this exhausted bit of MJ-by-way-of-JT detritus about as necessary, in 2011, as an Ashley Parker Angel solo disc.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: 1990s Belly > 2010s ft. Belly.
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