The Singles Jukebox

So many comparisons, so few stylistic differences…

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[5.09]

Katherine St Asaph: Introducing the jukebox-musical adaptation of Animal Collective, starring Michael Franti and three guitar notes!
[3]

Brad Shoup: A pinch of crunch, a touch of twitch, and a whole lot of harmonies. I’ve been suckered by smaller formulae. MVP is Sam Doyle, putting in an elongated, cymbal-light groove. While the harmonies are nice, they’re trying to prop up shaky pop existentialism, so I recommend focusing on the drums.
[7]

Iain Mew: The intro is punchy and urgent, but The Maccabees squander its momentum fast and never live up to its promise. At the song’s best, they sound like The Shins with a more rough-hewn, uncertain singer. Most of the time there’s just too much imprecision, the guitars lost in no man’s land between Coldplay chime and post-punk clang.
[4]

Josh Langhoff: I really like the doubletime sections because they make me feel like I’m flying. For the rest, it’s bad form to promise “Eye of the Tiger” and instead deliver Fleet Foxes.
[6]

John Seroff: This Mumford Brothers by way of Godspell rattler has a surprisingly high BPM and a counter-intuitively low quotient of get-up-and-go. I can’t remember the last time I heard so much energy squandered with so little return.
[5]

Jer Fairall: The evasiveness of the vocals is one particular indie quirk that I’ve grown tired of over the last decade, but the band manages the neat trick of sounding spacious and urgent at the same time, languishing in atmosphere while delivering a concise melodic punch. It resembles what would have been a minor Futureheads or Bloc Party single from either band’s 2004-5 peak, and even if its own hooks are less indelible, I’ll take this over anything either band has offered in the years since.
[7]

Anthony Easton: A simulacrum of a Xerox of South African pop, sort of has the relationship with Vampire Weekend that it had with Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel. Despite that, it’s catchy and fun.
[6]

Alfred Soto: What Tim Goldsworthy contributed to this band only they know — maybe the right matrix by which the Moody Blues and mid-eighties Rush could produce a decent Metacritic score.
[2]

Michaela Drapes: I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’ve heard this somewhere before; no doubt I have, in one of the endless iterations of NME-band-meets-UK-prog which has come back around every few years since like, 1983. Which means that, instead of being terribly bad or terribly good, it’s just terribly mediocre. Unlike a lot of bands in this vein, The Maccabees have survived past having just one album, so that’s in their favor — but could it hurt to be just a little more aesthetically interesting?
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: They sure sound like they think they mean something, don’t they?
[4]

Isabel Cole: It took a bit of a hit when I looked up the lyrics — I’m not saying you can’t make an interesting song out of “mortality is a thing that exists,” but I don’t think I’ve seen it done yet. Still, when I closed the tab, I found myself hitting rewind to listen again to the way its trajectory contracts and expands, pulls back and intensifies at just the right moments, never feeling stagnant or forced. It seems at once pushed along and inwardly propelled, and after a few listens, the journey from the staid opening chords to the soaring whirl that exhausts itself only at the very end began to resemble a day’s arc from waking to stumbling home after a very late night. Perhaps the key to selling me on a song about death is to paint it in the exuberant strokes of life.
[8]