Monday, September 3rd, 2012

Dragonette – Live in This City

We’ll unanimously love a track by them yet…


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Edward Okulicz: Having got their foot in the door with cheesy disco pop, Dragonette have gone for broke with a big, stupid dance pop number. “Live in This City” is as subtle as LMFAO and about six times as banging. Plus, I left it on repeat while I took the garbage out and when I came back into my apartment I actually thought I could hear “We Built This City.” Only sexier.
[9]

Will Adams: It takes guts to reference a song many consider to be the worst song ever in a million years, and to do that on several levels –- the synth-core rock, the looping chorus, the pride in the “city,” a grab bag of cultural signifiers. What’s more, “Live in This City” is punishingly loud, as if to remind you over and over of these similarities. These all sound like negatives, but sometimes it cancels out. It might be that it’s half as long.
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Jonathan Bogart: Late 70s power-pop given the standard machine-tooled 2000s (not 2010s) finish. Dates matter.
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Alfred Soto: What an awkward chorus! I can’t tell whether the rhymes defeat the singing or the singing isn’t up to them. Luckily the guitar and percussive thump have that Miley Cyrus-Go-Go’s glint. Any song about ruling the streets tonight needs to sound like Patton tearing through Germany.
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Iain Mew: Makes me think of Icona Pop, except that where they just said that their city was made small, Dragonette’s actually sounds small thanks to their determinedly direct and thrashy approach. It’s fun and catchy, but not so much as to make up for being only that.
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Pete Baran: An AV Club article recently reminded me of the abject lack of success of most films that feature dragons. Perhaps this explains the lack of success of Dragonette as a band, outside of people who program bumper trailers who have an insatiable attitude for “Hello.” “Live In This City” is probably their first single in five years that I don’t care for, and I wonder if out of desperation they are going against their natural pop urges for what has turned out to be a bit of a messy fuzz rock song. Or, cynicism rears its head — has “Live In This City” been written with city pop radio stations’ bumper sting producers in mind?
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Anthony Easton: Which city? In an attempt to make a party banger, their instinct towards specificity is bleached to a wan and generic push towards “fun.”
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Patrick St. Michel: I don’t know what the “top of the toilet choppers” bit is about, but I do know that is one catchy chorus.
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Brad Shoup: Lifter Puller by way of Grease, “Live in This City” references a bunch of shit I don’t get over the kind of dinosaur-label power-pop I do. Apologies to Taylor Swift, but this is how you namecheck indie rock: as one of a surreal set, meaning stretched to incomprehensibility. I’m normally cool to this kind of sass, but the track is a machine — clanks and thrums and all — and the bass & synth touch down like modern bosh, making this a bit more than an exercise in exhumed flash.
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Katherine St Asaph: Ignore the Lukelike guitar spangles — as responsible pop listeners no doubt know to — and you’ll hear the true antecedents: those shiny city-exceptionalism anthems by Starship, ABBA, Patrick Stump and the rest. But Dragonette goes an extra step. Everything and everyone in the city exists for Martina. The indie rockers who’ve probably retched at those three referents, the rioters presumably occupied, the high-rolling 1% — all naught if not for her solipsistic, noisy, chrome-gleaming self. They exist so she can blast noise at them, tap-dance over the pronunciation of “city,” sneer through everything, because she can. It is ridiculous. It is stunningly callous. It is, in other words, the stuff of pop legend. The great thing about solipsism is that you can’t prove it wrong; deny Dragonette this, and they’ve already spat tinsel at you, smothered your disdain in synth lines and laughed and laughed. 
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One Response to “Dragonette – Live in This City”

  1. “We basically invented this place/that’s why it’s standing room only….Standing Room Only!!”

    nobody mentioned that part. it’s so good!