Monday, September 30th, 2013

The Internet – Dontcha

No. 1 result on Google, for the record…


[Video][Website]
[6.90]

David Turner: To be Syd tha Kyd, in a white tee, skinny jeans and not even a pair of shoes. To appear cooler and more aware of it than the biggest white boy R&B sellers of this year, Timberlake and Thicke. No extravagance, only funk, groove and love — and my god, the LOVE and LUST. It’s beautiful, makes one want to dance; to find your partner and say “I love you,” or at least go up to a friend and say “I don’t think I’ll be able to ever afford Syd and crew at my wedding, will I?” 
[8]

Cédric Le Merrer: This sounds exactly like the kind of thing my uncle would awkwardly dance to, played right after “Get Lucky.” I’m still a bit confused as to when filling floors with everybody’s drunk uncle became the hippest thing.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Lounge disco in the Boz Scaggs vein, with hints of the Roots’ use of female voices for “mystique.” A decent atmosphere in which to relax with a single malt, in other words.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Harkening back to small-voice R&B from 15 years ago while also sneering “I hear you jags are into disco again.” The combination of quiet confidence with a trendy glide is too much for me to resist.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: You thought The Internet wasn’t going to shamelessly glom onto the trendiest sounds going — space disco, ’00s R&B? They’re called The Internet! That’s the joke. Anyway, here are some things The Internet likes: cloudy production, in the sense that close up it’s made of all these tiny interlocking ice crystals; the chorus of “Rock Your Body,” reimagined so that the key lyric is “please stay”; pretending you’re a Pussycat Doll while feeling like a wallflower. It’s genial, relatable, shareable — but hey, sometimes thousands of shares can be right.
[7]

Jer Fairall: The Odd Future gang’s other queer representative affects a surprising and credible Janet Jackson coo, but I would have liked to have heard a little more urgency and personality in her placid vocal. Ceding the spotlight to the warm, amorphous disco-funk groove might prove to be a wise move, however; this sounds as much like a Pharrell Williams composition as anything he’s actually been involved in this year, and such things seem to be doing pretty okay.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Trading in the sub-R. L. Stine atmospherics of her OFWGKTA pals for this slacker-Prince groove is a major step up, even if Syd tha Kyd can’t particularly sing and the band can only barely bump. This shy, eyes-averted chat-up is way more appealing than the towering infernos of confidence represented pretty much everywhere else in pop.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: Smooth and spacious, but what really sells this one is Syd tha Kid’s vocals. She sounds a little nervous, a little vulnerable, singing about someone she really, really wants to get with, getting close to mumbles at times. She doesn’t stretch herself thin, rather coming off as earnestly nervous. It matches the mood.
[8]

Crystal Leww: Syd doesn’t have the strongest vocals, but she’s learned from her Odd Future pal Frank Ocean that emotion can go a long ways to make up for that and add something special, too. Her delivery in the chorus is similar to something that Frank would do. It’s a certain shyness that comes across even as she’s asking the most straightforward of questions in “Don’t you want me?” Coupled with that bassline that simply grooves , “Dontcha” fits right along with “Thinkin’ Bout You”: simple little love songs.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Historically minded but not nostalgic, with a delicate balance on exactly what the implications of desire mean; it’s difficult to know if the attachment is to the history of the work, or a person in general. (The band’s called The Internet, which instead of producing new ways of information provides endless ways of systematically sorting, new narratives from old, shuffling and repeating forever.) Abstraction as a formal move has been played since the mid ’70s, since Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” maybe, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t love it.
[8]

Reader average: [8] (8 votes)

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One Response to “The Internet – Dontcha”

  1. I love this song — wish I had blurbed. ;___;