The Singles Jukebox

US ==> UK ==> the Javiera Mena Catbird Seat of Delayed Hits…

[Video][Website]
[5.67]

Mallory O’Donnell: Every so often we get one of these house anthems whose lyrics delineate the emotional terrain of modern life so very precisely. Slightly less often such an anthem gets remixed three years later into a nugget-sized jack-pop powerhouse that storms its’ way up the charts. Almost never are they poetry sung with beauty and soul of this calibre.
[9]

Scott Mildenhall: Number one after an incubation period of three years — not quite the seven long ones Damon C. Scott spent moving through the streets, but a lot more than the two-and-a-half minutes it’s been chopped down to for the radio. It’s a common practice that bears mixed results, and on this occasion it’s a little bit inhibiting — almost every part could and probably should go on longer than it does. But that’s a minor issue when the inevitabilities of sadness and dancing are fused so well.
[8]

Alfred Soto: In a year of house throwbacks this one errs with a vocal that leans on soul when the Robin S. “Show Me Love” beat exudes plenty of small-s-soul already. The result is a mishmash of distance and sweat. 
[5]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Cutting down the track’s original length in half (and then some), Mark Kinchen offers lots of negative space for the vocals — terse, angsty, lonely — before pushing in on the percussion and not turning back. Kinchen turns negativity into a burst of exuberance, albeit one transmitted directly from a dancefloor in 1995. Seems that sharp joy ages well.
[7]

Brad Shoup: My personal squishiness keeps me glued to the intelligible bits. The bit about looking for his lover’s ladder is beautiful. I love the snap in his voice; I wish the track whirled more in contrast.
[6]

Iain Mew: The tiger-Casanova video doesn’t help, but I already found something a bit comical about the mismatch between the oily vocals and everything else. The smallness of the track comes off more as a lack of ideas than as minimalism, and the result is the sound of someone passionately failing to escape from a cardboard box.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Soulful, subtle track becomes glass-light house, then Shazam hit. Damon C. Scott laments that “they don’t talk to me” as his voice gets cut off and cut up for its coolest sounds. I like this trend less and less.
[4]

Will Adams: Flat UK house that’s gone in under two and a half minutes: I hear right through this.
[4]

Anthony Easton: This seems pretty standard: social isolation in the lyrics and a communitarian aesthetic with the handclaps and the boshy bedrock. It’s not obnoxious, but not much to love either. 
[5]