The Singles Jukebox

Alt-rock song from 2011 breaks through in 2013, produces this Wikipedia sentence: “Bruno was asked in an interview by the Red Bull Company if the complex lyrics were about suicide.”

[Video][Website]
[5.36]

Brad Shoup: Aaron Bruno’s been evincing pop wizardry since he wore Under the Influence of Giants’ banner. Dance-punk was message-free mush, so he brokered a deal with bygone big-label synthrock. It was hooky comfort food, a contained gloom from goofy haircuts, with a couple would-be major singles attesting to his ambition. A bit of reconfiguration got us to AWOLNATION; Bruno’s still dangling hooks, but they serve songs that are more modern rock than Todd Rundgren. And he’s still a careless lyricist, but so are a lot of studio rats. The important thing is the words don’t get in the way, and “sail” doesn’t — astride that choppy synth riff, it’s the captain’s command, loathsome and debauched. It’s harder to get a grip on “blame it on my ADD.” It startles (especially when delivered with a soul showman’s panache), but it’s all flash. Of course, so is the “la la la” bit and those ghostly coos, but a composer showing off is more palatable than a lyricist doing the same. There are times when this sounds like an inverted Elliott Smith: seething anger and dependency erupting through the pores, plus that honky-tonk tinkle.
[8]

Jer Fairall: Overmedicated crybabies make pulseless electro-grunge. Thanks a lot, the ’90s!
[1]

Andrew Casillas: Bonus points for the raw vocal, but everything else is complete nonsense. Is the bass supposed to be mixed so shitty that I can’t make out the words? Why do the backup singers sound so sad? I just read this hit the Billboard Top 20 meaning this song is popular. What the hell?
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: It’s strange what people latch onto sometimes. In a mainstream lacking in aggression for quite a while — unless you count assailing bosh — this is a massive anomaly. It’s not that anomalies are new, it’s just that normally they’re fairly explicable. With “Sail” it’s hard to see the mass appeal. You can sing “Cold As Ice” over the top, but that’s about it; its uneasy (and unenjoyable) mix of harsh and disjointed not something typically tagged accessible. Would the chart be full of this stuff if people had more of an opportunity to come across it?
[4]

Crystal Leww: Blame Imagine Dragons; this thick-voiced male vocal style, all too serious and melodramatic in the worst of ways, is back in fashion. A fan video starring two girls making funny faces helped this chart, but unlike Shawna Howson, I suspect that many new fans of “Sail” take the song and the melodrama 100% seriously, using “Sail” to soundtrack their YouTube compilations of their favorite sports teams or their frat house beer pong tournaments. Yikes.
[3]

Will Adams: It’s cool to see a song catch on to the extent “Sail” has while sounding unique — “Sail” takes a dizzying, buzzing backdrop and piles on several clashing elements (Choirs! Pizzicato strings! Saloon piano! Screeching!) to bracing effect. Too bad it’s helmed by someone who doesn’t really care about lyrics. Blame it on his ADD, I guess, or blame it on those too smitten with the instrumental to notice.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: “Blame it on my ADD, baby” is hella rock star swagger, and Aaron Bruno finds exactly the scuzzed-up preset through which to filter his voice to make it not sound ridiculous. Bit more ADD might help, actually; when Bruno’s silent, “Sail” tends to drift.
[5]

Andy Hutchins: The best music is the kind that expertly manages the space it will occupy, or vacate. Most songs that impact top 40 radio in 2013 handle space by filling it fully: Soft-loud-soft structures become LOUD-soft-LOUD-soft structures with whirring, doodad-and-whatzit synths, or with tectonic drums. A half-decade of electronic- and EDM-pop has trained listeners to wait for beat drops and savor buildups. “Sail” is a middle finger to a lot of that. It begins with plinks, layers on sizzling error codes of guitar and plodding claps, and adds little else but lead singer Aaron Bruno’s strained, distant vocals until the second verse, when cymbals lead into rising guitar. And then that leads into one of the most surreal things on radio this year: a keyboard-based bridge with “La la la la la, la la la la la, oh” as the only words. This is an almost delicate rock song, or a muscular pop song, and either way, it stands in stark contrast to anything else one would typically hear on the dials, which made it perfect for YouTube highlight compilations and ads for shows about sailing civilizations and one of the better viral videos of 2012 (I wonder if “Sail” might have been a top 10 hit if Billboard had made its streaming changes early last year) as a collection of neat, strange — SAIL! — sonics. The lyrics are an inchoate mess, but the feeling is not, and the care with which the music was made shows.
[9]

Alfred Soto: If only Aaron Bruno didn’t heave as if the ginormous distorted synth riff and pizzicato rested on his shoulders.
[3]

Frank Kogan: The electrobeats are plinks that have an orchestral reach despite their plinkiness, and there’s a big boulder of a hum that the poor singer keeps trying unsuccessfully to climb — he ends up repeating the word “sail” as if he’s just another plink, though the most poignant.
[8]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The key to “Sail” is in those creepy pizzicato rave stabs that open the song. Instead of showing off a frantic energy, Aaron Bruno allows the beat to evaporate, its icy allure to distill, the tempo to creep into slow-motion. For a former savant of electro-indie angst, perhaps the allure is in using the language of dance music for the use of dirges, turning a club-bound bad trip into life-encompassing drama. It’s smart songwriting.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Critics ignore radio rock more and more, but “Sail” could use the coverage; it’s so fascinating. It’s simultaneously grating as hell — the most offputting sound of any 2013(ish) song may well be Aaron Bruno’s Interrupting SAIL, like a chain-smoking error message — but cluttered with too many extraneous drum fills and creepy toy-piano bridges to keep grating and too many coos and drifting chords to be aggro. And it makes sense in context — Alex Clare’s context — and it’s been adopted as eagerly by reality TV, film trailers and ad syncs as Anna Kendrick. Weird! Being a sleeper hit, “Sail” has accumulated its rote covers, but they’re weird too. Macy Gray’s version is unexpectedly apt as a distaff counterpart: prettifying oboe, strings and sonar pings, a cod-DnB breakdown for some reason, then Macy’s voice scrunching like a seam in the wash. A “Sail” cover was also Dev’s first song in ages; her version is faithful but distant, pop coos and whispers with no there there, which unsettles in its own way. When fun. and Carly Rae and Gotye broke out of nowhere last year, the hope was that they’d begun an era of bizarre charting shit. Which, well, happened to excess; but that the delicate screech and post-grunge testosterone of a band on Red Bull’s label was a highlight might be the weirdest thing of all.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: There is some alternate timeline where this song doesn’t need TV placements two years after its release to become popular, where it racks up views from the get go and guarantees that Imagine Dragons won’t ever become a thing. In this universe, “Sail” beats everything to the punch of merging brostep with rock, except instead of platitudes piled on loud noises it shines because it blends pirate sea-shanty shuffle against vocal growls that sound deeply personal. It still isn’t a great look, but sloppy trumps boring “epicness” any day.
[6]

Zach Lyon: About as predictable as a Modern Rock megahit modeled on the OH in “I Luv the Valley OH” could get, which is to say: the lyrics are pretty simple. Easy to highlight “BLAME IT ON MY ADD” when you embed it in vague Muse castoff lines, easy to highlight “MAYBE I SHOULD KILL MYSELF” with that ever-important drum fill — ugh. Still, the sounds are dynamic, it shines on the radio, and it doesn’t have any lines like “my behind is a beehive.” Good for you, young rock fans.
[6]