The Singles Jukebox

What, me worry?

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[3.33]Edward Okulicz: McCreery sings this bleached-sterile chorus with such a lack of desire or desperation that I can only conclude his character in this song is psychotic or unable to feel. Actually, it’s not just bleached, it’s like the backing has been boiled until there’s no flavour at all in those guitars.
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Alfred Soto: Let’s assume Scotty’s weird enough to get hot by calling a girl’s home phone. Who over twenty has a home phone unless (a) she lives at home (b) you’re Alfred Soto (c) she’s a girl. No reason to listen closely to this jangle-pop trifle though.
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Brad Shoup: I think the doubled phrases were still placeholders when the buzzer sounded. This thing smells fresh from the factory, rote linking solo, the mix’s post-solo dropout, drum track and all. If he keeps singing this crap I don’t see how we can still say he’s got a good voice.
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Anthony Easton: When Josh Turner (who has provided a kind of mentoring role to McCreery) manages this neat trick where really vanilla sex is profoundly erotic, and work isn’t quite about sex, it has an element of intimate tenderness so that it might as well be about sex. Thinking about McCreery — this might have been a fuck anthem, but it’s not delivered — he becomes the anti-Turner. It might be that he has “a couple of hundred” photos of this woman’s face, but in a selfie/Instagram/Twitter/long distance relationship, how many photos does he have of her body? How many photos has he sent her? That is just one example where he seems too old fashioned, that he might be pulling his punches. The idea of a phone instead of texting or tweeting, or how he says “I need to see you tonight” but then says, “I hope that’s all right,” or how he talks about her as sweet or pretty, or how he sings, “Girl, I got to see you tonight” with the ardor of a baptist ice cream social, or when he says that there is only one thing to do, and then he rhymes it with, “Baby I’m missing you,” instead of describing what he is missing, or that the only place that he mentions touch is when they hug “under that porch light”. The problem may be McCreery. The guitars ebb and flow like heavy breathing, the places where they rest is almost corporeal, the production is cleverly constructed; but there has to be a middle ground between the bro-countries blaze of macho aggression and the gelded gentility of something like this.
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Will Adams: It’s all fun and games until: “I got a couple hundred pictures of your pretty face/On the dash, all over the place.” Damn. If Scotty had performed with a modicum of character this would have been mortifying. As it stands, it’s merely creepy.
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David Lee: #Lifehack: obey restraining orders.
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