Friday, July 1st, 2011

Alexandra Stan – Mr Saxobeat

Still not as good as this.


[Video][Website]
[5.20]

W.B. Swygart: Alexandra Stan is going to mash your face into pulp and sell it to Burger King. You are going to find it surprisingly difficult to care about this.
[5]

B Michael Payne: Hah, what is this? This sounds like Wesley Willis making “dance” music.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: The value of implacable rubber earworm Europop is always underestimated — and not just by critics. Ask the general population what they think of “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” or “Dragostea Din Tei” and you’ll get the kind of generalized loathing that makes you wonder how they ever got popular in the first place. Me, I’m just waiting for the Pitbull remix that will make me fall in love with it all over again.
[6]

Michaela Drapes: Everything you need to know about why this song is incredible is that it’s charted nearly everywhere in the world in a big way, but hasn’t rated an appearance in the Billboard Hot 100. BTW, if that sax noodle doesn’t make an appearance on every DJ set in the universe for the next two years (I’ll even suffer it used ironically!), I’m going to be extremely disappointed.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: Taken in the context of 2011, where sax breaks are currently the hottest thing, “Mr Saxobeat” is a charming little novelty. But if you’ve spent most of your life devouring tasty European dance pop, it comes across as rather less impressive; it’s better as a novelty out of the blue and into the charts than it is as a quality example of dance-pop. Also, every time that male “yeah” pops into the mix, I keep fearing it’s going to turn into an Enrique Iglesias guest verse.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Forget Alexandra — I want a remix where the guy sighs out a beat for three minutes.
[6]

Hazel Robinson: The video for this seems to have Alexandra and her girl gang being arrested for including that terrible, sex-up-against-an-abandoned-Woolworths “aw yeah yeah yeah yeah aw aw yeah” male sample in this otherwise pretty great Euro-filter piece. Unfortunately, it takes very little to break the spell on something whose constituent parts are so loosely chucked together.
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: Stupid and cheerful, just like the turn-of-the-’90s pop-house it recalls. Who said perma-retro was the sole province of the hip?
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: A title like this and a horn part like that deserve to be used in service of “Doop“-grade silliness, but Alexandra Stan just sounds so serious about it all.
[4]

Zach Lyon: Middle school sax players must feel pretty good about themselves right now.
[5]

2 Responses to “Alexandra Stan – Mr Saxobeat”

  1. Who is this guy, anyway? The Internet doesn’t know. I swear he’s Andreas Harde, except there’s no way he’s Andreas Harde because Andreas Harde hasn’t done shit (that I’ve heard of) for years. I guess he would have a Romanian connection though.

  2. It only occurred to me upon clicking that link that this could be about “man who makes music with saxophone” rather than “man who listens to music too loudly while driving a Citroen Saxo”.

    (“about”)