Wednesday, June 15th, 2016

AlunaGeorge – I Remember

You know what I remember? George Reid.


[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Taylor Alatorre: Nostalgia is fun; nostalgia can kill you. The narrator’s token resistance to the seductive power of memory is soon carried away by the cresting synths and burbling future bass rhythms as she retells her relationship in reverse order: break-up, then fighting, then intimacy, then that (retroactively) magical first encounter. The bad times are not erased but presented as mere obstacles on the way to a climax of good vibes and cozy simplicity. In the meantime, a “tiny love” is growing “bigger behind your back,” ready to pounce at your most vulnerable moment. But the song encourages the same kind of sentimental wallowing that it critiques. Nothing is stopping us from using this as a soundtrack for our own memory reels, but neither are we let off without a gentle warning.
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: Aluna captures how those neglected memories come back: in bits and pieces, in successions of short bursts during the most solitary moments. The wobbling beat hums slightly numb, but that might be by design.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The scratches and stop-start momentum suit a voice that’s growing more confident and a tune meant to summon the ineluctability of memory. I can’t dance to it, though.
[7]

Crystal Leww: When younger singers are trying to find themselves and their voices, often their musings on love and life come off as a little childish. But Aluna Francis is in her late 20s, and her songs sound like someone who has lived a little bit of life. She is a phenomenal vocalist because she manages to find emotion that goes beyond the fake-deep or the bigness that often plagues younger dance vocalists’ work. That is not to say that she is not emotional — Francis cannot help but burrow into her feelings and emote — but the way “I Remember” is wistful and sad and yet still fond of its subject is no easy feat. Credit to Flume for the production, too. I love that those vocals stutter and shit; it reminds me of how I replay a relationship, too, like a memory reel of flashing memories that repeat and rewind.
[9]

Cassy Gress: The way this sounds spliced, cut and pasted into fragments, is incredibly distracting. While Aluna Francis waxes nostalgic about a (violent?) former lover, somebody is in the control room beating things with a hammer.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Poe’s Law of Music and Internet in 2016: It is impossible to distinguish a music stream lagging on your somehow (“somehow“) slow connection from a song that just sounds like that, because that’s what stuff sounds like in 2016. “I Remember” is just a sluggish, overwritten ballad (when there’s sand in my bed I don’t think “ah, wistful lost love” or anything metaphorically close, I think “ow, there’s sand in my bed,” or maybe “how’d I wake up in a beach house?”) stirred on the plate until it resembles Purity Ring without body horror, i.e. like Purity Ring without the point of Purity Ring. At some point I hope it registers that “White Noise” and “You Know You Like It” became hits because AlunaGeorge left the hooks alone.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: What admirable restraint! I was terrified that after the gorgeous, stuttering ambiance of the intro the song would do the “okay, we know why you’re really here, here’s some overproduced tripe you’ve heard a million times before” thing, but I was pleasantly surprised. It’s got bubbling synthesizers and sliced-up reverb tails and a shy little drum machine, each doing their own thing to marvelous effect under hazy morning vocals. The incoherent, chopped vocal lead doesn’t work when it takes center stage, though, because it sounds like a compromise to appease the one guy in the studio who wouldn’t stop asking why they wouldn’t add a drop. (Okay, okay, fine, Brandon, here’s a totally extraneous melodic phrase that we’ll mix way above everything else for a few bars! Is that good enough?)
[7]

Iain Mew: There are a lot of Flume touches on “I Remember,” like its digital fluttering and especially the appearance of his favourite skipping file effect. I’ll take this over the mirror image AlunaGeorge track on his album, though, since the balance being tipped over to AlunaGeorge’s songwriting increases the effectiveness of those moments. The beautiful disruptions work perfectly as echoes of the tantalising but impossible idea of experiencing better times over again exactly as they were.
[8]

Will Adams: The beauty of “I Remember” is how it captures — through its syllable slivers, sudden flourishes, and stop-start dynamics — the way we often reminisce: not in movie scenes or novel chapters, but as single frames or flecks of broken glass or, as Aluna Francis puts it here, “grains of sand.” Everything else melts into a blur, leaving one to replay those tiny moments over and over — whether good or bad — hoping to recapture that glorious, heightened feeling.
[8]

Megan Harrington: I think mostly the memories are better than the experiences. 
[9]

Peter Ryan: Is it vague because it’s been so long that she can only just remember, the stuttered refrain a half-truth she tells herself to avoid admitting that all but the outlines of memories have faded out? Or is it all too fresh to drop specifics? Or maybe it’s that memories like this don’t lend themselves to detail — it’s just your scent/smile/face. This feels most like those things that I think I’ve forgotten — maybe it’s time or maybe I never paid close enough attention to be able to recall them at will — until I suddenly haven’t, stupid pieces of flotsam bowling me over out of nowhere, triggered by a whiff of something or the way a stranger stretches out their vowels or a sweater that looks a lot like yours. Tiny love attacks indeed.
[8]

Gin Hart: This touches so much of what it is to have and to lack, and to experience both at once. The undercover mess and the days of stasis, the apathy that’s actually ache — moving the self (and sometimes the other) over the surfaces of your bedroom, which is also time, which is also the inside of the cavern of your memory.
[8]

Juana Giaimo: I always have the feeling that AlunaGeorge would rather not risk much. But when there are so many artists right now doing what they do, it’s hard to say I’ll remember this single. 
[5]

Reader average: [7.66] (3 votes)

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