The Singles Jukebox

Indie pop singer and production duo (not pictured) respectively makes her Jukebox debut and returns with significantly less creepy lyrical content!!

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[6.00]

Will Adams: Things to be grateful for today: CamelPhat putting out a song that isn’t horrifying to listen to; Au/Ra retaining lead billing, which these days sadly feels like a rare win; this remix, which adds some needed cachet to the genre of grooving, deep trance along the lines of Yotto or Cubicolor, even if it’s a slightly less memorable example.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: This is a solid example of what, in the ’90s, we called “big room” music: something meant to reverberate in a packed club and turn it up to 10. And yet there’s no drop! CamelPhat’s remix shoves Au/Ra onto the dancefloor and makes it work. A little trancey, a little housey.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: While Au/Ra provides the core of this — a vaguely drawn but evocatively sung horror story where the object of fear is the singer’s own anxiety — it’s the remix that elevates “Panic Room,” using skittering hi-hats and synth arpeggios to rescue the song from its sub-Halsey original track. It was too maudlin there (and in the obligatory guitar-and-strings acoustic version), but here, Au/Ra’s vocal performance gains a much needed urgency which provides enough adrenaline to forget a lyric that traffics heavily in cliche.
[7]

Stephen Eisermann: One of the few house tracks I’ve heard where the production works with the lyrics, rather than drowns them out. The noisy production fits with the anxiety ridden theme and by the end you simultaneously want to jump, dance harder, take deep breaths, and openly sob because it is all just too much.
[7]

Ramzi Awn: The production doesn’t do Au/Ra any favors on “Panic Room.” The tune hits its stride in the second verse, but unfortunately, it’s too little too late.  
[4]

Iain Mew: CamelPhat’s remix has an effective energy, but it’s more pulse-racing excitement than pulse-racing terror, which sits a little oddly with Au/Ra’s existing song. The two feelings mix easily enough, but end up somewhere celebratory enough to lose the potential for the horror to be much more than schlock subordinate to movement.
[6]

Will Rivitz: “Panic Room” seems a misnomer for this CamelPhat remix. A “panic room” implies a sudden shift in mental state, a flip into hysteria and terror; this track, breezy, weightless, and serene in its normalcy, would cause absolutely no change in whatever environment into which it might be introduced. It’s the ideal music to be piped into Zara or H&M, which constitute “panic rooms” only inasmuch as I tend to have a minor panic attack every time I see my receipt after checkout, but that’s my own damn fault, not the music’s. 
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