The Singles Jukebox

The Jukebox writes its application for Beats Music curator…

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[6.50]

Josh Langhoff: Google Translate and YouTube keep writing me a Harlequin novella with this lyric, something about beautiful breezes from lips and skin awakening desire in a wine cellar. Only while bad things sometimes happen in Harlequins — people hide dark secrets from one another or succumb to wine cask avalanches — songwriter Horacio Palencia seems to allow himself just the one feeling per song. (Explaining “Ya Es Muy Tarde,” his 2009 weeper for Arrolladora, Palencia told Billboard, “The majority of my songs are about love, so I said, ‘I’m going to try to do something about lack of love, and I’ll see how it turns out.'”) The romantic excitement in “Hermosa Experiencia” lies in the tug of giddily harmonized vocals against tightly choreographed horns, not in its words alone — not even in itself alone. The song’s vocal-horn tension amplifies and shades all the other Crayola tales of love and woe that surround it, on both 95.5 El Patrón and my iPod. It pops. As Neil Young and Joshua Clover have suggested in somewhat different contexts, it’s all one song.
[8]

Megan Harrington: This is “You Make Loving Fun” painted with primary colors instead of pastels. The trumpets go a long way in erasing the syrupy sweetness, but it’s still horn tooting. Solid first dance music, secretly alabaster first drink music. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Terrific wedding music, and if you listen to the lyrics terrific wedding bed music too. 
[6]

Madeleine Lee: Good idea: serenading your lover with a ballad of devotion you’ve written for them, with your banda buddies backing you up. Bad idea: putting your drum kit outside to make room for everyone, because some kids are going to roll it down the hill and then every time you open the door when you’re not singing all you hear is the crashing.
[5]

Brad Shoup: The swing and urgency of the verses would seem to belong at the end, like a closing montage. But its own close can’t muster the swoon of a (translated) phrase like “stay engraved in me”.
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Anthony Easton: I was wondering why the music in this was so overwhelmingly joyful (it’s mostly the horns, but oh, the horns!) and realized that they had overlain an American pop sensibility over the traditional polka and waltzes. This is how music evolves.
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