Underwhelmed…

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Hannah Jocelyn: BANKS’s music has everything I’d want in electropop — minimalist beats, up-close melodies and a mix that treats the stereo field as its plaything. Yet songs like this fail to connect when they remain this static, both production-wise and melodically. (Yes, I heard the “rah.”) At best, it’s the kind of song I would find interesting enough to Shazam at a clothing store, forgetting that I’d already Shazamed the same song at another place the week before.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Flat bassline, empty singing from a surprisingly absent BANKS, a grating arp synth and an equally annoying synth chord.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The affected coquettish coo is an irritant, despite her diffidence about her lover treating her as an object. A cluttered production buries WTF lines like “Your kisses are like gluttony,” which, given BANKS’s blankness, is probably celery arranged on a plate to look like gluttony.
[4]

Stephen Eisermann: Aggressive synths, intriguing vocal tics, and sultry lyrics built on a unique premise make for a pretty terrific pop song. BANKS is at her best when she is most playful, and this is no exception.
[7]

Eleanor Graham: Most of this chorus is unintelligible and doesn’t get any less so when you know the lyrics (“you know I like it in the bath when it’s bubbly” …anyone?) but it does have tremendous swagger. BANKS’s speciality is intimate, perkily delivered menace. She’s a lover and a brawler. The contrasting invitations of the pre-chorus and hook — “come back to heaven/back in my bed” straight into “why don’t you step to me?” — are a manifesto. She’s not afraid to beg. It’s also entirely believable that she would also take an unsmiling satisfaction in taking someone out. “Poltergeist,” for example, is the sound of her plotting. On “Underdog,” you can practically hear the samurai swords flashing.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Nothing feels more like a greater weapon of the current age than dignity. Not only our own senses of dignity we maintain with constant vigilance, but what we deem more or less undignified in the world. It’s not hard to find anything that could suit that sense in the idea of the choosy consumer of media where inevitably something can be given the ol’ *glance down the bridge of one’s nose and over their glasses* treatment. Pop feels a particular battleground of dignity, where so many artists are appraised based on who likes them, how much they grant someone a sense of impression. Can you imagine liking something say, a *excluded qualifier* could possibly enjoy? Couldn’t be me… And so BANKS is one of those weird artists I always tilt my head at. On the one hand, her blend of R&B and pop isn’t that far removed from some of the more clear-headed material of Tinashe. Yet on another it could also be considered what Jessie Ware would sound like with an impetuous streak. The babyish coo and snarl on “Underdog” are deliberately playful and demonstrate that, for all her tasteful electro-dance production (a sound that for many implies “real consideration” and not just boring complacency), she’s trying to shirk the stoicism and boldness of a certain thread of critically adored but publicly ignored pop while being a bit too sinewy for the Big Bold World of Commercial Sensibility for the current age. “Underdog” isn’t going to change anything, but it’s the happy admission of that moment of pure foolishness that endears her to me for a moment, knowing it’s become hard for so many to appreciate the occasional relief and pleasantry of the irrational.
[5]

Leah Isobel: BANKS always sounds like she’s cultivating a distance between what she’s feeling and the way she writes, produces and arranges it. “Underdog” has great individual moments — the “rah!” after her first invocation of the title, the sparkling bridge, the sneer implied in “it’d make a good story” — but it never fully comes together into a compelling whole. Artfully dislocated rage turns out to be a little less compelling than the unfiltered stuff.
[5]