The Singles Jukebox

We built this city on Cobra Starship…

[Video][Website]
[5.11]

Pete Baran: We’re in Cobra Starship territory, where hubris and clubability vie with traditional song dynamics. The needle fades and vocoder is heading straight to the eighties disco, but once the song reveals its middle eight, trad song dynamics win out. Its probably thirty seconds too long, but I’ll take that right now — just for its triumphant video game coda.
[8]

Michaela Drapes: Brilliant or utterly terrible. Today, brilliant wins. Ask me again tomorrow, I might give this a [2] instead. As an aside, I feel the need to rep for my bros Captain Ahab — who were doing this schtick in a much more delightfully repugnant way nearly 10 years ago. Cobra Starship, 3OH!3 and Breathe Carolina owe them more than a six pack, that’s for sure.
[8]

Brad Shoup: These dudes, and the subliminal disco of the chorus and bridge particularly, remind me of Under the Influence of Giants, 2006’s surprise bright spot that forwarded its frontman to AWOLNATION. It skips, it flutters, it has a series of absence seizures: you know that it’ll end, but not how.
[8]

Alex Ostroff: Their music videos make me feel the way Brad feels about Marianas Trench songs. “This won’t stop ’til I say so” and “I can’t see your face” don’t mean what they could, but the tone is menacing and creepy, and end up cringing just as much regardless. It’s like 3OH!3 without the tasteless humour. Not even Ke$ha could redeem this.
[2]

Anthony Easton: 3OH!3 had a cleverness and a pretty profound respect for their own unstable masculinities — even at their most libertine, they were never sure what it meant to be a man and whether they earned the privilege they sang about. The leer and the ironic wink functioned as a kind of leavening agent. This track combines the electro-party and the rock and roll aesthetic, and so you think about it in the same genre as 3OH!3 (emco or dismo, maybe), but you realise they haven’t earned the malice. They are not only not really sorry, but not proud of not being sorry.
[3]

Alfred Soto: When a small group of us fights thousands of Orcs decrying the state of top 40 radio, this is what our enemies think we’re defending: Daft Punk versus something or other.
[2]

Iain Mew: So, after brostep, I think we can coin another genre here. Electrobro? Elecbropop?
[4]

John Seroff: This quietly wormed its way into my heart over the protestations of my forebrain. I blame it on the oddly halting stutter of both the vocal cadence and the synths and how all is cleanly resolved minute after minute.  “Black Out” proves smarter than it appears and never overstays its welcome. Great stuff for folk what prefer their electropop less LMFAO and more Hot Chip.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: You know that moment when you emerge from a blackout, forehead seething and clothes streaked with scum? Of course not. We’re all responsible here. But nevertheless, Breathe Carolina has stretched that feeling into an entire song!
[3]