The Singles Jukebox

We begin in Indonesia…

[Video]
[6.50]

Jonathan Bradley: I don’t know much about Cita Citata, and if the Internet has information about her not written in her native Indonesian, it’s eluded me. I do know she launched her career from appearances in a local soap opera and has landed a number of songs in a local chart that seems otherwise filled with treacly ballads. “Goyang Dumang” is not a treacly ballad, but rather a dance tune possessed with the steely determination to fill nightclubs and move bodies of underground ’90s dance hits. Rather than hearkening back to electronic music’s more chart-friendly ambassadors of the era, as the recent house revival has, “Goyang Dumang” sounds like the sort of thing I used to encounter when local radio played DJ mixes long after midnight. An endless trance beat unfurls, the way endless trance beats do, and a suitably perfunctory English-language sample punches in periodically to announce the next movement. Citata weaves away over this, not a diva but a confidant, dancing with you while the bass pulses.
[8]

Alfred Soto: A perfervid mix of nineties 808s and beat callouts, and Italo disco lushness — the track burbles. Citata’s vocal is a tad coy though, as if trying to find usable space amid the influences.
[6]

Mo Kim: Cita Citata emotes longing well, but her voice is light enough to float on top of the break-beat rhythms and Tonka toy synths. There is a playful quality to “Goyang Dumang” that I admire, even if the end result sounds like a cut off a twelve-year-old kid’s Newgrounds playlist.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: I was half expecting the Dance Dance Revolution sound effects to start cheering me on. It’s entirely serviceable, but not all that exciting, and the weaker bits aren’t really forgivable.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: There’s an excitement here, of artists wanting to plug in as much as they can into a short amount of time. Yet Cita Citata is also smart enough to not overdo it, making sure the screeching EDM bit never dissolves into pure chaos. This still somehow feels way longer than just-under-three-minutes, but it plays out really nicely. 
[6]

Dorian Sinclair: According to Indonesian Wikipedia editors, Cita Citata makes dangdut music. Now, I don’t know anything about Indonesian genre music and I can’t evaluate this song on those grounds. What I can tell you, though, is that the vocal has a ton of personality, the backing track is absurdly fun (albeit pretty retro, but I am more than okay with that), and the combined effect has served to at least temporarily jolt me out of a multi-day major depressive episode. If you don’t think that’s enough to warrant a [9] I think you’re underestimating my depressive episodes.
[9]

Madeleine Lee: Cita Citata is fine as a techno house vocalist, lithe rather than brassy, which works with the curling chorus melody. The production is so flat it sounds like its own karaoke instrumental.
[5]

Brad Shoup: There’s the feeling of a megamix played in a particularly receptive Sixth Street bar: Citata’s precise vocal, which ascends and never quite looks down; the nostalgic deployment of the T. La Rock sample; the very Vengaboys fingerprints all over this joint. In the end, it’s many things to many people; I wonder what it exactly is to the balladeer holding it all together.
[6]