The Singles Jukebox

Yeah, I’d love a tonic, thanks.

[Video][Website]
[6.50]

Will Adams: Three nights in a row this week, I had nightmares so bad I couldn’t fall back asleep for at least a half hour after awaking in the early hours. “Quinine” illuminates the deep-seated fear I hold that there is something within me that makes me fundamentally unable to escape such terrifying thoughts, but it gives me calm in that I’m not the only one.
[8]

Iain Mew: “Qunine” tosses and turns like someone trying to throw off its unhappy dreams, slipping from section to section in a haze with its next direction never clear. It’s compelling but not great until its frantic finale that reveals its ultimate destiny as a dark mirror to the stomp of Dumblonde’s “Dreamsicle.”
[7]

Alfred Soto: Like Mitski and some of Sky Ferreira’s efforts, “Quinine” keeps its head while all around it everyone loses theirs; during other moments it drifts into the kind of demo into which one of the Knowles sisters would’ve breathed life.
[6]

William John: Even a radiant voice would struggle to elevate a beat so drab and plodding, and Dessa’s uncompelling turn here only multiplies the anaesthesia.
[2]

Edward Okulicz: I like lyrics, but I generally react more viscerally to sounds. Here, though, there a couple of little lyrical snippets that stand out as particularly vivid and interesting in a song that is melodically a bit bland: “we were hand to glove to cuff,” in particular suggests a kind of snug but uncomfortable tightness of fit. The atmosphere is terrific, and Dessa’s a transparent emoter and good lyricist, but the song doesn’t grab where it needs to close the deal — “nothing stops the dreams” and “still holding on” read as, and are sung as, cliches. It’s compelling, but in my mind the finished verison of the song this is a draft for is a 9 or a 10 and that makes me feel a bit frustrated.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: I stopped writing down my dreams in 2015. Nothing good happens there, and everything I want. In 2008 it happened by a conference table; I luged, supine into traffic. 2009, a New Orleans hotel: I lost him in a masquerade ball, died, and scraped trash forever in the afterlife. I lost him at a skyscraper at the Atlantic/Pacific station in June 2012, a too-tall shadow; a rendezvous at the same nonexistent skyscraper in October, where my hands bled out at the lifelines. I’ve been lounged with in garages, rhapsodized about over emails, commemorated, bitterly, in a Facebook event attended by half my friends. A morning-after walk down eighty flights of stairs with glass walls. A 3 a.m. Amtrak stop in a navy sweater dress, skulking around the maintenance sites. Hands touching, after some time’s silence, across a card table. Paired off in some ritual tango. A museum in Atlanta exhibiting all my secrets, which I fail to shut down in time. A room full of staircases and escalators — it’s in Chapel Hill, by Lenoir — that you must ascend, in public, among acquaintances, if the humiliating romantic thing engraved above ever happened to you. The final staircase is long and narrow: “I’m worried. He’s just fine.”
[9]