The Singles Jukebox

The anxiety of influence.

[Video][Website]
[5.67]

Edward Okulicz: Having had most of the best bits of her schtick sanded down and neutered by other artists (cough, Katy Perry), Martina Sorbara has decided Fuck It I’m Gonna Be Pat Benatar. Imagining this on the radio in the 80s linking arms with Benatar’s radio pop period highlights, or maybe Culture Club and Bow Wow Wow, is heavenly. The way the emphasis on “heart” in the chorus isn’t where and how you expect it to be is perfect. It’s dropping at the complete wrong time in the northern hemisphere because this would be a quality summer jam. No matter, it’s spring in the southern hemisphere and it works for me.
[8]

Peter Ryan: If Bodyparts’ failure to produce a hit definitively let any remaining air out of their hype balloon, it also solidified Dragonette’s status as a commercially-ignored cult electropop act. Four years later, CRJ has summarily recast the mold for the commercially-ignored cult electropop artist; meanwhile, Martina Sorbara has passed the time drip-feeding us a full album’s worth of pretty-good mostly-EDM collaborations with producers who aren’t Dan Kurtz — makes sense, given that their only hits have been one-offs in this vein. Summer 2015 brought a proper Dragonette single with no sign of further content; fall 2016 brings news that although Sorbara and Kurtz separated romantically, their creative partnership persists and the album is on its way. So it makes sense that “Lonely Heart” seems perched atop the tipping point between laughter and tears, just barely papering over the pain in all the usual ways. This could easily be a check-in with the character Sorbara introduced 10 years ago in “I Get Around” — coated in a cheeky high-gloss lacquer and indefatigable as ever, hyper-aware of her own habits, really no worse for the wear but with an extra sense of having been through it all before. The guitars are shoved way to the back, overshadowed by drunken synth droplets, all in service of a lockstep cowbell-bolstered electro-reggae groove that brims with their typical consummate professionalism. I’m not sure where this leaves them, still furiously pounding away at Big Pop while simultaneously playing to an ever more niche audience. Stanning for Dragonette in 2016 is a bit of a pointless exercise, I know, but I’m just glad that they’re back and churning out bops like this like it’s nothing, which it definitely isn’t.
[8]

Ryo Miyauchi: Can’t help but to think how much further some other pop artists have already taken what Dragonette gets at here. Charli XCX let that “love sucks!” call out amplify through a dozen more megaphones. Tove Lo warped that misery of being repeatedly dumped into something more reckless and sinister. That said, I can get behind the casual “eh, fuck it” vibe they take for this anti-love pop as it seems like an approach more unique to them.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The chorus mixes a light skank with cheerleader chants like Charli XCX taught us to like in 2013.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: Do you like twee reggae-tinged synthpop? I don’t.
[1]

Iain Mew: “Lonely Heart” sounds like big pop in a recent Tegan and Sara or 1989 mode but with everything a bit softened, deflated even, and no space left to resonate in. As a listening experience it doesn’t always work, but as a fit to singing about being beat and wrecked and still carrying on it couldn’t go better. 
[6]