The Singles Jukebox

Enjoying success with Major Lazer, not so much with punnery…

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[6.00]

Iain Mew: Tinie Tempah, come in! Your time as the leader of the Most Thudding Pun League 2016 is over! (And Mumbai was officially renamed eight years earlier still than the Rolos slogan was dropped.) In this case though, that outsized chorus is the way to bring together a bunch of segments and collaborators that seem to come from completely different songs, and it works just well enough in a brute force kind of way to let by.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: A multinational, multicultural collaboration with grounding in Britain: what better song for the day Theresa May becomes the country’s leader? The broad strokes in which Fuse ODG has always painted don’t actually extend to the place — never closer than the potential colonial connotations of the title — but they are broad regardless. It’s better left to people who have a stake in them to judge those, but what’s most notable elsewhere is that this lacks the insistent hooks of its lead artist’s best work.
[5]

Cassy Gress: My primary issue with this became clear in the third verse: by and large, the sound of this is very intimate, a little murmury, like seduction alone in the back room of the club. And it would be fine if that was the point, but every time Fuse ODG comes in, he’s busting in all loud on the dancefloor, and I can just see Zack Knight and Badshah cringing. “Madarchod, I’m working here!”
[5]

Katie Gill: “Bombae”, aside from being a hilariously bad pun, is a song with generic “back that ass up for me” lyrics. It’s a good thing that the rest of the song is much better. The Indian/African stylings as well as Badsha’s verse and Fuse ODG’s ridiculous brapapapap are just pure FUN.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Love the verses, light and summery and skittering and peppered with nonsense lyrics. And by that I’m referring to the bits which are in English. The canned horn fanfare over the chorus is delicious but it takes the frisky beat and puts a few too many tinny murmurrings over it, like one of the tracks in the mixer was inserted at double the sample rate. Away from that, Badshah’s verse is the brightest, euphonious words and his breathily excited voice.
[7]

Brad Shoup: There’s not much separating this from filmi. Fuse ODG and the extensive use of English, I guess. It’s corny — loose with the signifiers, but not hammy about it, because the spare, minor-key production does more than enough cross-cultural work.
[6]