Jakwob ft. Jetta – Electrify
He’s a dubstep Brit and she’s not a Volkswagen…
[Video][Website]
[6.50]
Iain Mew: My enjoyment of this does mostly come from the first thirty seconds, in which a rickety fairground ride gets invaded by alien death robots. Having done the major sudden contrast thing, it then settles into being a completely different, more subtle song. This is best illustrated when it builds up to a what seems sure to be a big noise breakdown and just drops a breakbeat instead. I quite like that song too.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: A dispatch from 2030, when they’ve laid off all the humans and smashed the instruments to build sheeny buzz machines and when “Till the World Ends” is up for its cyclical rewrite.
[7]
Michaela Drapes: This song brings a message from our robot overlords, built to destroy us all: DANCE, PUNY HUMANS, DANCE. (Related: has it really taken this long for Ratatat’s decade-old tropes to reach the mainstream?)
[5]
Brad Shoup: When the drop is gone, the substratum of bass shapes itself into an absence. Jetta spins beautiful nonsense into the sound of important decisions and high drama. (Seriously: “tonight’s the night/let’s define me”?) Then comes that sample, pouring instant false nostalgia into a fine drum’n’bass/dubstep amalgam. Wish I could place it; it sounds like a sped-up game show interstitial, or an Austrian Eurovision entry.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: I had Katy B, Emeli Sandé, and Yasmin singles on my 2011 shortlist, so on paper this should be another slam-dunk: post-dubstep soar with drum ‘n’ bass clatter, a tenderly big-voiced diva jawing vaguely inspirational choruses, elegant builds and releases. Maybe I’ve just run out of ways to like the same thing, or maybe it’s just too indistinct and formless to grab in the same way. Or maybe it’ll sneak back up on me when I make my 2012 shortlist and I’ll feel like an idiot for having scored it so low.
[6]
John Seroff: A by-the-numbers, diva-dipped exploration of brostep by way of Jonsi. If those words don’t make sense then you’re probably reading the wrong website, and if they do, I’m not sure what else I can tell you that you don’t now already know, except that this is a reasonably fun track and that I promise to never call anything “diva-dipped” again.
[6]