The Singles Jukebox

Revisiting some high scorers, to somewhat lessened returns…

[Video]
[5.14]

Kylo Nocom: Keyboard Fantasies stretched out into cinematic terror. Brief moments define the song: the introduction of a sax for a second, the duo’s upper registers harmonizing beautifully near the end as they devastatingly call out “she is an accident.” Then it fades out: a journey that does not climax but rather dissolves and dissipates at its most beautiful.
[7]

Alfred Soto: So winsome that it dissolves into a cloud of lavender ether. 
[4]

Hazel Southwell: I really wanted to like this because melodramatic, icy, arch goth electro is absolutely my sort of bullshit, but by halfway through all I could think was “The Knife have tunes, is the thing.” By the end I wanted to add “and a sense of rhythm.”
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: In my least charitable moods, parts of The Practice of Love — which I like, at least in theory — kind of remind me of that ’90s Vanessa Daou album (which I purchased once and own), except taken seriously. This is the part that kind of reminds me of Ladytron circa Gravity the Seducer. Which is to say: “Accident” is languid and elliptical, and too determined not to be embarrassing, not to succumb to the cliches of The Synthpop Album Turn, to allow itself a chorus or a build. I suppose “Girls on the TV” was like that too, but I can’t really compare the two, since I can barely tell Laura Jean is here.
[5]

Iain Mew: The lyrics go between elliptical and very direct in the effective way that Jenny Hval often has. More so than other things I’ve heard from her, though, the music shuffles somewhere between the two, and makes everything feel smaller and more uneventful than it would if it took a leap further into beauty or confrontation. 
[5]

Michael Hong: The arpeggiating synths start somewhere mysterious and intriguing, but grow stale as the track reveals its only tricks to be mechanical roars and adding growing layers of distorted fuzz. Hval and Jean’s intertwining murmurs might be therapeutic, but become less captivating and much more isolating as they move in the third verse from the concrete toward the abstract.
[5]

Ian Mathers: In much the same way that some of us go back and forth about wanting to have kids (something that can be distressing when unresolved for us cis males, but also less fraught in our case than in most others, admittedly) the disjointed, powerful busy-ness of parts of “Accident” can both play as an effective channeling of complexity and sometimes strife and somehow not land at all. Sometimes within minutes of each other, sometimes all at the same time. Music for people who only partly understand why they feel like jumping out of their own skin sometimes, maybe.
[7]