The Singles Jukebox

Not a Giorgio Moroder cover. No, we’re never going to get sick of that joke.

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[6.00]

Alfred Soto: Not seeing Dev Hynes in the credits surprised me; the track’s got his use of humid electronic space, massed vocals, and block synth lines. As a singer Sparks is OK, too cool for school in the Ciara tradition. But this has bounce.
[6]

W.B. Swygart: The plot: Jordin and lover have sex so ridiculously that their fellow hotel guests have them ejected from the premises; however, fuelled by sex, Jordin and lover then proceed to have sex in a car in full view of some police officers. Epilogue: Jordin Sparks declares she will sex ridiculously in hotels again, because the bit where they get kicked out? That’s the best bit. It says something for her performance that the song’s ridiculousness takes a few listens to fully reveal itself; the Ciara-esque atmospherics help some, too.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: This is the most insanely sexy single I’ve heard in months, maybe all year. Key is the fact that Sparks is channeling Aaliyah so hard I can barely believe it isn’t her. She coos, she flirts, she climbs into your lap like Prince on “Do Me Baby.” Additionally, Dem Jointz’s production is superlative; it’s been far too long since that slamming-car-door effect, used so expertly by the Neptunes in the Clipse’s “Grindin’,” has been, well, used so expertly.
[10]

Brad Shoup: The dancehall intro is a Trojan horse; something this playfully melodic should’ve been able to state its own case. As it stands, it sounds a little like the mixtape cut it started as: the remarkable bridge, with its striking vocal intervals, gets a sloppy transition to the chorus via a windup string section. But that’s not really a quibble: Sparks fully inhabits the lusher stretches of the production, which are beautiful.
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: Thankfully, Jordin is sorta/kinda getting better at trying to navigate R&B as her new home. The production is fascinatingly restless, always predictable but at times seeming to slow down and speed up in a hallucinatory fit. But while these verses are so poorly constructed they might make better sense stammered, and while the chorus is a bit too disposable, Jordin’s vocal approach is getting a bit more natural. Maybe this will work one of these days.
[2]

David Sheffieck: The production and vocal barely seem to exist in the same song, one pulsing and frenetic, the other gliding like a skater; they’re interesting separately, but less than the sum of their parts. Where Sparks really trips up, though, is the chorus. It glides into and out of the mind without leaving a trace — it’s not here, and it’s certainly not now.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: A promising underwater beat, love in one of those sensory-deprivation pods, undermined by the lack of a chorus.
[6]

Will Adams: Cluttered and rushed, “Right Here Right Now” stumbles pretty quickly out of the gate, not least because Sparks’ smooth delivery clashes with the pulsing beat. The not-really-a-chorus recalls Aaliyah but barely has any time to get on its feet before the next verse, and suddenly the song is already over.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: Hamstrung by being almost done and dusted by the close of the first minute. Sparks is looking for a payoff, empirical substance to her internal certainty, and while it’s clear that it’s not coming in the duration of the song, that doesn’t mean it has to be so one-note, dreamlike backing vocals or not. It’s a vignette, but one with all the form’s potential untapped.
[6]