The Singles Jukebox

But Victorian art.

[Video][Website]
[5.45]

Stephen Thomas Erlewine: Teetering on a bunch of production tricks that suggest the era without ever embodying the time, “90s Music” grabbed me. Always seeming as if it’s on the verge of collapse–the melody never quite formulates, there’s never has a rhythm with a throughline–it makes mincemeat of its references, ultimately sounding like scattered forgotten memories instead of a pop song, which is perhaps is how it should be.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: ’90s nostalgia in 2014 veers between two extremes: the cheap “remember this thing?” rush of listicles and quizzes, and the desperate need to validate the importance of the decade that pops up all the time in this-thing-is-now-20-or-15-years-old articles and oral histories. Yet nostalgia is rarely that simple, usually a deeply personal affair that’s far knottier than any .GIF rundown can possibly capture. Kimbra’s “90s Music” sounds nothing like ’90s music, but rather some deep-space transmission that’s starting to break apart. Or a Dirty Projectors’ song pushed to the limits. The twisty nature of the music is the first clue this isn’t lazy looking back, and even when recites a lists of ’90s pop stars, it’s barely audible and digitally manipulated. And that’s the thing – whether this is about old love now gone or literally about ’90s music, what sticks with me is how the past isn’t static, but in flux when Kimbra encounters an old song on the radio (“it just felt different”). The sound of memories in motion, and always changing.
[9]

Anthony Easton: This doesn’t sound like 90s music, in fact it doesn’t sound like much of anything–just an idea of a xerox of a concept of a mindmap that a focus group put together, that hints at nostalgia and also at the refusal of nostalgia without fully committing to either. 
[2]

Alfred Soto: Unlike Little Mix’s “Salute,” this production changes temps, guide vocals, and rhythms like it’s hoping one will stick. Kimbra doesn’t hold it together. Neither does the title, which is evoked like a penitent before an image of St. Jude.
[3]

Will Adams: I can’t get my head around this. The sections hang together by a thread while Kimbra deploys an unflattering, witchy falsetto throughout. “90s Music” evokes neither nostalgia nor novelty, mostly confusion.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: This is WEIRD. In an awesome way. First of all, she’s right: the ’90s are the retro of the ’10s. Secondly, love that she name-checks TLC (and Left Eye specifically). The production here is so all-over-the-map, like it’s 4 or 5 different songs colliding, and I’m not sure how to describe it, exactly. The chorus could be from a Lorde record. The post-chorus (it’s not exactly a bridge, I don’t think) taken from some contempo R&B track. The bass thumps and thumps like it’s ridin’ dirty. Kimbra herself goes through about 4 different voices in the course of three-and-a-half minutes. And all of them are wonderful.
[7]

Crystal Leww: This is poptimism turned rockism, nostalgia in the way that poptimists make fun of rockists for — Kimbra holds up up some sort of hallowed standard of what music should sound like, citing a bunch of 90s music. Style and swagger jacked right from M.I.A.’s playbook (a love song disguised in fragmented and scattershot elements is pretty much “Come Walk with Me”) but devoid of the forward-thinking or critical engagement with the world. Much more importantly, “90s Music” is completely and totally lacking in sincerity. This is cold, aiming for cool points and self-awareness; the lyrics read love song, but you wouldn’t know unless you tried to hear it.
[3]

Brad Shoup: It’s not quite fair, that title, as it sends me on a referents hunt (TLC? Ghost Town DJ’s? Very Secretary?) rather than keeping me on the nod. All its postmodern cut’n’pastery can’t disguise a casual tune delivered with a lot of tension, registers chasing each other, handclaps and guitar churn giving way to a skittery Kanye-style passage of synths and imbalanced percussion. I’d rather we’d had this than Beck, in other words.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Hopefully the titular aspect of this is self-aware, like “Acceptable In The 80s” by Calvin Harris (born 1984), because otherwise it’s a bit stupid. Are the 90s even up for any gauche, generalizing evaluation yet, or does history just stop where your memory begins? Probably. Solipsism is what brings everyone together. Kimbra’s personal history (real or imagined), your personal history (real or imagined); both conduits for the surplus of sonic ideas she has here, stopping short of annoying, but too often falling short of interesting.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: For an ostensible comeback single (or, more realistically, new-artist launch), this is bizarre. It doesn’t sound retro. What it sounds is mechanical, like it’s from one of those YouTube videos where someone rigs a dot-matrix printer to play “E.T.” It doesn’t sound particularly ’90s, either. You could maybe reconstruct someone’s imagination of the decade from these pieces — you’ve probably got the Spice Girls in there, definitely R&B, perhaps kids’ commercials, if the kids were surly enough at taping to sound like they’re doing The Most Unwanted Song. But as usual, entire swaths of actual ’90s music are left out; the ’90s, here, extends as far back as Michael Jackson (permanently ’80s, Xscape notwithstanding) and far forward as Kimbra’s own immediate past — she sings “that song we used to sing” with the exact rhythm and melody of her part on “Somebody That I Used to Know. It’s so scrambled that it takes a trip to a lyrics page to realize what’s going on: a straightforward conceit, old music conveying memories of old love, that’s compressed, made lossy, fed through WordPerfect and back out, until what’s left of the emotional hook is nonsense like “love like, love like” and what’s left of the relationship is corrupted and irrecoverable. I imagine this song won’t fully make sense for a few decades.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: Like watching architecture being erected it’s impressive in its way but there’s a bit too much scaffolding visible to actually enjoy it.
[5]