The Singles Jukebox

Suggested by Connor, here’s a breathy ode to all-encompassing lust…

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[6.79]Brad Shoup: La Grange has given an AOR-level of care to her vocal; on the verses, she’s sprinting through a familiar maze and I’m huffing just to keep her in view. On the chorus, she hangs back, adding a frisson to her relief versus the “I Will Follow Him” bass. La Grange uses the same phrasing on the bridge, but she’s dismissed the low-end to some vortex. She apologizes twice, but the second time the sonic cruft had me convinced she said “for being so right”. Whether that happened or not, the Kate B yelps to close sell a triumph, however arrived at.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: “So Sweet” comes on like a shy cousin of “Kids of America” — only sung so as not to wake anyone let alone rouse them. Or like it was given to Cyndi with specific instructions to pretend she was Kate Bush. It also evokes Goldfrapp’s underrated Head First album — polite bounce, subdued vocals, but infectious once it creeps under the skin.
[7]

Peter Ryan: Cut Your Teeth ended up being one of my favorite releases of last year largely on the strength of La Grange’s knack for an indelible minor-key melody, for which I am a notorious sucker. Given this, it is no surprise that the verses are my favorite parts of “So Sweet.” The menagerie of sounds swelling throughout the first minute is as meticulous as anything on her last album, building from start-stop synth bloops to full-speed-ahead by the prechorus. And where her previous narrative voice often tended toward abstraction, here it’s immediate and personal from the start. I’m trying to pin down why I get a bit lost in the chorus. Maybe because it’s so subdued compared to the spiky energy of everything else. Maybe because I’m not a fan of the particular synth pulse that undergirds it. It might be the pleading delivery where I want shout-along. These are quibbles I guess, because they melt away when bridge hits, shimmering and pleading exactly as much as it should. I’m happy to hear La Grange pushing at the bounds of her sound, exploring new stories. I shouldn’t want this to go even bigger, but I do.
[7]

Megan Harrington: The complicated tangle of sex and seduction arranged as a cloud of meringue that feels lighter than air.
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Micha Cavaseno: The affected vocal is supposed to convey intimacy or severe emotion, but that ‘3-4 on the floor’ bit before diving into the corny leg warmers chorus kills any gesture to genuine connection. The production is obnoxious in the right way in places, but to culminate in such a blase eruption is disingenuous, and that bridge is just gross.
[3]

Will Adams: There’s plenty to like in “So Sweet”: an opening that suggests how “Flesh Without Blood” might sound with synths instead of guitars, and a satisfying switch to ’80s gloss on the chorus. It’s sunk, unfortunately, with flat mixing that causes several instruments to bump into each other, making the song sound like it’s covered with a heavy blanket.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: It’s all about delayed gratification. “So Sweet” starts out as a fidgety Grimes-ish pop number before reaching a school-yard-ready chant…and then it just lets down and goes technicolor with that hook. You have to wait for it, but when it comes…well, the title makes sense.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: In my mind, this is what the Knife sound like in a world in which they make the purest pop, with a sweet tooth for Blancmange. And since I’ve always found the Knife a bit too “cool” for their own good, this is, accordingly, charming.
[7]

Mike Mathews: Goldfrapp got their hands on an Mumford & Sons album and lost themselves in the woods. While we wait (and pray) for their safe return, Kyla La Grange has built a lovely little world as propulsive and hypnotizing as anything this side of Felt Mountain.
[8]

Hannah Jocelyn: The melody in the verses clashes oddly with the instrumental, as do the harmonies, as if the song was put together via a slapdash mashup. While the song does improve melodically by the time it reaches its chorus, even that chorus has its own set of grievances; the drums and vocals are mixed very strangely, both too compressed and still not loud enough. Nonetheless, it still works for me, but that’s only because the lyrics here are solid and the song as a whole reminds me of Naomi Pilgrim’s unfairly overlooked “It’s All Good.”
[6]

Austin Brown: Blends into the background for most of its existence, until Kyla hits on this whispery delivery in the chorus that finally articulates what the rest of the song’s been wanting to say for the verses. Then the not-quite-right match between the instrumental and the vocal in the verses comes right back, and I forget about it all over again.
[6]

Anthony Easton: She commits to vocals that deserve perhaps a bit less commitment, and that beat is a steam train that defeats any John Henry-esque effort.  She is defeated by the mechanics of the production. Extra points for how corporeal it is about sex, and how it sounds like some kind of lost minor Swedish pop masterwork.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Gliding without effort from light skank to electropulse hook, “So Sweet” celebrates a lust so encompassing that La Grange dissolves into gasps and sighs.
[6]

Scott Ramage: The production could have been overdone but the mix of reggae guitars, bass swells and disco guitar all seem individual highlights rather than unstructured muddle. It’s a triumph of songwriting too: the verse is basically two choruses to accompany the actual chorus, all of which are infectious earworms. But it’s La Grange who is the real revelation here: vulnerable and sugary, her voice elevates “So Sweet” from a formalist achievement into pop glory. Everything I’ve ever heard of her material previously has suggested Florence-lite, with songs that don’t make the most of her vocal strengths, but on this she’s found a way to make surrender sound positively life-affirming. Ellie Goulding take note: this is how to do dizzy breathlessness and giddy abandon.
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