The Singles Jukebox

Another week, another country act warning of the dangers of sun exposure…

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[5.25]Vikram Joseph: Breezy yacht-pop par excellence with bubbly, “Get Lucky” bass and streaks of sun-bleached synth; it’s a brazen swoop for “song of the summer” status, but it wears its hedonism well and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s also remarkably youthful-sounding for a band that are… well, post-youthful. Good, uncomplicated fun.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Bubbledisco has rarely been as frothy as the first minute of “Summer Fever,” and Little Big Town has for years sought material commensurate with the mild dancemania they hear in their heads. As usual, though, the mildness of the vocals dream of dance floors but are rooted in bedrooms.
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Katherine St Asaph: Fitting that in our new Gilded Age, everyone turns into yacht rock. But “Summer Fever” works anyway, and doesn’t make me want to capsize the whole marina, because the arrangement and vocals are less smarmy than melancholy. The chorus, though, needs to either bang more or sigh more.
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Juana Giaimo: “Summer Fever” has little of fever but a lot of summer. It has the calm beat of a relaxing day at the beach and a voice that flows pleasingly without trying too hard.
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Will Adams: I didn’t enjoy “Pontoon,” but at least its lazy sprawl was something. “Summer Fever” is anodyne disco that recalls not-too-fond memories of five years ago, when “Get Lucky” was ubiquitous for some reason and I hadn’t yet realized how gross Malibu rum is.
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Edward Okulicz: I like Little Big Town a lot and they have a bunch of really summery songs that work, and I like disco, but this seems too timid a toe in the pool, and it’s nursing its solitary cocktail all night. The pernicious influence of the overrated, frictionless and weak-as-piss “Get Lucky” on disco pop crossovers must be stamped out immediately. As far as neon-hued country goes, this threatens several times to turn into the melody of Maren Morris’s “80s Mercedes,” and almost no pop single of the last five years is not coming off second best in that comparison.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: Little Big Town attempt to infuse a little palm-muted guitar into their usual formula à la the rehabilitated funk of Random Access Memories. I applaud their willingness to switch up their sound as often as they do, but this particular experiment sounds like a hastily assembled mashup.
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Lauren Gilbert: I don’t understand the point of this? Like, OK, I get that it is Little Big Town does Summer, With Vague Disco, but there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better by other artists. Country meets disco? Try Kacey Musgraves. Cliches about driving around in vintage cars in the summer sunshine? Yeah, Rita Ora’s already covered that for 2018. That summer fever? OK, there are many articles with lengthy playlists on the subject. This is, at best, the SparkNotes version of them, and I’d rather read the original.
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