The Singles Jukebox

Canadian electro-pop outfit move to UK, work with French DJ…

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[4.93]

Alex Ostroff: Canadian electropop outfit move to UK, work with French DJ. It’s all a bit too DFA-lite, but it’s catchy and the simplicity is refreshing in a world full of overproduced glamstomp blare. Plus, shockingly terrible accent issues aside, there’s something charming about rhyming “tu me fatigues” with “out of your league.”
[8]

John Seroff: Armed with lyrics that sound ricocheted through Babelfish, as questionable a rhyme scheme you’ll hear this year (“You could be my girl / Come on rock my world”?) and a bargain-basement Patrick Daughters-esque video staged by Jean-Paul Gaultier featuring loads of dress forms, clothes racks, roman columns, corsets and Solvieg prancing about in a tux like an effeminate James Bond, “Boys and Girls” is probably best enjoyed with a liberal spicing of irony. As songs go, it’s a pretty good perfume commercial and I mean that a bit kinder than it sounds. Just a bit.
[5]

Pete Baran: What a half hearted dance routine in the video, with constants looks off camera to check they are doing it right. And brush yr hair you scruffy git.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Claims to be queer, but still plays with the same gender dialectics, like most Euro-trash.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: I love Dragonette and wish they would get massive already, but if that’s going to happen they need a better launching pad than this embarrassment. You’ve heard one line of the first verse and you’ve pretty much heard the whole song, which ponders vainly for a hook for its entire length and, finding none, settles for being trite.
[3]

Chuck Eddy: Dragonette’s slut anthem “I Get Around” made my top-ten singles list two years ago, and I thought Galore was a pretty good album, so I’ve got nothing philosophically against this song. Too bad it reminds me why I didn’t like electroclash.
[5]

Michaelangelo Matos: Between Tiga, Felix da Housecat, DJ Hell, Peaches, Fischerspooner, Larry Tee, Miss Kittin & Thee Hacker, and (I think this has been established for a while, right?) Lady GaGa, 2009 has really been the year of electroclash’s revenge. This is a little more human-scale than the ’02-premium stuff, which reveled in dank sheen, but it’s precisely as secondhand even while being (or because it is) “catchy.”
[4]

Rodney J. Greene: All hooks, each one of them as predictable and unclever as they are pleasing and sticky.
[7]

Martin Kavka: Disposable, but not quite frothy enough, in part because Martina Sorbara ends up changing her mind from the second chorus on, saying that she could be Solveig’s girl, and the only audible justification is that Solveig keeps telling her that he could be her boy. Because, you know, if you tell a woman often enough that you want her, she’ll change her mind and won’t get that restraining order against you.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: While there’s usually little more glorious in pop music than a he said/she said duet (“Don’t You Want Me,” “Nothing Better”), all the verve derived from such arrangements depends on singers capable of a little more than the leaden performance Solveig and Dragonette deliver here. Neither is assisted by the flat, blurting bore of a backing track, which seems to labor under the belief that a synthesizer makes a good substitute for a tune.
[2]

Anthony Miccio: Anyone want to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Animotion’s “Obsession” by dancing to a retread that rhymes “be my girl” with “rock my world” in the chorus? Anyone?
[5]

Additional Scores

Andrew Brennan: [8]
Ian Mathers: [5]
Martin Skidmore: [4]