Medina – Kl. 10
Hej danske læsere. Medina er ganske god.
[Video][Website]
[6.29]
Brad Shoup: Really, I just love how she sings. There’s no effort to her moment-to-moment shifts in rhythm, and more often than not, when she hits a syllable it ends up a melodic refraction. On top of all that, she’s tremendous at conveying emotion. Shame she’s in service to a slight electropop be-with-me-instead song.
[6]
Michaela Drapes: Save for the occasional flashes of blatant autotune, this could be zapped straight to us from the Cold War, complete with the melodramatic video starring the terrifyingly clean Alexanderplatz U-bahn station! Oh, and if you were wondering what “Call Your Girlfriend” would sound like if it weren’t an internal dialogue, the answer is: this. Unsurprisingly, “Kl. 10” isn’t nearly as compelling.
[4]
John Seroff: No doubt if I could understand what Medina was talking about I would enjoy the song that much less but, oh the joys of ignorance. Amidst melancholy strings, Jan Hammer keys, My First Drum Preset and wind machine, Medina earns her place, earns her melodrama, earns her crescendo; she earns her goddam reverb. It is, to poor monolingual me, a song about absolutely nothing at all but it swans about with ten times the meaning and motion as anything from the Katy Perry camp. Medina über alles.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Medina sings like her feelings go straight to her vocal cords, like she’s trying to brood like the synths and the strings at once, or possibly like a cross-country Adele who never knew she could’ve had it all or could sing that high. Once you’ve grasped what “Kl. 10” is about (unrequited love), the lyrics would be superfluous if they weren’t so nuanced. A track for anyone who knows what 10 p.m. does to the streets you know you should share.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: I’m definitely spoiled by the willingness and fluency with which so many Scandinavian pop stars sing in English. Medina is more expressive than the vast majority of her peers as a singer, but because I don’t speak Danish I’m ungenerously critical of the translated lyrics, when I’m sure I wouldn’t even notice them if they were in English. And then the music doesn’t do enough to excite me out of that peevish response.
[6]
Iain Mew: Dramatic intro strings, total poise, a chorus sways to and fro just so… and just a lack of anything to take it over the edge to greatness. As well executed as it is, musically there just isn’t anything to give the same compelling drama as previous singles. As such it seems like a very odd choice of single from For Altid, (to me the title track, “Vend Om” or “Ejer Heler Verden” would all be much better), but that just brings home that as much as I enjoy the album I probably am getting something different out of it than the Danish target audience for its singles. “Kl. 10” likely just codes completely differently. Maybe that’s what happened with Javiera Mena too.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The programming updates “The Safety Dance,” which makes sense: Medina’s vocal is gingerly one-two step between hysteria and the arctic gentility that lesser singers think illustrates the iceberg technique.
[6]
It’s not that the lyrics are special, but in this particular case you do miss out on certain things not knowing the language, like how the chorus’ “du har slået op” makes for a much more poetic or interesting punch-line than the translated “you have broken up” would have. I’m not entirely neutral here, though – as a Norwegian there’s something exotic about the malleability of Danish, even if I understand what’s being said.
As with Mr Shoup, I love how she sings, and the consistent role she inhabits in all her material, and that makes me like her less amazing songs more than I would had any random girl performed them.