Miami Horror – Sometimes
Probably not gonna be as popular as our previous entry…

[Video][Website]
[4.70]
Alfred Soto: The you’re-soaking-in’em synth lines with which this leads are the clues: Eurodisco with a dash of the expected melancholy. The vocals aren’t up to the hooks, though.
[7]
Martin Skidmore: The act name made me look forward to some bass or hip hop, but it’s retro Australian electro, which sounded nicely bright and discoey until the deadening vocal started, the sort of tuneless drone that no disco record would have countenanced for a second. You put your average competent singer, say a 10th placer in X Factor, on this, and the rather lovely music would shine, but as it is I don’t like it at all.
[4]
Mark Sinker: Right, so you decide you’re going to redecorate your bathroom, shiny and classic, a semi-fab crisp polished synth-tiling of a sound. Except his voice has the pawky up-and-along of grouting; and the words are so much crappily smoothed Polyfilla. People were mostly forgiving when Bernard Sumner first came up with this shtick: it was part of his necessary trajectory — get your mind off, well, you know what, with necessary busywork, as you move on… But what’s so dire that MH have to be moving on from it? Their terrible name, maybe? Or the opening lyric: “Eyes wide shut”? Even before Kubrick this dead zinger was making people sigh. Why don’t more people just NOT SING? It’s so not obligatory.
[4]
Erick Bieritz: Whereas previous Antipodean disco Jukebox entries like Bag Raiders’ “Shooting Stars” hewed closer to the dance-driven style of the Presets and Pnau, “Sometimes” is slavishly deferential to “In Ghost Colours.” It’s serviceable, but Miami Horror and other bands like it need to escape from Cut Copy’s long shadow to prove they’re more than also-rans.
[4]
Ian Mathers: It’ll certainly fill up the time between playing “Shadows” or “So Haunted” again, if you need something for that.
[6]
Michaelangelo Matos: If you’re going to make everything else this blatant, you might as well write a song that people can remember.
[3]
Doug Robertson: Other than sound tracking trails for BBC Three programmes, it’s hard to think of any good reason why this track should exist.
[2]
John Seroff: “Sometimes” suffers from heightened expectations built up from a Philip Glass intro and a grungy Cure guitar line that fumbles into a too-standard “Forever Young in Ibiza” club blip seasoned lightly with pretensions of Phoenix. A little too manipulative for me, though it’ll certainly work great as an advert.
[6]
Chuck Eddy: Would’ve been a refreshing change of pace amid the drabness of 1990; still refreshing amid the drabness of now.
[7]
Anthony Easton: Is Richard Kern making a come back as a voice in fashion? This video suggests it’s possible.
[4]
Edited out of my review above, an explanation of why I (rightly or wrongly) heard this song as refreshing: “Pretty and forward-motioned ’80s-style post-Pet Shop/New Order/ Sensation/whoever electro-jangle pop, from Melbourne marsupials.” Kinda sad that almost everybody else liked it less.
Do agree it’s not exactly memorable, though. (At least, I can’t remember it much now, a week or two after hackiing out that blurb.) But I should mention to Alfred that I never thought New Order’s vocals were up to their hooks, either — It’s kind of par for the course for this kind of stuff, isn’t it?