The Singles Jukebox

Thank you for crediting your guest vocalist, and for nothing else.

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[4.88]Cassy Gress: She equates her lover to an ocean, but if so, it must be an ocean full of ducks.
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Iain Mew: Alan Walker’s “Faded” is Europe’s biggest dance single of the year, so it’s not surprising its slowed down trance approach is starting to inspire imitators. The only thing Mike Perry does better is to actually credit vocalist Shy Martin, who sounds like Iselin Solheim right down to the same careful spacing of words, and does her best with limited material. Perry’s other new idea is to combine with elements of the other current big thing, tropical house, and it’s a bad one: the multiple possibilities of the ocean as an image aren’t nearly enough to meld the tropical bits with the psychodrama of the rest.
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Alfred Soto: Sounds like someone else took pills in Ibiza.
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Katie Gill: That drop veers a little too close to bike horns for my taste. Thankfully the rest of the song is something that manages to be both weirdly chill and a banging dance track at the same time.
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Hannah Jocelyn: I managed to misread that as Max Martin twice. And he would probably love the melody for the drop, a sugar rush that a decade ago would be the chorus for an Aly and AJ song or something. At the very least, he’d enjoy “The Ocean” until the sax-harmonica thingy goes up the octave – a blatant misstep, like no one in the studio realized how well the sound worked in its original form. This could really use a bridge, too, or at least some variation in the chord progression, as while those four chords can alone sustain a large variety of music, the reluctance to shift from the verse and chorus just makes the song sound idle. Maybe it just needs an additional verse about dysphoria. Whatever “The Ocean” is missing, it still sounds just one draft away from becoming something great, even though it’s perfectly listenable as is.
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Brad Shoup: The pinced synth hook sounds like a curious bird, flapping around Martin as she calls over the waves. Not that this is a grandiose spectacle; the results is cozy and lonely… Martin’s object barely registers.
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Edward Okulicz: An attempt at a relaxing tropical trance, “The Ocean” was going pretty well against my reservations —  I don’t find the ocean relaxing, I mean, think about all the terrifying things in it. All gently crashing waves and cooing vocals, and then after the chorus the song started honking at me.
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Will Rivitz: “Objectively,” this song isn’t great – it’s the kind of piano-driven electro-pop which got boring about a week after Kygo hit it big. However, in yet another example of “objectivity” being a stupid metric by which to measure music, I like this song because of the context in which I usually hear it. I’m spending my summer teaching a CS summer camp in the Bay Area, and this song is a mainstay on the collaborative playlist our class maintains for long stretches of coding. I know it’s cheesy, but I can’t listen to this song without thinking of our class and the awesome progress the students are making and how much of a joy it is to teach them. If I hadn’t heard this song before, I’d probably give it a 4 or a 5, but since it holds special meaning that rating goes out the window. I’ve read about a music writer on the sadly defunct AbsolutePunk who scores everything a 7/10 because she thinks ratings are stupid, so we’ll go with that for now.
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