The Singles Jukebox

A fully furnished and comfortable space.

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[7.50]

Brad Shoup: That smuggled-in left-hand piano sounds like something from “I’ll Come Running.” The keys are hopped up, but she’s hanging back: Spoon would surely approve. The pieces are attached so lightly — the bass ends up shouldering the load —  but the effect is effervescent. 
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Juana Giaimo: A person is made of places. Remember when we were in my car singing to the Jonas Brothers? There is no moment I feel safer than when we are all home, but I can’t help getting excited when I see you on the other side of the screen. I still keep picturing that time I took you by the hand in the park next to the Floralis Genérica or that time you tried to teach me how to play the ukulele in your room. As Natalia Lafourcade sings, “I photograph moments that are now secret,” because only I know how new you can make me feel. In the narrative of the heartbreaking Hasta la raíz, “Mi lugar favorito” is the only track in which the present consists of the past before the pain arrived. Instead, as a single, the melancholy disappears. No words better describe the song than Natalia’s own words: “No effort is needed to sweeten the moments”. She is playful, making us eager by building boxes of happiness opened in the final choruses. Just promise me that we’ll come back to this place again. But you’re right: there is no time to worry right now. By the way, I called the Xul Solar museum today. It reopens in March because of summer vacations. I think it’s a nice place to go together. Yes, I think we should go.  
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Iain Mew: The streamlined evocation of AOR reminds me of Eleanor Friedberger’s best mixture of precise and effortless. When Lafourcade wanders off in playful new directions, what the song loses in focus it gains in the impression of the kind of joy that sits at the back of the mind and keeps turning up to brighten otherwise ordinary moments.
[7]

Dorian Sinclair: I find Lafourcade’s vocal style appealing, although if pressed I doubt I could nail down what precisely gives me that impression. Something about the crispness of her enunciation and purity of sound is tremendously enjoyable. I also love the choices made in instruments — the way it starts with the straightforward piano (that low rattle underneath adds just the right amount of interest) before opening two minutes in and welcoming the horns in the back half. If I have a complaint, it’s that I’d have preferred a cleaner finish instead of the extended ride-out.
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Alfred Soto: A decent strummer elongated to five minutes so the producer can demonstrate mixing board tricks, mostly playing with faders.
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Cassy Gress: This song is eminently danceable, in no small part because for the first minute or so it moves back and forth on the beat between channels, and she’s singing it in the sort of casual way you might sing a familiar song to yourself in the kitchen while sweeping and dancing on a sunny spring Saturday.  By the end of it, it’s driving in a convertible on a cool starry night.  There’s also something in that baritone sax that’s very northern soul.  On many re-listens, I’m starting to think that this song is one of my favorite places.
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Patrick St. Michel: It’s a song saved for the back end of the road trip playlist after the heavy hitters but with enough skip to keep passengers excited for a few hours.
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Jonathan Bogart: She’s long drawn on ’60s psych-pop formulas and ten years ago could have been dismissed as a twee yé-yé/tropicália revivalist, but as her lyrical concerns have deepened and grown more personal, the shimmering music has become a barbiturate to cut the emotional turmoil. Here, though, she returns to sunshine and happiness, and it’s all the brighter for the knowledge of how dark it’s been (as the production hints, as the horns slide backwards into tape). “You are my favorite place in this world,” she croons, and it’s one of those perfect expressions of love that can still, amazingly, after all these years of stupid human gnawing at language, happen.
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