The Singles Jukebox

“Started from the bottom, but we still here…”

[Video][Website]
[5.12]

Iain Mew: What they’ve done here is take “Reckoning Song” by Asif Avidan and the Mojos and the more successful “One Day/Reckoning Song” Wankelmut remix and find a perfect midpoint that improves a lot on both. Not original, but a good idea well executed.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: It’s always interesting when hearing similarities between two songs to Google them side by side and see if other people have been saying the same. Sometimes there are no references, sometimes only one — akin to a Googlewhack — and sometimes, if Lady Luck is really shining, someone will have made a terrible mashup. In this case the two songs are this one and the Wankelmut remix of Asaf Avidan’s “One Day” that was massive across Europe last year. In replicating, it OneRepublic have tapped into an interesting sonic niche; obviously there’s “One Day”, but there’s also “Somebody That I Used To Know” (people have mashed up those, too), and in Romania a guy called DJ Sylvio seems to be having great success gently remixing people like Bedouin Soundclash into similar shape. Tedder & Co make a good fist of emulating the sound, but that’s all they manage — and unfortunately, as with all things in life, Avicii has come along to usurp them, knocking “Counting Stars” into a boshed hat.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: It turns out that OneRepublic only required minor tweaks to be bearable — a little extra speed, an actual rhythm no matter how basic, and for Ryan Tedder to barely open his mouth while singing the verses. I’ll forgive the attempt at being soulful after the second chorus because it’s over quickly.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Easily the best OneRepublic song I’ve ever heard.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Something about the admixing of rhythm shifts, batshit lyrics, and a singer who has to be threatened at knifepoint not to use his higher register reminds me of “Lonely No More”-era Rob Thomas, but not even Mr. Smooth conceived of The Killers as a band worth pilfering. Let’s see if Ryan Tedder enjoys counting stars when the dollars stop coming in.
[5]

Will Adams: Something about this just irks me, and it’s not OneRepublic’s general blandness. (Ho!) Maybe it’s that it borrows heavily from a superior Of Monsters and Men song. (Hey!) Or that the verses’ cadence recalls that of “Drive By.” (Ho!) Or perhaps it’s Ryan Tedder’s ham-fisted attempt at soul in the middle eight. (Hey!) No, it’s something else, and it gives off a whiff of opportunism. (Ho!) But I just can’t put my finger on it (Hey!).
[3]

Brad Shoup: If I could drop a micro-thinkpiece on ya: Kanye burns red, but OneRepublic operates in the UV portion of the spectrum. He pulls European prog and the Great Expectations soundtrack out of the crates; their major move involves a Wanklemut-style disco backbeat. They look to uplift; ‘Ye’s nothing but needles. He’s super-specific to the point of pain; they’re constantly mistaking universality with relevance. Eddie Fisher’s chugging drumwork isn’t revelatory, but it provides the urgency that all these ridiculous generalties and cod-protest chants can’t. This is the deal Tedder & co. struck: their gospel gets boiled down to a grumpily grandiose millennial unease, and they get to be pop radio’s conscience for the next couple years.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: OneRepublic, today’s band that sounds most like a megachurch, finally gets a musical correlative for its name. In this, they have company. It’s striking how much the backlash to Mumford and Sons and followers resembles the backlash to Coldplay before them, and Creed and Nickelback before them: populist rock-radio staples who do not rock very hard and who come off vaguely, plausibly deniably Christian. (Others have made this connection, albeit sometimes for different reasons.) Where Jesus would be, marketing points are; gospel becomes, Tom Ewing wrote, “meta-gospel, where the object of worship is all about how high the music you’re listening to dreams of being.” But there’s still enough to fill out the pro-social part of a Focus on the Family review, and no business-minded contempo pastor would kick their crowd-pleasing uplift out of the church repertoire. (See for yourself.) If the demographic waters were muddied before — the Mumfords suggest the Bedford Avenue set as much if not more than the Baptists — OneRepublic un-muddies them. Ryan Tedder, after all, is thoroughly pop — he’s borrowing not just the HO!s, HEY!s, panpipe twiddles and Pro Tools call-and-response of the above but such lucrative veins as “Reckoning Song,” “Set Fire to the Rain,” how Adam Levine’s voice is theoretically supposed to sound, and how jumping up octaves jumps up the octane. It’s as sanctimonious as it sounds, and as disingenuous too (Kelly Clarkson probably has some words about Tedder counting dollars), but I’d rather listen to handclaps than the big hollow drums that OneRepublic plagued pop with for so long. The times, it seesms, would agree.
[5]