The Singles Jukebox

PRESENTED BY PHARRELLBOT2014®©℗™℠…

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[4.50]

Scott Mildenhall: Like another 2009 breakthrough, Paloma Faith finds herself in the seemingly serendipitous position of returning at a time when the sound she introduced herself with is somewhat in vogue. Less fortunate is that she’s done so with something that’s not really much of a song. There’s a bit of “Take Me Out”, the entertaining double bubble of addressing a ne’er-do-well’s general flakiness as much as realising that even irrespective of it she’ll still one day need something more, but mostly ad libs. More than ever, she’s ensured a lot hinges on your enjoyment/tolerance of her love of dressing up.
[7]

David Sheffieck: At least “Blurred Lines” had hooks to spare; the most memorable thing here is the interpolation of Jesse Jackson’s introduction of Soul Children at Wattstax, and that’s largely because of how head-scratchingly incongruous it seems.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Pharrell hasn’t listened to new music since 2003, which makes sense because Paloma Faith hasn’t listened to a new album since Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid. Strident, arhythmic, graceless.
[4]

Rebecca A. Gowns: This sounds more like a vocal exercise than an actual song. The backing is annoying as hell, but if you try to shut it all out and focus on it just as an exercise alone, it works — we can hear Paloma warming up her pipes, then she belts the chorus over and over. It’d be so much better if it was just her over the sound of the shower running.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Royaltiiiiies! I know you want ’em. 2 points for the beat (atrophied a point for every year Pharrell was probably sitting on it), no points for the sharp singing, or the Duffy-meets-Timbo crap this is probably going to foreshadow.
[2]

Anthony Easton: So, the good stuff is his penis, and his unreliability is coming before the song ends, right?
[8]

Megan Harrington: The Wikipedia article for Adele states she’s got a new one coming out this year and cites the (unverified!) Twitter account of alleged Soundscan-adjacent PR-adjacent human “Paul Moss.” If you’re reading this and also writing papers that get graded, this is why you can’t use Wikipedia as a source. I had planned to allege that we won’t be needing “Can’t Rely on You” come the return of Adele, but instead I’m going to tweet that Adele’s postponed her album to 2016 and then refresh Wikipedia every two minutes until my 4chan nonsense is reported as fact. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: Mid-’70s backing vocals fronted by a young-MJ impersonator. I see Pharrell’s making this kind of intro A Thing, but maybe he’s actually prescient, cos this sounds like a Nikka Costa demo. 
[5]

Edward Okulicz: The funk here is so stiff and wooden, it makes “Blurred Lines” sound silky and aqueous much as it did before it became a #thing. There’s some “Work it Out” and “Crazy” in there somewhere too (Neps Barkbey?), with an underwritten chorus that doesn’t catch fire no matter how many time’s it’s repeated, and Faith trying to inject a song’s worth of soul into one word (“rely”) doesn’t help much. She does a lot better with her little ad-libs and screams,  and when the track introduces that manic tapping, both singer and song loosen up just enough to work for half a minute.
[4]

Will Adams: Pretty good Nikka Costa karaoke, but that still means it’s karaoke.
[4]