The Singles Jukebox

Reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Alfred Soto: When a collision of video game effects, vocoder, rapidfire rapping, “Gangnam Style”-style stop-starts, and popping bubbles is this fetching, who cares whether it’s perfect, let alone human?
[6]

Cassy Gress: That club-lasers synth sound is a better, or at least more modern, sound than “Gangnam Style”‘s, but I’ve heard that damn song too many times now to be excited about a new take on it.
[5]

Iain Mew: It could easily be a rush of energy at the expense of much else, certainly technique. It isn’t thanks to the smart and pragmatic decision to fit it exactly around the crescendo-into-deadpan-spoken-hook structure perfected in Korea in 2012. The familiarity gives it an upper limit, but one guy playing it straight while another one excitedly chants his name is a nice twist.
[6]

Crystal Leww: Radiofish are from Japan, and yet, “Perfect Human” sounds so much like paint-by-the-numbers “Gangnam Style,” right down to the build-up to the chorus, the pause, and then the “I’m a Perfect Human,” which, by the way, even has the same number of syllables. Unfortunately, this comes three years too late, Radiofish doesn’t have the energy or the charm of Psy, and no cute videos of kids dancing to it with their dads. 
[3]

Brad Shoup: The dance-pop works as dance-pop — that synthburrow kinda warps time — and the pop-rap signifying overwhelms. It’s clauses on clauses, a tottering tower of grandiloquence that falls onto one simple joke.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: Comedians making funny songs have long been a staple in Japan, but around 2000 a new lane opened up for comedians interested in music too. “Rhythm jokes” became a thing, distinct from those writing songs with silly lyrics and way, way better than the few comedians who tried making earnest attempts at rock-stardom in the late ’90s. Usually, these song-and-dance routines are pretty clearly jokes — yet recently the lines have blurred a bit, with some of Japan’s most popular tunes in recent years being pretty straightforward numbers…done by comedians. Radiofish — comedy duo Oriental Radio and some well-known dancers — is 2016’s entry into this genre, with their EDM-dipped number “Perfect Human” becoming this year’s TV staple, batter-up music and goofy wedding gag. This live version currently sits at over 33 million views on YouTube, eclipsing anything released by a non ha-ha group this year. It’s catchy, and the deadpan hook certainly stands out from a sea of similar sounding J-pop choruses, but “Perfect Human’s” straddling of the joke-serious line also results in something that sounds like a relatively straightforward bit of EDM pop with a kind of funny gag in the middle. Like a lot of these serious-but-maybe-not? songs, it’s novel for a bit before it just morphs into the worst of both pop and comedy with more exposure.
[5]

Will Adams: Maybe in another four years a reboot of “Starships” will make sense, but now is not the time.
[3]