The Singles Jukebox

For best results…

[Video][Website]
[7.36]Crystal Leww: Dance music splintering into a bunch of different directions has been good for the genre. “Rinse & Repeat” has been all over all kinds of dance floors since the end of last year, featured in big sets by dance giants like Fatboy Slim and Annie Mac for being the sound of the future. There’s not a lot going on with “Rinse & Repeat” — the track is a simple, monotone vocal that sometimes gets pitch shifted over a house beat, but the effect is magnetic. “Rinse & Repeat” becomes a parallel for dance floors themselves: it is the movement of bodies and feet, the posturing and posing, the closed eye dreamy wide smiles, the potential for sex, and what feels like an absence of time while that house beat plays weekend night in and out. Major ups to Riton, who has been very consistent on shouting out Kah-Lo. This track would not be what it is without her vocal. It could sound hollow or icy or robotic to someone who hasn’t spent time getting sweaty in clubs, but to me, it feels like an absolute surrender to the genre. Her vocal is just another texture, another percussive instrument that plays alongside that bass. This is both the last great dance track of 2015 and first big dance song of 2016.
[10]

Iain Mew: I love “this is not how I woke up but it’s how I look now”: not a rebuttal to the iconic line it’s referencing, but an alternative that blends humour and matter-of-fact confidence. The rest follows from there, Riton realising Kah-lo is a star and providing an unobtrusively banging beat for her to demonstrate it.
[8]

Cassy Gress: I laughed about “this is not how I woke up / but it’s how I look now”, and I like how this sounds sort of like hitting pipes full of water. I’d totally dance to this, except that for a song all about rinse and repeat, it drops the drums out too many times, and “to the club we go” is a weirdly old-sounding phrasing. Why does the backing track fade out at the end, on the repeated “time to make the club go up?” It sounds like Riton left Kah-lo hanging, or like she was completely lost in a song in her head, and then opened her eyes to find everyone gone. Or, more accurately, this sounds like a song that is undecided about whether it’s a regular club song, or whether it’s a song about being bored of the club routine.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: A fine roller that sounds like skimming your finger around the edges of a torpedo, and an apt comparison when you feel the subs on this track.
[6]

Megan Harrington: Credit to the nasty production which spares every expense, but the star of “Rinse & Repeat” is Kah-lo and her disdainful monotone delivery. You know that face Rooney Mara makes on every red carpet? Withering and far away, like you should feel bad that she’s disgusted with her display of crass capitalism? Kah-lo can do that face with her voice and it’s so much more effective.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Did Riton use a Casio SA-1 for the hi-hat in the intro? God, I hope so. “Rinse & Repeat” has drawn “212” comparisons, which is more a matter of timbre than anything: Kah-Lo is so blasé she brags about it in her Twitter bio. She’s basically narrating, which has got to be real effective in a club.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Distorted piston bongs meet laconic vocal intoning a perfect po-faced hook. I wouldn’t have minded another six minutes if it didn’t take its title so seriously and the drum fades weren’t so insistent.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: “Eat Sleep Rave Repeat” told by someone likable.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: For some reason it’s proving impossible to listen to this and not hear a comedy Yorkshire version of the vocal concurrent with the real one. Endless fun. “Rinse & Repeat” certainly doesn’t wear as thin as Fatboy Slim’s similar 2013 effort, because unlike Beardyman’s additions there, Kah-lo’s resilient deadpan makes the perfect distinction to the covert brio of the minimalism around her.
[7]

Will Adams: “Rinse & Repeat” reminds me a lot of Benny Benassi’s classic “Satisfaction,” even beyond the octave-to-fifth-to-root riff they share. The insistent repetition of the main hook in both songs reframes the club experience as something sinister. “And it just goes on,” repeats Kah-lo. The confident club strut so often adopted in songs about nightlife is subverted, peeling back the curtain on the terrifying social ritual it often is.
[8]

Juana Giaimo: “And it just goes on” Kah-Lo says as her voice is distorted in endless repetitions. “Rinse & Repeat” feels exactly like it could be going on forever, with its steady beat and a unchanging chorus. But if we could be dancing forever, when is it time to say stop? Is it possible to get bored of what once was so fun? Kah-Lo’s monotonous tone erases all the excitement of going to a club to transform it instead in a routine. But while we think the answer, we just keep dancing because it just goes on. After all, what else could we be doing but dancing?
[7]