The Singles Jukebox

An n-gram of “Nile Rodgers” might prove interesting…

[Video][Website]
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Kat Stevens: In Nile Rodgers’ cracking autobiography Le Freak, he describes his and Bernie Edwards’ “golden rule” for writing disco hits. Each Chic song had to have a “Deep Hidden Meaning,” complex musical ideals concealed by superficially simple lyrics: “We felt that audiences would be more receptive to multilevel messages, just as long as they liked the groove.” Ellis-Bextor’s past disco-pop efforts have made a good stab at this technique. The simplicity of “Groovejet” places the emotional rush front and centre; the Moroder-by-numbers wobble of “China Heart” is ideal for her ice-queen angst. “Come With Us” tries painfully hard to emulate Nile and Bernie but misses each mark: the groove is too busy, the innocuous lyrics aren’t sing-a-long-a-simple nor complex enough to spend time dissecting. Sophie may be aiming for Dancefloor Temptress, but she sounds more like a PE teacher coaxing a frightened child off a climbing frame.
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Tim de Reuse: On the agenda: garish momentum, rubbery funk basslines, bombastic string crescendos, losing your soul in a luxury pyramid scam, neon and smoke and retro-futuristic sleaze. The breathless vocals perform beautifully when they have to deliver vaguely threatening lines like “In a hazy frame of mind you’ll believe this stuff.” It falters only when it tries to restrain itself for a bridge and roar back for a climax, which proves utterly unnecessary after the tightly knit clockwork of the song’s first half.
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Jonathan Bogart: The pleasures and perils of disco would seem rather a hoary theme for 2016, but the pleasure and peril of 2016 is that any past can be recreated if you don’t mind a fudged detail or three. For those who can never get enough 1977, this is as soothing a slice of fantasia/paranoia as a warm cup of tea. Which is what it sounds powered by, rather than the uncomfortably present-tense cocaine.
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Scott Mildenhall: A return to disco stripped of all synthesisers. A celebration of the magical world of pop, tempered by a clanging critique of its capitalist reality. She gives with one hand, and that is in fact the most important part. Better yet, “Come With Us” captures the headiness it describes so well that the allusions to cash and contracts are easily forgotten, which in itself is quite a good allusion to reality. Pop is all about compromises, like the one Ellis-Bextor makes between ripping instrumental interludes near wholesale from “If I Could Change Your Mind”, and putting some exciting “ooh”s on top.
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Hannah Jocelyn: “Come With Us” does everything that songs like “Give Me Your Love” get wrong. The song has a more interesting arrangement and cleaner production than most EDM or otherwise right now, what with the left-right panning and the strings not too showy but perfectly placed in the mix. Also, there’s an actual guitar solo! But aside from that, this is just a well-crafted song, top to bottom, in an age where everyone else is trying to be weird and out-there to varying degrees of success.
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Cassy Gress: Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s fluttery vibrato is suited much better for electropop than for this tired disco retread, which has so little sparkle that even Sophie herself is unable to do much more in the video than bob her head.
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Alfred Soto: Where Petula Clark’s winsome baby powder voice suggests a normal woman who’s figured things out enough to stay at a slight remove from the world, Sophie Ellis-Bextor sounds way too regal for pop. Note by note and guitar lick by lick, I’ve no problem with the disco-inflected would-be anthem, but the rhythm needs more spritz and Ellis-Bextor needs a booch or two.
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Katherine St Asaph: Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s move from theaudience to the dance floor is seeming more like a pendulum swing; “Come With Us” could be remade as rock with few changes to structure. What would need changing: five thousand discotheques’ worth of genre. Sophie’s best when she’s shamelessly maximalist, and if she does disco I prefer her really doing it, like here. The Nilish guitar, the disco strings and the conceit are all swollen to twice their size and about a hundred times the size of our wimpy “disco revival.” Ellis-Bextor’s voice, though, doesn’t swell with it; she always sounds derivative of someone, though here she’s less a posh Cracknell follower, more a petulant, fluttery Goulding precursor. The lyrics suggest a take on Goldfrapp’s “Happiness,” which makes me wonder what Alison might be like on this.
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Thomas Inskeep: Lovely, chugging disco-kissed mover whose lyrics, upon closer examination, suggest membership in a cult of some kind. Which gives this a delectably sinister undertone. 
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Peter Ryan: I can’t imagine that this would engender any amount of particularly feverish devotion, but the story sort of works if you zero in on the fact that Ellis-Bextor isn’t playing cult leader here — she’s part of the flock, a recruiter, and there’s a taut anxiety built into her usual above-the-fray delivery that befits the role; it also makes the mismatch between vocal and heady lyric/arrangement a feature rather than glaring deficit. But that’s all overthinking this brand of disco-funk-aping pop, now on its 8247th life and mostly subsisting on sounding pleasant. This sounds especially pleasant, and most other specimens can’t touch this one’s tireless bassline. She’s splitting the difference between her electro-diva and artier indie-pop pasts, and although my bias is in favor of the former, at least this is a revivalism I can get behind.
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