The Singles Jukebox

The door’s right there, boys.

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[5.14]

Brad Shoup: Yesterday is right — they’re riding a backbeat out of Quincy-era Michael Jackson. Kevin Parker’s timbre obsession is spiraling: the bass tone in particular is narcotic. This is pop music for the Nugs-app set.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: Stuck in their old habits of playing their entire hand as soon as the song starts: they show you their tightest groove and their pluckiest bassline and then seem terrified to show you anything else, riding in a straight line before just kind of petering out. And I guess I can see the reasoning behind that (What if the catchiest part of the song was just the whole song?) but when you actually listen to it for four straight minutes it starts to fall apart, in the same way that saying a single word over and over again will eventually cause you to hear it as linguistically meaningless noise. The bouncing triplets on this one have a sing-song feel that starts to grate on the eardrums when you’ve still got two whole minutes left. The intended experience, I guess, is that you fall in love with it for fifteen or twenty seconds and then forget that it’s playing as you switch to another tab.
[3]

Alfred Soto: “Lost in Yesterday”  opens with a frosty synth line and a solid bass line — the best opening of their career. Then it collapses into 1980s Moody Blues. As T.S. Eliot might’ve said: after such knowledge, what forgiveness?
[5]

Ian Mathers: Turns out I liked them better when they sounded more like Supertramp.
[3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Listened to this on repeat for 45 minutes and I couldn’t remember what the vocal melodies sounded like. I’m tempted to think that this means “Lost in Yesterday” is a failure but really it’s just a testament to how enjoyable it remains for passive listening. The molasses-thick bass line lures you in, but maybe all this proves is that the most pleasant songs aren’t exactly the most enjoyable.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: It’s quite the intoxicating brew of 80s pop, funk, psych, indie, anything, like when someone brings a variety box of chocolates into the office. Not just a variety of styles, but so many hooks. If this becomes a hit, in 15 years, when it’s on oldies hits radio, it will make fools of everyone’s taste. I really like it now, though.
[8]

Ryo Miyauchi: Kevin Parker stumbles upon a hippie gem of a refrain, where it’s vague enough to scan as profundity, but the rest of his writing feels half baked. The chorus in particular runs of steam halfway through in both rhyme and message with him reaching for a film reference just to fill some space. The psychedelic warmth of the filter funk can only do so much.
[5]