The Singles Jukebox

It only took three of them (Gotye DQ’d on a technicality), but finally a Hottest 100 winner earns the hallowed [4]…

[Video][Website]
[4.00]

Jonathan Bogart: If white people don’t want to be called boring, maybe we should try being less boring.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Brevity counts, and this Australian top ten has a decent hook, but after two plays I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to say other than a particular combination of drum machine and guitar strum.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: It’s been suggested that the Rubens’ sound is “trademark RnB-meets-blues-rock swagger.” I suppose that might be true if your benchmark for “RnB-meets-blues-rock swagger” is Modest Mouse.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: It lopes amiably along with half a hook and an R&B-aspiring efficiency placing it in the lineage, if not the echelon, of mid-’00s Spoon. The a cappella moments are the most striking and the least advised: the blockish vocal is not remarkable enough for less to be here more. The finger-snaps and synthetic handclaps work better: they deliver some fun to what could be an exercise in indie-pop box-checking. As a single, “Hoops” is modest and not unenjoyable; it’s as a national poll-topper, however, that it befuddles.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Mumbles McGhee and the soul-rock posse here aren’t winning any awards for a song format that’s built to sell passion and receives a guy less interested in what he’s doing than the listener could be at their worst. I think even he’s rating this lower than I am.
[2]

Cassy Gress: Hear me out: this reminds me of a dark “Row Row Row Your Boat.” I don’t mean that it’s childlike, or that the words have become meaningless; lyrically it reminds me of a relationship that I pushed far enough back in my mind that it took me three listens through to remember. It’s the “hoooops and everything, get back” — “hoops” is the longest-held note in the chorus, and it stands out rhythmically in the same way that “merrily merrily” does. Plenty of pop songs end with a counter-melody over the chorus, but this one feels more like a round. Really, really wish the singer (who sounds sort of like Harry Styles just rolled out of bed) would have finished at least one of those choruses on the low A; it feels unresolved without it, but that’s probably the point.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Pretty bold to write the whole song around a placeholder word. Is that an oblique strategy? 
[4]

Megan Harrington: The good news is that now that The Rubens are here there’s nowhere left for The Black Keys to go. 
[2]

Edward Okulicz: My first instinct was “oh my god is this like a Milky Chance cover?” because melodically, I hear this weird relationship to “Stolen Dance.” It’s a lot better than that though because having a drum beat and electric instruments and an actually punchy hook elevate the song enormously. The singer’s voice has more fuzz than the backing, but I’d sing this one around a campfire, if that matters, and I was forced. It’s only 2 minutes and 40 seconds so it drops its payload enough times to work but doesn’t last long enough to cloy. Like most recent Hottest 100 winners, it strikes me as a song a lot of people like a bit (and would have come in around 40 if it had come out in 1995), rather than one that’s a Gotye-esque popularity monster, but at least this year I agree.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Sweet D-League action.
[2]