The Singles Jukebox

The closest thing to reaching pi score that we’ve ever seen…

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[3.14]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: This song calls to my mind a scenario — it’s Christmas Eve in Australia, I’m just getting over my US jetlag from a week ago, and my mum drives us to Coles at Noosa Heads for some last-minute supplies. We both break out in a sweat in the time it takes to walk from the car, and enter to hear the opening strains of “Missing Piece” by Vance Joy. I sigh resignedly — Australian Supermarket Music is an aggressively tiresome genre and it haunts me every time I come home. There’s an ocean mention, some enthusiastic acoustic guitar, a possibly slightly over-pronounced Australian accent, wistful oohs — all the classic stuff, but with none of the charm those elements could theoretically hold. Mum takes pity on me and sends me to the courtyard with a Calippo while she finishes shopping, and it’s only because this song gave me all these Australia feelings that I’m giving it even 1 point. 
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Oliver Maier: In real contention for the beigest song I’ve ever heard in my life. Makes George Ezra sound like prog.
[3]

Ian Mathers: The thing about the middle of the road is that it actually is a nicer place to be sometimes, and certainly an easier one. Still, when Joy’s voice reminds me a bit of David Gray on the chorus, it mostly just makes it clear that I find the latter more interesting.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The chugging guitar and flattened drums rattle over the box drum, then fly up on the spiralling back of the bass, which flings them away onto the organ clouds, then the bass carries them higher, then they fly again. All the while, Vance is getting his eyes burnt up watching it. Then he begins to float on synth patchwork clouds, lifting him into the arms of the bass, which flies away with him, leaving the chugging guitar and box drum.
[5]

Michael Hong: The first concert I ever saw was at the tender age of nineteen, watching Vance Joy trip over his words in love. That’s what “Riptide” was, being met with the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen and watching her do the most mundane shit, yet being absolutely transfixed by it, by her. And for a while, I was dumb enough to believe that that was what the pinnacle of love was. But that’s not true, not even what love is. Love’s the emptiness you feel when apart, the contentedness you feel together. At least that’s what Joy believes on “Missing Piece,” the same twee folk song format — the only format for this kind of lovesick ache — but more patient where “Riptide” was hammering. And at twenty-something, right now, I can’t help but agree with him.
[7]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: I saw Vance Joy perform once at a tiny bluegrass and barbecue festival in Augusta, Georgia. It was the early summer of 2015, and he was coming off the success of “Riptide”. His fans, the local white twenty-somethings who loved to complain about Augusta, but would never leave it, preferring the comforts of their parents’ money, stuck out from the other attendees, the folk and country diehards there for Rhiannon Giddens or Chatham County Line, or the jam-band devotees sticking around for Leftover Salmon’s headlining set. “It’s insane that Vance isn’t headlining”, I heard a few of them say. After watching his largely forgettable set, I found it impossible to agree with them. Like his career, Joy’s set was built entirely around “Riptide”, a song that succeeded not because of its aping of folk genre conventions like kick drums and straightforward strum patterns, but by stumbling on something meaningful: pathos. The best artists in the mode Joy reaches for on “Missing Piece” rely on raw vocals bathed in emotion. They offer something familiar, something that reads on the surface as wholesome, but call forth feelings of rage, grief, jubilee; that permeate their vocals. Comparing The Avett Brothers or Shovels and Rope to artists like Joy or The Lumineers, you can hear the emphasis on the raw emotional experience rather than the precision of repeated choruses and callbacks. But “Missing Piece” doesn’t even have catchiness on its side. Failing to reach for the shaky, emotional falsetto that made “Riptide” a hit, Joy here delivers overproduced, forgettable pablum. It’s filled with the signifiers of the genre, with its palm-muted strings and high-mixed kick drums, but its lyrics are entirely forgettable. I would struggle to even hum a bar of the chorus. That night at the festival, Joy left the stage before sunset. His fans left with him, talking loudly about how good the set had been. And so, I’m forced to conclude that this entirely unmemorable track will help Vance Joy sell out college homecoming concerts for the next three years.
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Alfred Soto: A song to assure listeners the acoustic guitar is dead. 
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