The Singles Jukebox

“[Zhu]’s first track, “Moves Like Ms Jackson”, a mashup of several songs by Outkast, was released in February 2014 and was positively received by blogs and reviewers covering electronic music.”

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[5.57]

Alfred Soto: “The project (Zhu) is all about art, and we try to make it about the songs and the response,” the artist said in 2014 after his Grammy nomination. Whether this combination of 1985-era synth stabs, piano ripples, chopped vocals, and dusky female samples is art I’ll leave to my interest in replaying it, but producers with less musicianship can do less with less.
[5]

Will Adams: When it’s minimal, it’s great. The warbled vocal makes figure eights above the tubular bass and woodblock synth interlock. When the extraneous elements enter (those loud synth strings! Why?), it wanders off course.
[6]

Brad Shoup: This thing unfolds at a real fast pace. Dance-popped bubbles, gated synth whole notes, snare freakouts: they all sprout and wither. That vocal hook should be a germ, but it’s just sick. There’s enough bigness here that I can’t fully resist.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: Smooth and tubular, with a slurry vocal that punctures the calm with its weird tone with a piercing richness. It’s rare to have this properly melancholy yet driving a house record in this decade, but this one definitely hits that balance.
[7]

Iain Mew: Tries to mix sensuality and cool melancholy like a Rue-y Da Silva, but Zhu makes things too muted for either side to make an impact.
[4]

Cassy Gress: It’s amazing how a single syllable can put so many images in my head — they’re probably inaccurate, but the resulting reaction is so visceral that I can’t set it aside. All the rest of the vocals are deadpan, and the beat is sharp and black, but the syllable I’m talking about is “I’ll tell you while you’re moaning, baby.” The note is a bit flat, and I already am not thrilled with the morning/moaning rhyme and clunky phrasing, but that “-by” sends creep chills down my spine. At that precise moment, he turns into someone who sets off warning bells, someone who I have not invited to breathily whisper in my ear about the things he wants to do to me but who is doing it anyway. It’s possible that someone with different ears would hear it as spine-tingling in a good way; for me there is a sudden vulnerability there, unheard in any of the rest, that reeks of boundary violations.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: A tale as old as 2013: a track like punch off the floor of the sub-basement of some garage or house, sounds meant to deepen and blur when you’re on too much of something, and the preying-ground of yet another Casanova Who Is Sad. Except most of us keep our sadness in our own trash brains and don’t say things like “there’s something in this water, drink it till you’re falling for me” — a pretty goddamn rapey line that sits there, unthinkpieced and inconsequential, like it’s just a natural extension of the scene. One can’t necessarily blame the infinitely unfortunately aspirational Weeknd for all this, but he certainly doesn’t help. Like everything else, creepiness has diminishing returns. At first I thought the refrain was “I only come when I’m alone” which is saddish if unoriginally so; instead it’s “I only call when I’m alone,” which, like, when else would you? (Thanks for not booty-dialing on the subway, I guess?) The sampled sex moans in this indie-R&B-dance interzone are becoming displays even Michael Cretu would find excessive. I’m guessing the idea behind the vocal is some androgyny = creepy idea, which is bad enough, but Zhu really has no voice, which just makes the scenario that more banal, that much more attainable a self-insert. The worst part is, this song is pretty good, and deadly effective if it catches you off guard. They all are.
[6]