The Singles Jukebox

Coming soon to Playstation: Accordion Hero…

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[5.33]

Josh Langhoff: A dextrous accordion hero puts down his axe to sing a banda ballad with more authority than he’s ever sung before, enunciating to las estrellas. Noel Torres would farm this kind of thing out to the likes of Luciano Luna, norteño’s own Diane Warren figure, but Valenzuela wrote “Princesa” himself and he’s smart about it, intuiting how the brass will clobber the high points in his melody. (I don’t care how fleet his fingers are, this thing would sound thin with just his quartet.) Has any guitar hero ever done so well with a guitar-free power ballad?
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Valenzuela comes on like he wants to take things slow, but a staccato fanfare twenty seconds in betrays his excitability. By the half way point, he’s drifting away from the melody to burble about his girl, and by the final minute, the horns have almost caught up with him in terms of enthusiasm. He tries to end things like he’d been playing it cool all along, but by that point, even his banda has betrayed him. Not so slick, Remmy.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Yo, on the real though, can I punch out whoever mixed these horns? I think the lining of my ear canals should suggest that whatever sadist was responsible for the engineering on this record can stand to lose a few teeth. The song itself appears to be doing well, so he’s got the money to afford it.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The horns insert humor into this come-on by a sad sack. He does insist muchly, though. Is that why he’s single?
[5]

Brad Shoup: He wraps himself in the word “yo” like a down comforter. He also makes accusations with real anguish, but I keep coming back to that pronoun. Even a bravely-sung nice-guy anthem is still a nice-guy anthem.
[5]

Anthony Easton: The sparkle in this, and the horn section that provides suspense until it arrives, is one of the more delightful matchings of musical cue to theme in a while. The rest sounds a little generic. 
[4]