The Noisettes – Don’t Upset The Rhythm
Injection of horsepower propels indie footnotes to #2 in the UK…
[Video][Website]
[6.00]
Jessica Popper: I thought the last Noisettes single, “Wild Young Hearts”, was brilliant, but this one is even better. It’s super-infectious and sassy, with fun lyrics, and I have to stop for a little dance every time the advert comes on TV. If the rest of the album is like this, it’ll be one of the best of 2009 without a doubt. I chose the Noisettes as one of my ‘ones to watch’ in 2007, and was slightly embarrassed by their lack of success, but it turns out I was just ahead of the crowd!
[10]
M. H. Lo: Aside from placing the song in the Mazda ad, the canniest move made by the Noisettes is to fashion “Don’t Upset the Rhythm” into one of those songs that is about nothing more than itself: “It’s the rhythm you’ve been waiting for/Pure delight, kick snare hat-ride!” But such meta-songs work best when they interpellate the audience, commanding us to help realize the vision: hence, the awesomeness of something like the Pipettes’ “Pull Shapes” lies in how we have to help the song become what it wants to be, an irresistible dance stomper, by dancing. Here, in contrast, after the build-up on the verses, we are only asked to…not upset the rhythm. Which presumably involves…sitting back and letting the band do its thing?
[7]
Frank Kogan: Well, the rhythm upsets me, reduced funk with no roll to it, rigid and sexless. For a moment the melody seems to be working its way towards the floating sadness of Gnarls’ “Crazy,” but it doesn’t achieve much of a mood one way or another.
[4]
Doug Robertson: No matter how good a song might be, very few can survive being heard every twenty minutes on commercial telly and this, frankly, isn’t anywhere near good enough to cope with the overexposure, and the nagging suspicion that it was deliberately written with this sort of commercial intention in mind doesn’t help.
[6]
Keane Tzong: They will be, and have been, crucified for making this song. Of course they would be; it sounds nothing like any previous Noisettes song. Hell, it probably sounds nothing like any future Noisettes song. But this is easy, featherweight fun and Shingai Shoniwa’s voice is better suited to this polished electro-disco sound than it was to at least half of What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?.
[8]
Martin Skidmore: I was thinking how well she would have worked on old disco records, and this very much partakes of that, the guitar line especially. It’s not so far from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs single we loved last week, and though it certainly suffers from that comparison, this is still pretty good.
[8]
Alex Macpherson: Cheap, rinky-dink keyboards and an amateurishly half-assed vocal – I feel we have been here before – are the hallmarks of any incompetent indie band attempting a pointless disco pastiche, and the Noisettes come through on both counts.
[3]
Dave Moore: “Don’t upset the rhythm” scans way too literally here – they’re dancing on eggshells; it’s almost comically uptight. This might actually be the ultimate soundtrack to NOT dancing, or at least to standing still and holding in a fart at an indie dance club while quasi-rhythmically bobbing your head.
[2]
Rodney J. Greene: The disco gallop and chopping punk guitars are all passable, but the singer needs to take her own titular advice. There’s nothing resembling a song here, and the vocals take an occasionally overwrought turn as the frontwoman tries to create a melody where none exists.
[5]
Additional Scores
Martin Kavka: [6]
Ian Mathers: [6]
Edward Okulicz: [7]