The Singles Jukebox

Some of us do, some of us don’t…

[Video]
[5.00]

Jackie Powell: The source material behind “If I Hated You” is messy and dramatic. FLETCHER wrote and recorded the track and her entire EP The S(ex) Tapes about her quarantine-partner-turned-ex-girlfriend. Said ex also filmed most of the music videos. Am I missing something? Doesn’t that scream no boundaries whatsoever? But that’s the beauty of “If I Hated You”: it’s acknowledging a giant obstacle that resulted from an impetuous decision. The tension on “If I Hated You” is immediate. The ah ah ahs that lead into the chorus emphasizes how trapped FLETCHER is her own feelings. She’s catching her breath. The build of the bassline from lingering in the background to becoming the track’s centerpiece by the chorus says it all. These flustered emotions continue to bubble and build, and goddamnit, the footprint that Shannon Beveridge left on FLETCHER was just massive. The lyrics “My bedtime is the darkest, that’s when I’m brokenhearted” are relatable, but I wish that the entire chorus was just as dramatic as its kicker. “If I Hated You” is darker, deeper and ridden with dread. There’s urgency. The video at one point shoots FLETCHER in a green light. That’s literal resentment toward a situation that FLETCHER orchestrated herself. She has no self-control, and the final bounce or two of the bass as the song concludes tells her just that.
[8]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: This song is from a concept album born as the collaborative project of FLETCHER’s COVID quarantine with her (ex)-girlfriend, YouTuber Shannon Beveridge. Each song on the album is accompanied by a music video shot by Beveridge, and their efforts have produced a piece of art I find absolutely excruciating to experience. Both the intention and practice FLETCHER and Beveridge have put in to the project are admirable. I respect the effort to make the best of a literal nightmare situation, and FLETCHER’s clear effort to make a straightforward document of her former relationship while working with her ex. However, on hearing this I immediately wondered what the social media play was, it sounds so bloodlessly calculated for the social media zeitgeist. There’s nothing wrong with adapting your art to the media of the day, of course, but the construction here takes away from the artistic intention. While the instrumentation sounds like an inoffensively catchy CW sync, the lyrics are somehow simultaneously prosaic and overwrought. Beveridge’s video is some sexy, seemingly unrelated accompaniment. These artistic choices, alongside FLETCHER’s chosen format, amount to a thoroughly wearisome experience all round. 
[2]

Juana Giaimo: “If I Hated You” sounds a lot like Tove Lo — a sharp electro-pop song with sad and sexy vocals — but I still find it quite interesting, especially because quarantine has given a new meaning to many songs. In this case, the yearning sounds more real; I can imagine her missing the other person, especially the physical contact with another body, night after night.
[6]

Tobi Tella: Contradicting, messy feelings that can’t be organized neatly are ripe songwriting material, and that combination of regret and nostalgia is certainly captured here. And the vocal performance was a grower; the strange phrasing gives an unpredictability and edge that helps make her stand out. Unfortunately, being taken over by the spirit of Xtina in both unnecessary adlibs and basic pop production promptly dulls that edge.
[5]

John Seroff: Thuddingly effective, perfectly polished, but a bit too posed to induce genuine dancefloor feeling. What’s missing is burr, pain, dissonance; if you sound this seamless when you don’t hate your lover, it’s hard to imagine how much easier you need this breakup to be.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Contrary to some stans’ people’s belief, I try to avoid cliches when writing about music, like saying a song sounds “like the algorithm” (what, does it pulse like bubble sort? Is it long like long division?) or “like streaming” (so, like the Voyager Golden Recording, or numbers stations, or Wikipedia articles read aloud, or Fart Sounds – Over 1000 Farts?) With every new technology comes people who seize upon it to express their contempt for pop artists and the normies who like them, while disguising it as a moral point. Five years ago it was advertising syncs, 15 years ago it was American Idol and Auto-Tune, in the ’80s it was synthesizers and video games, in the early 1900s it was piano rolls. But I’ve gotta say, songs like “If I Hated You” make this really hard. Would I receive this better if the artist went by un-#brand-ed, normally capitalized Cari Fletcher and I only knew her from her X Factor girl group (named, I shit you not, Lakoda Rayne; man that would not have gone over well now), or un-synthed in a Hotel Cafe set or one of the many songwriter’s showcases she and veteran songwriter MoZella have undoubtedly attended? Maybe. Would anyone?
[4]

Vikram Joseph: There was this whole thing for a while about Dua Lipa “not having a personality”, but what people generally meant was not that her music was anonymous but that she’d neither created a mythology around herself or done anything particularly controversial. (This has surely been put to bed now, post-Future Nostalgia and, uhh, Albanian irredentism.) If you want a truly generic-sounding pop artist, try FLETCHER, who I’ve listened to several songs by and who never fails to pass through my brain without a trace, like water through a colander. “If I Hated You” is perfectly inoffensive and perfectly unmemorable alt-pop, Autotuned entirely to death and shorn of literally any distinctive characteristics, like a MUNA song written and performed by a well-trained bot.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The competence of tracks like “If I Hated You” unnerves rather than reassures. Each verse conveys its affected detachment, the chorus the requisite poignancy; the rhythm guitar acts like a semblance of a pulse. “If I Hated You” is the equivalent of a centerpiece: noticed when on the table, forgotten when your aunt’s stolen it.
[3]

Andrew Karpan: If only love were so simple, Fletcher sings, she could change the background of her phone without being so overwhelmed by feeling. Like a lot of songs made in the long, peculiar cultural shadow of HBO “Girls” and/or Tove Lo’s “Habits,” Fletcher sketches out a montage of bad romantic vibes that lack the writing or the detail to feel intimate. The mundanity of the cell phone, background in emotional flux, is moving but the “after party” she also remembers attending could be more illustratively depicted. Ditto the curious scene involving picking her eyelashes which could be a whole song itself (“said make a wish, and I made three”) but feels rather lonely tucked at the end. 
[4]

Austin Nguyen: For the most part, FLETCHER captures the limbs-splayed-out-on-the-bed ennui of heartbreak without doing much else, fixated on traces of the past (albeit the generic memories Ed Sheeran already penned full songs out of) and trying to find a way to break free of it. The only problem is that half of the pre-chorus doesn’t make sense (If the relationship is being mourned, how can she be leaving? Wasn’t she the one left behind? Confusion.), and I can’t find one decent justification why the line “ALL THREE, YEAHEAHEAH” 1) has to exist at all, 2) is swallowed up in reverb, and 3) is sung like an awkward ad lib from the soloist in a gospel choir who forgot they had the solo.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Pop songs are finely tuned machines. In a medium that works on the scale of 3 minute bursts of style, every moment is vital to the cultivation of the proper vibes that will allow your song to work. Here, a perfectly competent dark synthpop track that is clearly trying to luxuriate in its slinky vibes (off an EP called “The S(ex) Tapes”) is lain low by a single word choice: “bedtime.” It’s just not a sexy word! It kills the whole mood!
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: An effective mood piece that falls apart upon close lyrical inspection — “I dream about getting back together” and “if I leave you now” should not be in the same chorus. This throw-everything-at-the-wall approach does not extend to the production, which is satisfying to listen to in the same way a completed jigsaw puzzle is satisfying to look at. No hasty overreaches, no awkward genre splices, just presentably sad teen drama soundtrack vibes.
[6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Scorpio season has ended, but if you’re still craving moody, petty histrionics, this will hit the spot perfectly. 
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