The Singles Jukebox

Well, pretty good…

[Video]
[5.27]

Al Varela: This is one of the best-written songs Halsey has ever made. A really charming love song where Halsey reminisces on the many years of yearning she had for her current partner, before everything finally turns around and she finds out he’d been yearning for her for just as long. The journey Halsey takes us through is strife with detail and compassion that paints the picture of a perfect world that actually manages to come to life. Production-wise, it’s not as gripping, but the little passionate wail they do when they reach the second half of the chorus shows a love that is true and has been long and coming. Lovely song.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: No, it’s not.
[2]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The bridge hints a much more interesting song about betrayal and romance, but the rest–especially the “I know it’s bad, but we could be so good” hook–feels massively underwritten. Halsey proved they can be more ambitious and still stick the landing on “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” so this feels like a regression. 
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: After eight years (a decade if you’re on Tumblr) of Halsey, it’s clear that she is what she is. Regardless of whether they are doing EDM crossover, pure pop, or 90s alt pastiches, Halsey has always been more interesting in theory than practice, always bringing in cool ideas and losing them slightly in implementation, let down by clumsy wordings or cheap-sounding production. “So Good” continues in this lineage for its first two and a half minutes, content to anchor some generic romantic observations in a strong hook and a generic instrumental. But in its last 40 seconds, “So Good” manages to break out of its trap of mediocrity, ending with a moment of beautiful clarity that almost gives purpose to the rest of the song. It’s fleeting, sure. But so is all great pop.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Halsey was an artist we covered here with either a polite distance or a polite disapproval, never hate or love – we saved that for artists we clearly felt a strong way one way or the other. Me personally, Halsey debuted with New Americana, one of the worst songs to have as a hit and the best sing to start a career with; deeply bland and gawd awful and I tuned her out…until I actually started listening, then I realized she was very good, and was trying. And with this song, I’m seeing the rising, loop synths and the soft, gentle tone Halsey presses against them, then the straining, heartbroken howl she bounces off the bright, overexposed guitar strings and limo bright drums in the chorus, and the wistful, thoughtful tune she settles as each chorus closes. As she wails through the bridge into the chorus into the end, I feel the sadness and rage, the shame and fear, the pensive and passion, it’s a feeling I never thought I’d have from Halsey. It’s a feeling that I felt when I saw the writing on the server wall about this site. It’s something everyone want to put across everytime they put the pain they feel at each broken relationship they struggle through and wrote down, played on the guitar, record into ProTools, play for random nice notepads in a sterile, unclean office, release onto the morass of every Spotify clone and cross their fingers. It’s something that I didn’t realize I wanted to keep close to me until I realized I was standing on the same sidewalk in August 2017, thinking I was gonna write about music and make some money. Then, in 2022, I got told I chased the money and lost the most special part: the music. Ed, we could’ve been so good, but I ran away, and I’m sorry.
[10]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: My first exposure to Halsey outside of blue red violet tumblr edits was the same as my first exposure to Machine Gun Kelly: Cameron Crowe’s short lived masturbatory Showtime dramedy Roadies. The running gag about the tour not being able to keep an opener was actually a way to shoehorn in whatever single the acts Crowe liked (or likely their licensing group wanted to promote) on a weekly basis. And yeah, there was something great about this show for me, a guy who seemingly can’t write about music without talking about movies or TV or fucking comic books, for someone who has difficulty writing about shit without bringing myself into it, who left academia because cutting too deeply into a telenovela ruined watching it for him. God, how many blurbs did I, in my not even two year tenure, bring up my parents in? But truthfully, what is the work that I choose to do (versus the work I’m obligater to do) but exploring what it all says about me and the people and art that made me? So yeah, Halsey will always make me think of that summer that I thought Roadies was good and didn’t know that MGK made “music”,  and I’ll never quite be able to connect to their music in a way I would have independently. This track, for all its effort, just feels like another dime a dozen single; I would fast forward through it to get to Imogen Poots and Rafe Spall flirting, and you, dear readers and fellow writers, will be unable to parse this blurb, buried in commas, semicolons, and the detritus of my perspective. I hope you’ll miss it. 
[5]

Lauren Gilbert: My first review for TSJ was a pan of a Halsey track, and so it feels fitting that my last review should also be.  Halsey is a frustrating artist to listen to; when she lets her mask slip and reveals her anger, she can write a damn good song (“at a tender age, I was cursed with rage” / “I’m tired and angry, but somebody should be”).  But most of her pop songs are deeply forgettable, and this one is no exception.  I’m glad she’s happy, but there’s no Max Martin magic here.  It’s not that the song is bad, it’s just not (so) good.
[4]

Ian Mathers: It’s my own fault for looking up these things, but this fairly standard narrative about the one who got away (directly and explicitly; that phrasing shows up in the lyrics!) takes on a new cast when you see the claim that the song is “about Halsey’s long-term relationship with Turkish-American screenwriter Alev Aydin, who directed the song’s music video and appears in it”. Given that I don’t know anything else about the two of them, suddenly it felt like “So Good” was someone Sliding Doorsing their own life, imagining a version where it didn’t work out, and maybe due to my age and marital status (tenth anniversary this November, still happy) it gave an otherwise solid but unremarkable song a strange, poignant charge. Then I noticed that the last chorus changes it so they do get together and read a bit further and discover the song is more about the period where they knew each other before they got together. And it’s still a perfectly fine song, but I miss the weirder and sadder version I had in my head for a few minutes there.
[7]

Michael Hong: Halsey seems to believe authenticity makes a pop song. They craft “So Good” around that idea, a song that gives you the cleanest image of Halsey just so it can pull the curtains aside and show you they have this lovely raspy voice and that it’s authentic and real. They write a line about Maria getting married, like suddenly that detail erases the nothingness of the rest, lines about a couple years flashing by and that one regret. It’s all just pleasant make-believe, edging towards something with each chorus without ever giving you anything, like La La Land, if La La Land were solely the glance across the club.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Until last year’s “I Am Not a Woman, I’m a God” I’d given up thinking Halsey could match 2017’s “Strangers.” Twitchy and plaintive, “So Good” can’t decide whether to revel in its mid-tempo-ness or accelerate. Given the squabbles with her label, I’d say the problem is chronic.
[5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Hushed vocals and Writing 101-level lyrical details transform this half-Taylor Swift, half-campfire singalong into the worst sort of calculated catharsis. That final, good yell points to Halsey’s career-long problem: an insistence on making sure you understand the severity of her songs before letting you feel it.
[2]

1 blerg » Monday, August 29th, 2022 1:26 pm

If you follow us on Twitter, you’ll have read that The Singles Jukebox will soon cease publishing.

This probably won’t come as a surprise given the reduced rate of posting and many key tracks that we would have been all over slipping through our fingers. There probably isn’t an Amnesty Week long enough for all of what we’ve missed so far. We will complete our backlog of scheduled posts and then post a more fitting goodbye at the end of these. The archives of the site will remain on-line. We’ll miss you.

6 blergs » Monday, August 29th, 2022 1:08 pm

Well, it looks like we’ve almost reached an end. But there’s still time for more of what we call “controversy”…

[Video][Website]
[5.91]Leah Isobel: “Do I want to be you, or be like you?” is one of the more durable queer koans — when it’s not enforced by gender, desire feels like ego. Do I want to give, or take? Nurture, or possess? Do I deserve you, or do you deserve me? Do I want your body if comes with your soul?
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: The pace, and vibe, 070 Shake sets here is so glacial as to be sluggish; this “Body” is getting no action.
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: 070 Shake’s music has always evoked the faux-sophistication of modern sci-fi — epic, sweeping minimalism, her giant synths and elegaic vocals conjuring emotion through pure show of force. It’s never meant anything, really; I’ve been fooled by her SpaceX torch songs before but no longer. Christine and the Queens presents Redcar can’t move the needle here — it’s all too much and nothing at all.
[2]

Hazel Southwell: I’d normally describe horny, drugs-referencing, sensual, blurry electro-barely-pop as exactly my music taste but this doesn’t hit at all. In a sort of inverse to the way The Weeknd’s songs commit too hard to accurately representing being messed up at a party and go through the fun zone to something else, this tries to convince you so much that it’s totally having a fun and cool time it accidentally ends up sounding like a corporate focus group. OK we got bodies, we got weird noises, we got a novocaine reference — guys, can we work on the storytelling here? We’ve gotta really get the authentic buy-in from the geriatric millennial homeowner demo.
[4]

Alex Ostroff: The gradual build from skeletal production and breaths to heavier latter-day-Kanye evil synths sets a mood, and 070 Shake and Christine and the Queens’ voices circle around one another in an entrancing way. Still, I can’t help but want something a little more substantial. “Body” feels more like an interlude or an album outro than a single. “I wanted your body, but it came with your soul” is a nice line, though.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The lilting synths over the loping bass drums are so hypnotic you almost wish that the snares don’t touch down as Chris begins to waft in, his voice so wispy and soft that the slightest move might break it. Synths crinkle as they slip under the front door, but 070 Shake kicks in the door, pulls Chris off the couch, and tosses him out into the street. As Chris falls, he begins to ponder that Dâm-Funk song he did and whether he should’ve called him to do an album together — then 070 Shake drops the Ye Vinyl out her window and it slices his body to synth ribbons which splash against the ground, shrieking and wailing, until they spin into a blinding tornado of light and disappear.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Not a demo so much as an interlude or perhaps a pupal stage: a track in the act of becoming a song. With a hook this solid, all the performer’s gotta do is not get in the way of the bloops and bleeps and helium gushes.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Christine and the Queens is consistently overrated enough (including here on TSJ) that I find myself bracing for disappointment even when he’s just a “ft.” but it turns out providing the hook on some vibey, synthy mumblerap is a good look for him. 070 Shake is still the more compelling performer here (and “I wanted your body, but it came with your soul” is a good line) but the blend works out nicely and the overall result feels like a dark, strange obverse of another good recent song about the body.
[8]

Anaïs Escobar Mathers: Talk to me with your body/when your words can’t anymore has been looping in my brain since I first heard this and it feels… timely for the kind of fatigue people are feeling around communication these days. It makes me think of sex, of touch, of affection, of grounding, of somatic bliss, of all the ways we communicate with our own bodies and others’ bodies without words. There are many ways to communicate and this song expresses that succinctly and effectively. I think there’s this place or level where we process and absorb things outside of the cerebral and “Body” encapsulates it. It’s what we’re calling a lot of art and media lately: a vibe.
[10]

John Seroff: 070 Shake’s disembodied electroburble and Christine’s pointed élan collide and blunt without significant enhancement to either. Bits of vocal and electronic filigree provide tiny sparks of possibility, but “Body”‘s overall miasma of ennui makes this bass-heavy mope du jour more of a sleepwalk than it has to be.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Not that anyone’s keeping score, but I did come around on “The Hills”. It’s a punishment jackhammer, a tripledown on fucked vibes, something so willfully obnoxious I ended up admiring it. And the bass has exquisite touch. The bass here doesn’t have the same aftershock. It taps at the shoulder as relentlessly as 070 Shake says body. But there’s a similar insistence on dragging the bit out of the cemetery, and the screams of “The Hills” are echoed in the Carpenter-core of the outro. Sometimes being transparently miserable is enough.
[6]

no blergs » Monday, August 29th, 2022 11:20 am

Is it better to let go?

[Video][Website]
[5.67]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: For something that starts with “Hey, it’s a mess out there,” this is unfortunately devoid of anything gritty or unexpected. The three major personalities in “Stay With Me” are flattened out and neutered by Harris’s glossy but tepid production, which feels far from the heights he achieved during the 2010s. 
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: Calvin Harris’s métier these days seems to be sun-soaked retro disco-pop, and this certainly fits in that bucket. Timberlake and Pharrell sound right at home on it, too (they’ve both hoed this particular row), but Halsey — uh, doesn’t. Their voice sounds lifeless and limp, and I don’t get why. It takes me completely out of the song, which is otherwise perfectly fine.
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: Halsey’s uncharacteristically flirty hook is a [10]; it’s so hot, it’s hurting my feelings that the rest of the song goes to Pharrell and Justin Timberlake. 
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: Pharrell and Timberlake have been here a thousand times, so it’s only the ill-fitting Halsey who disrupts the over-considered flow, miraculously bringing the wrong kind of blankness to the facsimile party. While the male vocalists do their best to remember what fun is, she summons a studied insouciance that jars. Either way — and from a man who once “created” disco with little more than an Amiga and his idiosyncrasies — this is the music of self-expression without any sense of self.
[6]

Al Varela: One of those collabs that seems weird on paper, but works wonderfully in execution; exactly what makes Funk Wav Calvin Harris such a delight. Justin Timberlake, even this far into his career, can knock out this brand of funk in his sleep, but it’s Halsey’s flirty chorus that makes this even more of a wonderful surprise. She doesn’t get to do much, but her presence is still baked into every facet of this fun summer love song. Pharrell acting as the smooth-voiced hypeman once again helps too!
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Every part of this is perverse — the guitars are phasered within an inch of incoherence, Timberlake and Halsey are forced into strange, tight melodies without sense, and Pharrell sounds as inhuman as ever. Taken as a whole it sounds wrong, like a vinyl record left in a hot car. And yet I keep coming back to it. Perhaps, in a pop landscape filled with boringly competent disco pastiche, excitingly incompetent disco pastiche has its place.
[5]

2 blergs » Saturday, August 27th, 2022 8:30 am

Lukewarm shit.

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Thomas Inskeep: Durk raps about “bitches” (the less said about his verse, the better), and Kanye does his conspicuous consumption lines on autopilot. But Cardi, as is nearly always the case, comes with the, well, hot shit. Over a minimal beat (which frankly spotlights her voice better), she spits and spits and proves yet again that she’s so far above the commercial hip hop game right now — well, her and Megan — that it’s ridiculous. Minus two points for her guests’ verses.
[6]

Oliver Maier: Cardi could stand to go for more interesting beats if she’s going to drop so infrequently (and Tay Keith can do better), but she, Durk and even Kanye all manage to be charming on this, if not that clever.
[6]

Andy Hutchins: Cardi was the hottest shit circa the release of Invasion of Privacy, and she had bona fide hits with “WAP” and “Up,” but this just sounds like a distress signal from label-based purgatory: The same “super fly” Jimmy Snuka bar hundreds before have used, no brags bigger than buying houses and wearing unreleased Chanel, nothing more clever than “I’m a bad bitch at breakfast,” and all over a stepped-on variation of Tay Keith’s signature minor key menace. (Telling that AJ Tracey and Aitch realized they could do more jogging than bragging and slid better on “Rain”!) Smurk has some entertainingly smirky bars, but he ain’t carrying Cardi and an entirely uninspired Ye.
[3]

Tobi Tella: A few years out from her massive debut, it’s weird to see Cardi become the “Ol Reliable” of mainstream female rappers. There’s nothing wrong with this; she gets in some good punchlines, the hook is fine enough, Lil Durk and Kanye don’t embarrass themselves (although Durk insisting the song is for Glock users only may have needed some focus grouping), but nothing about it makes it essential. Feels weird to ask such a big personality this, but can we get some style with this substance?
[6]

Andrew Karpan: A continuous and simmering rage animates Cardi’s first top-billed record in over a year. Her voice quivers with audible impatience as it crawls around a quiet blare of stylishly ominous, hard beats from Tay Keith. This creates a kind of frustrated authenticity that swallows the song whole, leaving an impression not of so-called street life, but of hours of studio time. On the other side of the song is Kanye, another studio rap maven, who continues to both push nobly at the sonic boundaries of his repeated scatting on last year’s Donda (good) and threaten to stalk his ex-wife (bad). In between all this, Lil Durk is perhaps slightly underappreciated.
[6]

Harlan Talib Ockey: If you clipped ten seconds from “Hot Shit” at random, I might be impressed, but sitting through all of it is exhausting. Cardi’s verse feels like an endless slog, given the sheer repetitiveness of her flow. Although she gets a few good lines in (“I don’t know what’s colder, man, my heart or my necklace”), most of it is on the level of rhyming “contest” with “contest”. Even the energy she brings drains out almost immediately with such an obvious lack of variety or progression. Kanye’s flow is actually mildly interesting, but it’s so full of self-absorbed, arcane nonsense about God, Skete, and Balenciaga that I can’t sit through it either. Lil Durk, who would be largely ignorable in any other song, is somehow the strongest link; he sticks to the theme, switches up his rhythm a few times and sounds like he genuinely wants to be here. The production is the most viscerally grueling element of all, sending an overpowering onslaught of bass to incessantly club you over the head. There is such a thing as going too hard, especially when doing that without variation for the entire song. Any component that might work here is hammered into the listener in the most punishing way possible, with no sense of structure or respite at any point. I’m so tired.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Cardi sounds engaged, and, boy, can I relate to “I don’t know what’s colder, man, my heart or my necklace.” Kanye offers varied meter and a Maybach full of merchandise. Durk barely hangs on. A draw.
[5]

1 blerg » Thursday, August 25th, 2022 4:10 pm

We’ve discovered the seam of average: wordless Becky Hill hooks…

[Video]
[5.00]

Leah Isobel: “Dun dun dun,” as a sound, is blunt and closed-off, almost comical — it lacks the airy percussiveness of a “la di da,” for instance. When Becky and Ella sing it to double the instrumental, the effect isn’t captivating or emotional. It communicates unsubtly, cynically: here is a hook. Dance, fucker.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: Just as there are big dumb summer action movies, the kind where you put up with plot hiccups and just-OK acting for a two-hour rush of explosions and movie theater air conditioning, this is a big dumb summer dance single. There’s nothing particularly artistic happening — David Guetta is the epitome of a genre whore, jumping from one style of dance to another in his eternal search for a hit, and both Hill and Henderson are perfectly fine, nothing-too-special vocalists. But yet, it works. Hill’s voice, in particular, is just quirky enough to sound unique, and Guetta is nothing if not a pro: he knows what he’s doing, and on “Crazy” he gets it right. Big, dumb, but an awfully fun sugar rush, like a handful of Skittles eaten at the beach. 
[8]

Oliver Maier: I think absolutely every song that these three touch runs from a [2] to a very generous [7] but I have a respect for them all the same. There’s no affectation of depth — it’s boring, reliable dance music that gets the job done. Everything happening here is an excuse for three minutes of kick drum to get you through that last bit of cardio. Begrudging it would be like getting mad at a packet of instant noodles for not being tasty.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: As an Old in an ever-accelerating world, it is strangely comforting that David Guetta is still out there doing David Guetta things. He’s even got better mainstream dancepop to sound like.
[6]

Andrew Karpan: Guetta records these days generally feel big and go nowhere, but the effect is compounded slightly by the decision to have EDM dancefloor queen Becky Hill’s anonymously brusque singing repeated, for some reason, by Ella Henderson. In retrospect, I think Hill did a sharper job than gave her credit for when she last cut such a song — or perhaps the returns from the pair are just that diminishing. The loud, wordless vocalizations that tie the indistinguishable musical strands together here made me think, however, of “Tom’s Diner,” which is always nice in the cool evenings as the summer heat dies quietly.
[2]

Hannah Jocelyn: In an age of Instagram therapists, I’m surprised people aren’t tearing this apart: “I didn’t care for anyone until there was you”? “You’re my oxygen, now I can finally breathe”? I’d bet money this relationship failed by the time the song was released. Especially as it feels like it was recorded a decade ago. Maybe people aren’t latching on to it because there’s nothing to latch on to.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: The power of love is ineffable, so fair enough, why bother with details? The power of Love Island, meanwhile, was a code cracked long ago. Boohoo deals for all and easy wins for the powerhouse Hill. The only curveball here is the presence of a pretender to her throne, but to the naked eye that ball still seems to bounce vigorously in the straightest of lines.
[7]

no blergs » Friday, August 19th, 2022 12:18 pm

What happens in Vegas…

[Video][Website]
[5.33]Thomas Inskeep: Interpolating “Hound Dog,” sure, but to what end? As dead as Elvis.
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Not as fun as either Elvis or any of the Planet Her tracks still hanging around the charts, but a perfectly adequate movie tie-in nonetheless. You get the sense that Doja Cat would rather not be having to rap around Big Mama Thorton’s chopped up vocals or around the vague Presleyan mythos (she doesn’t even talk about Vegas that much, even though she’s clearly a good culture fit), but when she gets a chance to break from the clutter she sounds like the most interesting thing in all of pop music.
[6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Okay, maybe I do have a weakness for Baz Luhrmann soundtracks. I feel so dedicated to my general dislike of Doja’s dominance that it feels almost sinful to enjoy this, especially with the sample being what it is. Perhaps when I finally see Elvis it’ll lose its luster in the way most Baz does, slowing to a crawl after sixty frenetic minutes. But for now, I’ll bounce to the lazy Dog and Frog rhyme like I do to will.i.am on “Bang Bang”.
[6]

Leah Isobel: “Vegas” semi-deconstructs the myth of Elvis by drawing a parallel between him and the ain’t-shit dude Doja rips apart, while simultaneously sampling – and serving as promotion for – the film that has done more to prop up that myth than any other cultural ephemera in the last decade. These competing impulses don’t push on each other in any compelling way; despite Doja’s energy, the chorus feels limp and the beat grating, as if the song’s duty as a piece of advertising muffles its perspective.
[4]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis soundtrack simply repeats his Great Gatsby soundtrack’s concept verbatim — “how do you do, fellow kids” — but I regret to inform you that it still works. As a personal preference, I may be the world’s biggest advocate for sampling more ’50s blues. Even apart from that, however, Doja absolutely kills this, from the vicious portrait she paints of her target to the transfixing charisma in her delivery. Not only can you practically hear her holding for applause at the end of each verse, it’s hard to refrain from cheering. The late Shonka Dukureh is also a formidable secret weapon; embodying Big Mama Thornton’s titanic vocals should be an impossible task, and yet she does so effortlessly. There are several unstable transition points between the modern production layer and the 1950s-style instrumental, but it locks back together in the verses. Elvis who?
[8]

Alfred Soto: By all means recontexualize/sully Elvis — he’s existed as postage stamp since I was a kid. This catchy nothing interpolates a howled “Hound Dog” callback over a trap beat and offers little in the service of humanity, but after years in search of a context Doja Cat lives again.
[6]

no blergs » Tuesday, August 16th, 2022 5:54 pm

Whoever said that love knew no genre?

[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Alfred Soto: Once upon a long ago the insistent whack of “Like I Love Country Music” would’ve occasioned serious chatter about genre and who polices it. In 2022, to quote Brad Paisley a decade ago, this is country music. I like the way Kane Brown’s vocal plays hoochie-coochie with the guitar interjections; I like less the rote callbacks to legends who existed on Earth to give their blessings to Brown. This is fine. It isn’t Miranda Lambert.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep:  “Like I Love Country Music”‘s version of country music is so smart and so reminiscent of Shania Twain’s ’90s-’00s Imperial Phase: it thumps (and occasionally features a squalling electric guitar) while still spotlighting “trad” country instrumentation (barroom piano, fiddle, steel guitar). None of this would matter if it weren’t topped by the endlessly charming Brown, however; you can damned near hear him smiling as he sings. Come to think of it, that’s much like Twain’s peak period, too. The lyrics here are cute and a bit pat — I mean, how many country songs have you heard, especially from the ’90s forward, praising the history of the genre in which they’re being performed? — but Brown is able to sell them. He’s one of the best stars the genre has to offer right now, and this is further proof. From almost any other male commercial country artist right now, this would be a [6] at best, but in Brown’s hands it’s an 
[8]

Kayla Beardslee: This song sounds exactly like you would expect based on the title, but the hook plus guitars get the job done. It’s corny, but ultimately harmless. I’m not sure we of the Jukebox have much of a right to tease other people for randomly spouting off about how much they love music!
[5]

Al Varela: Nashville’s current love affair with 90s country throwbacks has been surprisingly fruitful. Though “Like I Love Country Music” isn’t as creative as Cole Swindell’s “She Had Me at Heads Carolina” or as outstanding as Scotty McCreery’s “Damn Strait”, it manages to get by almost entirely on its rich, delightful sound. In reality, the writing is pretty derivative and relies on easy name drops, but the twang of the electric guitar and fiddle on top of Kane Brown’s excellent baritone… It’s such a cheat. And then the fiddle solo!!! The fiddle solo!!!! On top of that, there are little moments like the quick vocal sample of “Brand New Man” by Brooks & Dunn and the song doing a fake-out ending before going off on an instrumental solo, which, ugh! Again! Cheating! But it sounds so fun and full of love! I can’t help but smile.
[8]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: This sounds tailor-made for Season 3 of The Righteous Gemstones, and reader, that’s a good thing. The “Black Skinhead” drums lead into a solid jam, with well-executed fiddle and what sounds like pedal steel. Sometimes a song irritates when it pulls a fake ending, but “Like I Love Country Music” feels less like a sitcom lasting a season too many and more like your buddy deciding he can have one more beer.
[8]

Leah Isobel: The whole concept is a little overbearing, but the crunchy stadium guitars and Brown’s appealing, dorky enthusiasm sell it.
[7]

2 blergs » Wednesday, August 10th, 2022 8:09 pm

We found a glimpse of your score, if that helps…

[Video][Website]
[1.83]

Thomas Inskeep: An insufferable sadboy piano ballad that damned near makes the likes of Sheeran sound like Godflesh. 
[0]

Katherine St Asaph: The problem with Joji remains the fact that a significant portion of his audience would be equally happy being seduced by Filthy Frank.
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: He’s somehow more disrespectful to the audience doing sincere piano balladry than edgelord YouTuber trash. This is bad and boring in ways that I did not think were still possible, the nadir of this year’s trend of worthless pop men selling hook-devoid wares on the strength of their charisma alone. The problem here is, of course, that Joji lacks even the charm of Jack Harlow, let alone Harry Styles or Drake. Even a more distinct personality would have trouble selling this. “Glimpse of Us” resembles most of all the first songs that we all write when we’re heartbroken teenagers, clumsy stabs at trenchant sentiment let down by a lack of specificity and life experience. Joji’s 30!
[0]

Leah Isobel: There’s a nice Bacharach lilt to the melody, but the lyrics are featureless and Joji’s performance is adenoidal and mushy. There’s no sharpness, nothing to pierce through the soggy self-regard.
[3]

Harlan Talib Ockey: I imagine this is what Adele’s discography would sound like if you stripped it of half the emotion and all of the vocal acrobatics. There are a few vaguely interesting psychedelic moments in the production, though they vanish as soon as you notice them. The skeleton of a more interesting song.
[5]

Rodrigo Pasta: Trying to talk about all that is wrong with “Glimpse of Us”, by a long shot the worst pop hit of 2022 thus far, would be too long and exhausting for a Singles Jukebox blurb. Instead, I’m going to narrow down the song’s many, many wrongdoings into a single passage: “Why, then, if she is so perfect, do I still wish that it was you?”. The killer here is not the overall (not really) “toxic” vibe of this line, it’s much more specific: it’s the “then“. That throwaway word is not only a means to fill up the cadence, it’s meant to serve as a literary device! By sheer virtue of being there, it’s meant to lace the line with a poetic air, an extra sense of delicacy and care that previously couldn’t be found. Now, the line should feel more “refined” and “thought out” — give me a break! Like it’s somehow not the same clumsy, childish writing with some smaller details to indicate that Joji really took his time writing it. That word gets even worse when you hear it: it’s just another word. A “then” could indicate a pause in a train of thought, some crippling doubt in one’s speech, maybe even make the following words feel more urgent. All of that flew by Joji, who sings it with his mouth shaped like an o and his dull, puppy-eye emoting, like words mean nothing but the sentiment they transmit. That’s not careless, that’s deliberately careless, which makes a world of difference. This is so rehearsed, all emotions leave the table. “Glimpse of Us” sets out to be pathetic (already a bad start) and ends up being goddamn twee! Delicate pixie softboi, “I can fix him” playlist fodder shit. I’d feel embarrassed if I felt there was anything being conveyed, but there’s not! Grab the keys and get in the freaking truck, you jabroni! I’ll slap you jabronis!
[0]

6 blergs » Friday, August 5th, 2022 4:26 pm

Feelings > talking…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Leah Isobel: “Late Night Talking” is luxe, lightly funky, gently wonky, and utterly sexless. It finds and demonstrates the precise amount of personality needed to make it feel present and identifiable as “Harry Styles Music” and stops right there. When people online talk about himbos, this is what they mean — not unintelligent, but blank and frictionless. Perfect, in a sense.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: I found “As It Was” a not-at-all-original ’80s pastiche, but this takes influences from ’80s pop and makes them its own. (And the chorus sounds naggingly like it’s cribbed from a track on Dua Lipa’s debut, which is a plus.) The lyrical conceit works from Styles, too.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Increasingly clear that this guy’s touchpoint for 80s funk rock is not Prince but Phil Collins doing Prince. At least when Dua Lipa did a “Blame it on the Boogie” riff she sounded like she was having fun. Here, Styles continues to perform his cosplay pop with characteristic ambivalence, trying too hard to seem cool and laid-back but not committing hard enough to seem like a good hang.
[4]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Unearthed a priceless historical artifact yesterday: the first known article to compare Harry Styles to Robert Palmer. Stereogum argues their shared poise reads merely as bland — and perhaps it did, at the time — but by now, Styles has assumed all the elements of Robert Palmer that detractors hated most. “Late Night Talking” is varnished with the same brand of soulless, impenetrable slickness, sung over the ceaseless bounce of a broken pinball machine. The lyrics, too, are polished air, consisting only of the dullest and most simplistic way to express each sentiment. Lines like “I just wanna make you happier” and “I can’t get you off my mind” may be smooth and objectively correct, but the result is so empty as to be gravely, impossibly boring.
[3]

Al Varela: Harry Styles is so good at making excellent pop music. He’s not a stand-out incredible pop star or anything, but that doesn’t matter much when “Late Night Talking” has so much infectious momentum behind it. It’s catchy in the feel-good way where you can find yourself dancing to it as you head down the sidewalk, living in Harry’s awkward charm and indulging in the little moments that make the song so good. My favorite part is that little “wooOOO” right before the second pre-chorus.
[9]

Scott Mildenhall: There is an appeal to the contrast between the unshakeably languid performance of Styles and the chirpy synths jittering around him, but at the same time he would do well to sound just a little bit more invested. It gives the sense that he isn’t truly feeling this, which would be a shame — regardless, the song succeeds in spite of him more than because of him.
[7]

Alfred Soto: As his confidence has grown (without yet earning the mush offered on his behalf a few years ago), Harry Styles has perfected a mean-what-I-say forthrightness. Innuendo suits him as well as a mustache. “Watermelon Sugar”? I mean, really. Crisp and meaningless, “Late Night Talking” almost prompts an ugh, but its staccato chorus and expert programming won me over. Go on, Harry — keep chattering.
[7]

no blergs » Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022 4:17 pm