BOBBY NEWPORT

[Video][Website]
[5.80]

Dan MacRae: I’ve been head over heels for this since it came out. Duck Sauce have provided a swelling, surging invincibility power-up of a cut that gives my greedy lil’ heart all it could ask for. TASTEFUL CLIMBS! DECADENT GUITAR BUSINESS! BRIGHT COLOURS! JUMPING ON THE BED! SOMEONE ELSE TAKING YOUR RECYCLING BIN OUT FOR YOU! It’s a good tune is what I’m getting at.
[10]

Thomas Inskeep: Yes yes yes YES. I am by all means down with anything sampling a 1985 dud uptempo single by Melissa Manchester — let alone crafting it into a song that sounds like it could be the theme to a Jazzercise class, or a pantyhose commercial (just add the word “sheer”!). I’ve run really hot and cold on Duck Sauce’s output until now, which is odd in that I love both Armand van Helden and A-Trak individually, but this single brings the fucking house down. No drops, no sub-bass, just filter house till the breakadawn. This single is a pretty much perfect 3:15.  
[10]

Tara Hillegeist: Slap me on the side of a fishtank and call me a sucker, because I swear I watched this cartoon once when I was like, thirteen or fifteen about a bunch of blonde aliens with blue skin dancing to this song and getting kidnapped by UFOs but they weren’t really UFOs since they were controlled by humans or something? I don’t know, it was trippy; what was that from? Does anyone else know what I’m talking about? I could swear this was the song playing on the soundtrack.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: A real melange of sounds — the ascending “doodladooda” bit stirs recollections of some pirate-themed seaside ride; the ultimate juddering halt surely the sound effect the BBC once used to match the videprinter on Final Score. And yet neither really feature, both having been swiped from one song. It’s what Duck Sauce do best — rip indelible hooks from wherever they see them and make them pastel-coloured. Kitsch, catchy, and even if you haven’t heard it before, you think you have.
[7]

Anthony Easton: It’s no “Barbra Streisand,” but how they manage to push a beat or even the idea of a beat past its own logical conclusion to something that becomes close to a platonic whole is a mark of great skill. I am not sure that skill without pleasure is enough, though. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: It’s a sketch in the middle of the record, when it should be a wink in the middle of a set. Imagine the Avalanches with writers’ block, setting a a hi-nrg sample to loop overnight, hoping that it will create its own context. The vocal begins in bold, and there’s nothing that pushes it bolder or draws it back: it’s there, and it’s enough.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: So A-Trak is getting into the future-funk game, huh? How long until Diplo starts making vaporwave?
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Like speeding at 70 mph in and out of the broadcast radius of your local Jack-FM station. It baffles me sometimes what people try to make cool.
[3]

Alfred Soto: If two festival circuit veterans set a catchphrase amid the most predictable electrostutters and crashes and let the dullest voice sing said catchphrase, this is the result. As Evelyn Thomas knew thirty years ago, don’t let the production dim your own enthusiasm.
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: This is some pretty decent Stock Aitken Waterman pulse-gone-modern-dance, and were it not for the amount of times that Armand Van Helden has blown my mind, I’d simply write it off as “Well, this exists to be a thing,” note A-Trak was involved, roll my eyes, and be done with it. But now I have to deal with the fact that one of my NYC dance floor icons, the man who created so many “guido techno” (a working term that existed in my brain as a teen and despite it’s repulsiveness, still manages to feel less provincial and essentialist than E.D.M.) bangers out of stuff like Tori Amos or Sneaker Pimps. I can applaud some late period success if it means a legend is getting money, because that’s what “Barbara Streisand” was! This is pedantic. It’s needy. It’s not pleasant to watch someone who can do so much better purposely avoid that.
[2]