Synthesizers and exclamation points, oh my!
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[5.89]
Ian Mathers: There was a time within fairly recent memory when a song like “Wait and See” could have gotten over on the novelty of the music, but now everyone is returning to the golden age of synthpop, which means that merely middling efforts suddenly suffer by comparison. It’s not like they helped by filming an homage to old New Order videos for this one.
[5]
Sally O’Rourke: The DFA sound is all but unimpeachable in my eyes, and the way the swirling sea of keyboards and pianos in “Wait & See” meld together is a thing of beauty. I just wish Holy Ghost! had remembered that the best synthpop needs a human element — James Murphy’s self-deprecation, Neil Tennant’s pensiveness, Bernard Sumner’s endearingly dodgy vocals — to cut through all those shiny machines.
[7]
Kat Stevens: I picture a group of earnest young men, eager to prove that they love both Depeche Mode and Ashford & Simpson! They are also making serious, controlled bobbing movements from the knees, whilst holding on to a small keyboard on a stand for support.
[7]
Jer Fairall: The best songs on Holy Ghost!’s debut album pick and choose their way through instrumental quirks from the entire run of ’80s synth pop and then lay all of the parts out to be reassembled into an idealists’ super-concoction of dance music that is acutely aware of its funk and disco origins. You don’t need to know that they’re on DFA to feel James Murphy’s influence all over this, in other words. “Wait and See,” though, cares as much about the vocals as the music, leaving the just-okay singing to carry a little too much of the burden. The result? Something that would have been, circa 1986, a perfectly fine synth-pop single, though one barely remembered by today’s nostalgists — especially now that we again find ourselves lousy with them.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Admittedly, this is as sprightly as anything on the Junior Boys album, but it’s almost as anonymous. Remember the gaudy eighties — don’t embalm them.
[5]
Hazel Robinson: If in twenty years time someone slips this into a Sounds Of The 80s show I’d find it fully believable. In the meantime I won’t turn it off, but it really does nothing. The comparisons with LCD Soundsystem or Cut Copy are totally unmerited; at least they have a sense of space and fun.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: Every point here is for the track, which clangs and clinks and whooshes like any decades-new synthpop track must. At least the Holy Ghost! guys seem pretty pleased with it. Why else would they sing like this?
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: While it plays it’s a charming way to pass the time, but when it stops and I review the last few minutes in my mind, I find no memory there at all. A tidy blank.
[4]
Michaela Drapes: It would be easy for me to give this one a [10] and say: Mea culpa, y’all — this is what hits my nostalgia buttons. The thing is, this isn’t really nostalgic music (it is, after all, a song about the very immediate problems of dating in NYC), and this one’s not quite a ten. But every time I hear the soaring oh-oh-oh-oh-oh outro punctuated by that final resonant chord and flittering, fading blips, I can almost be convinced to turn a blind eye to the slightly sloppy edges around the rest of the track.
[8]