The Singles Jukebox

That’s pronounced “jay-oh-one,” not “joy” as today’s editor believed until just a minute ago…

[Video]
[5.30]

Taylor Alatorre: The question of whether a Japanese band can make K-pop music brings to mind tedious online arguments about whether things like Code Lyoko and RWBY can properly be considered anime. Maybe it’s just my paternalistic Yankee mindset that assigns any sort of importance to this question — let a hundred NCTs bloom if that’s what today’s Japanese audiences really want from their idols. It should be possible to make a corporate workaround to cultural import restrictions sound sexier or at least less constipated than this, though.
[4]

Isabel Cole: Infectiously effusive, with some great rhythmic touches slinking, clicking, and banging away throughout, keeping things feeling busy but never crowded, like a party with exactly the right amount of guests. The vocals commit so energetically that the bits that could feel corny just feel fun, a big silly game we’re all invited to join.
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: It feels inert. I’ve played it three times and am listening to it now, one of the boys is sanging his ass off, and it feels like a fan circling behind me.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: What if “Can’t Stop the Feeling” had a “Can’t Stop the Feeling”?
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It’s not these guys’ fault, really — boy bands have been putting out lite funk since the dawn of funk. But at this point this style sounds less like music and more like cosmic background radiation, a wallpaper of sound that I associate more with podcast ad bumpers and other forms of strictly functional music than anything worthy of review.
[3]

TA Inskeep: A smart, absurdly catchy three minutes that mashes at least four songs together with live-sounding drums, crossing both pure pop and pop-rock, and ends up sounding like a sibling to peak-era One Direction. 
[7]

Alfred Soto: The rhythm guitars and percussive instruments signify “funk” but “Love Seeker” is as funky as Mike Pence. Play “Love Seeker” between a couple of, say, Harry Styles’ fast ones from his last album and it makes sense. Brief, bright, banal — solid pop.
[7]

Aaron Bergstrom: As much as I try to fight it, I’m still a sucker for a clickbait-y headline, and “Why Do Animals Keep Evolving into Crabs?” really scratched that itch for a science-illiterate lit major. (The answer is something called “carcinization.”) As far as the more pressing question, “Why Do Different Genres Keep Evolving Into ‘Uptown Funk’?”, I’m not sure if science has cracked that one yet.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: I can’t tell whether this is pastiching the same funk and new jack swing Bruno Mars did, or skipping a step and just pastiching Bruno Mars instead. The charms are similar.
[6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I really want to give this a higher score because the delivery is so suave, but I can’t when the first thing I intuit from the beat is buying cars for my local Toyota-thon. 
[4]