The Singles Jukebox

From Will A., rave reviews for a rave revue…

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[8.00]

Will Adams: I’ve always loved how Kelly Lee Owens uses repetition. She often treats her voice like a synth, gradually opening the filter to increase the intensity of her songs’ phrases. “Love You Got” is Owens’ most pop-forward effort to date; the titular line is situated within a verse, a brief pre-chorus and additional mini-hooks (‘wanting pure euphoria’; “feel it resonate”). The core, though is those three words, looped over and over to hypnotic effect. On paper, this looks like thin songwriting. In practice, it’s astounding, in no small part to how massive the song is. Owens’ production is as laser cut as ever — percussion like ice shards, reverb like wind shears, synth pads like glassy water — but it’s the booming bass that turns “Love You Got” into an inescapable gravity field pulling you to the dance floor.
[9]

Al Varela: You know a song is good when the synth bass is absolutely throttling your speakers. The production of this song alone is magnificent. A gorgeously blended whirlpool of starry-eyed synths, sandy beats, and of course a synth bass that keeps you moving your head throughout the entire runtime. Kelly Lee Owens’ effortless vocals drifting across the track really ties it all together. It’s like the most ethereal experience you’ll ever have on the dance floor, where the mood and the lighting hits just right. One of my favorite discoveries from this year’s Amnesty.
[10]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s strange and deeply lush, layering synths atop each other while looping Owens’ voice. Yet once it breaks from that haze in a breakdown of claps, it simply settles back into a dull, flatly programmed kick snare pattern, with the flurry of claps raining down as a brief filler. 
[6]

Tim de Reuse: Even since her debut, Kelly Lee Owens’ version of tech-house has always struck me as so glassy, precise, and meticulously well-produced as to make itself completely unremarkable: so close to the platonic ideal of its genre that it doesn’t really have the capacity to surprise. The spirited vocal hook doesn’t really change the formula, but it’s nice to have there, I guess. Fun harmonies. Bacon on a competent cheeseburger.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: When I can forget that my primary association with Kelly Lee Owens is a disastrous date that was entirely my fault, her music is almost perfect. “Love You Got” is also almost perfect, except for a big structural problem: the starchy, incessant hook stiffens the track up right when it should surrender to wordless bliss. Oh well, that’s what the remixes are for (whenever they come out).
[8]

Isabel Cole: Feels longer than it is in a good way, stretching time like taffy around its center. For some reason that keeps coming to mind is not a dance floor but a beach at night, dark but for the glint of moonlight on the waves, serene but never still as lines surface, build, crest, and slip back out to sea.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The way this track goes from tension and release back to contemplation is professionalism to commend. Also: it bangs, whether mirror dancing or at the club.
[8]

Kat Stevens: “Ah, Kelly Lee Owens is making The Kompakt Bork noise,” I thought to myself when I first heard this track. An icy echoed brrrr, sweeping through the streets, enveloping the city in a crystalline fog and trapping Kelly and her lover in an endless spiral of euphoric microhouse. I visited Cologne for the first time this summer and finally made my pilgrimage to the Kompakt record shop in 32C heat (could have done with some of those chilly vibes tbh, we had to make do with a nearby ice cream stand). While spending a large amount of Euros in said shop, I had a realisation: the only Kompakt CDs I had bought in the last decade had been from the Pop Ambient series, which on the whole favours birdsong and unexplained humming instead of Bork Bork Bork. Now I’ve got to the end of writing this blurb I’ve had another realisation: that it’s actually The Booka Shade Bork noise that Kelly is making, and Booka Shade weren’t on Kompakt at all! As you were.
[8]

Ian Mathers: The idea of desire lines between people is an intriguing one and if this particular track is content to leave it as a resonant but unexplored idea, Owens’ vocal lines carve their own equivalents, until “wanting pure euphoria” slides into sounding like “dancing pure euphoria” as those dark chords crash around in the back. Maybe I should go out dancing again.
[9]