The Singles Jukebox

If I told you this was a POD cover, you’d believe me just based on this photo, right?

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[3.00]

Will Adams: The chorus is a wonder of contradictions. She’s all alone, except there’s someone there to take her home. Home is where dreams are made of gold, even though the club is presented as the ideal place. The beat is uncontrolled, even though it sounds like it was generated by five lines of code. Come on, make her feel alive, sung over a track so lifeless. It’s not that “Alive” is any worse than its banshee bosh contemporaries, but, Jesus Christ, isn’t anyone starting to get bored with this?
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: I guess I knew that people were going to aspire to the condition of Rita Ora. I just wasn’t expecting it to happen already.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: I can’t pinpoint anything particularly bad about this song or the countless EDM tracks boasting the exact same message, I’m just burnt out on them. Being alive has never sounded so forced.
[5]

Alfred Soto: How many cliches can a lyricist cram into verses? How much treacle can you squeeze out of a piano? When will radio programmers get bored of Guetta-fied choruses?
[2]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “The zone where the beat is uncontrolled,” Jahan Yousaf sings, her voice coated in vocal processing, the lyric acting as her attempt to turn her group’s music into something ritualistic and alien and truly free. It’s a cute attempt at making utopia out of bubblegum but there’s too much structure in the formulaic thump, too much rigidity, too much control. It’s alive, yes, but it sure as hell isn’t living.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Most interesting here is the stuff beyond the song. To look at the group’s name and see what they look like, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine this might be some kind of anachronistic pop-punk or nu-metal. Well, it’s not. Is this what dance music looks like now? It’s almost what a certain strain of it sounds like – almost, because it’s not really all that loud — but the image? It made sense with Skrillex — his impenetrable walls of noise supposedly filling the gap Blink-182 and Limp Bizkit left, but matching it with this, presumably as a commercial decision, is curious. Then again, their other stuff might provide the requisite racket to explain that; this is listenable, but doesn’t exactly create an urge to investigate.
[5]

Brad Shoup: That synth rev-up ought to be outlawed by international treaty. This is dire, cynical stuff.
[0]