Little meta…

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[5.23]

Kayla Beardslee: It’s easy to take Little Mix for granted, but they have one of my favorite discographies in mainstream pop: of course they have traditional pop hits and stunning ballads, but they also have songs that use wasabi as a metaphor for fame, joke abut having sex in traffic, and interpolate “O Fortuna” (please click that last link, it’s my favorite LM song). That’s all just to say that I am a big Little Mix fan, I always look forward to what their new releases will bring — and I think “Sweet Melody” is one of their best traditional pop singles in a long time. The production feels fresh, the members kill it vocally (special mention to Leigh-Anne’s bridge!), and the extended metaphor of music representing a relationship is fun and well-written (“He would lie, he would cheat/Over syncopated beats” is one of the coolest-sounding lines of the year). There are a few things I have mixed feelings on, like Jesy’s “du du”s breaking up the verses, the mixing in the chorus blending all their voices together, and the production in the ending measures suddenly cutting off, but I understand those choices and they don’t bother me too much. After all, Little Mix has spent years proving to us that they know how to get weird: a handful of unexpected moments just makes the single feel more like their own.
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Vikram Joseph: “Sweet Melody” joins a very select group of meta-songs that incorporates a hook which is ostensibly the hook from another, fictional song (the only other example I can think of right now is Kero Kero Bonito’s “Heard A Song” – please comment below if you can think of another!). Whereas KKB burrowed deep into an elaborate, hilarious fantasy about their mythical bop (which it turns out, in an even more meta twist, might not even be real in the song’s universe), Little Mix use theirs as a platform for a more prosaic story about a charming but unfaithful ex. He sounds like an absolute reprobate, but credit where due: his melody is a proper earworm. And there’s a nice tie-in with that syncopated hook and the line, “He would lie, he would cheat over syncopated beats.” (Perrie, babe, don’t even speak to all those sequencers-and-beats boys: when they kiss they spit white noise.) There’s better songs on Confetti, but this is unexpectedly conceptual fun.
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David Moore: Big fan of the meta melody premise, where the song you “remember” is the song you’re currently singing. What are the best songs where the singer claims they are singing a different song that is, in fact, the current song? TikTok kids seem to have done an earnest take on the Rules of Attraction Eurotrip montage with one of ’em. Contra the song, I actually kind of like the words, but the focus on that melody underlines how weak it is. Why couldn’t they have just both loved “Tom’s Diner” or something? (Does “Tom’s Diner” count? Depends on if the “your voice” she’s thinking of is singing the melody, I guess.)
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Katie Gill: So, this has the same problem as “Best Song Ever.” If you’re describing a song within a song, you’ve made your job TEN TIMES HARDER. That little “doo doo, doo doo doo” does not sound: 1. sweet; 2. like something that would make you stop in your tracks; or 3. danceable. “Best Song Ever” gets away with it’s song in a song because of sheer goofy-ass energy and admitting that it really doesn’t know what the best song was like. And yeah, I know that this is a “my man did me WRONG” song so it makes sense that the melody isn’t sweet at all to begin with (though that brings me into point #2, Little Mix have done much better songs about men being jerks). But at least shoot for danceable.
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Aaron Bergstrom: If your song is built around the metaphor of a melody so all-consuming that it leaves the listener powerless in its thrall, the actual melody you keep pointing back to cannot be this insipid, sub-“Baby Shark”-level doo doo doo anti-hook.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The strategy of drawing attention to that wordless hook — putting it up front, inserting it after every verse, naming your song after its supposed sweetness — is deeply confusing. “Sweet Melody” is laid low by its sweet melody. Everything else is about as good as Little Mix’s extremely high energy pop blend can get — each vocalist gets to do something fun with the twisty verse melodies, the chaos of the dance breaks at least makes thematic sense (the syncopation when they say “syncopated beats” kills me every time), and the chorus harmonies sound glorious: the girl group construed as a blunt force weapon. But if a song wants to work on the virtue of its melody, it has to be willing to fail on the weakness of that very same melody.
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Alfred Soto: Songs about performing good songs struggle when the sausage casing boasts too many holes. The finger snaps, onomatopoetic hook, and massed vocals suggest activity, not inspiration, as if 2004-era Destiny’s Child fascinated Little Mix to distraction.
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Nortey Dowuona: The bass is limping around the cage while Little Mix sing their new song to it. The drums and percussion begin pounding on the terrarium glass, rather excited by the new visitors. The bass was so excited, it started dancing on hits hind paws, while the synth paused their slipping out of their cage to weave up the harmonies and tucking them in their bag to eat. As the synths eat the harmonies, they begin to float, seeing too many stars, until they realize they’re just landing in a floodlight, then leap out and destroy the terrarium and cage, freeing the bass and percussion. The three of them circle a delighted Little Mix, who disappear with them in a puff of smoke.
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Iain Mew: The combination of tried and tested pop house sound and diagetic “do-do-do-do” put me in mind of Jax Jones and Ina Wroldsen’s “Breathe,” another MNEK co-write that pleads for the ending of its own hook. Where “Sweet Melody” outdoes it is in committing totally to fleshing out the concept of song as expression of relationship, turning the love interest into a songwriter to complete a circle (a convenient move eased by biography). The propulsive sound eases past some of the more strained lines, and it’s all worth it for “he would lie, he would cheat, over syncopated beats.”
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John Seroff: Most of the current generation of Little Mix’s algorithmically-constructed Audio Product generally retains the chemical whiff of freshly-cracked plastic clamshell packaging, but the bouquet of “Sweet Melody” also contains hints of expired pineapple trop, watery salsa, and a distinctly cheesy pong. That there’s an almost pleasurable aroma yet to be found in such an overproduced melange speaks well to the band’s adherence to professional-strength formula. What spin class among us could argue that this doesn’t get the job done? 
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Thomas Inskeep: “Sweet Melody” doesn’t know what song it wants to be: there’s straightforward pop, harried EDM, reggaeton, and even a brief, very Anglicized version of salsa (?!) going on, while its “doo-doo/doo-doo-doo-doo” chorus sounds as if it was written by a TikTok bot. Not surprising, then, that this has five credited songwriters and five producers, all of whom would seem to be pulling the song in different, competing directions.
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Austin Nguyen: Besides the color palette screw-up that are Jesy’s nails (were highlighter yellow acrylics really the only ones they had on set?), which single-handedly ruin the whole Bad Bitches Back in Black color palette, the music video for “Sweet Melody” functions more as a distraction from the song rather than an enhancement of it. Each choreographic hit, body roll, and hair flip — especially during Jade and Leigh-Anne’s solos — either seems forced with undeserved intensity or a complete non-sequitur. (The chorus just blared in with no build-up, and your first instinct is Handsome Squidward Falling hand movements?) Other songs have used visual gauze to cover up what the music lacks — one of two ways “Sweet Melody” resembles “Love Lies,” the second being the fact that the verses are the same, just sped up and without guitar — but Little Mix seems to give themselves no other choice. After all, when your gimmicks and production are a pastiche of Bruno Mars, BLACKPINK, and BANKS, what else can you do but dance in the hopes that sight will overcome sound?
[5]

Stephen Eisermann: During these trying times, I’ve taken up cooking. I have tried recipes easy and hard, from all different countries and cultures, but one thing remains true: I (still, mostly) cannot cook. No matter how hard I try, something always goes wrong. I mention this, because there was a recent recipe for a gumbo that I tried that was absolutely mind-blowing during the first couple of bites. I was certain that I had not only finally learned to cook, but that I was a sous-chef waiting to happen. Then, I got about a quarter through my plate and it started getting a little too salty and the shrimp was a bit too chewy. As I neared the halfway mark, I bit into some hard celery and I noticed the sausage tasted weird. Committed to my original opinion, I pushed past the saltiness, chewiness, excess spice — just to pretend I did something. It turns out, though, I just made something inedible. Myriad ingredients (even stuff the recipe didn’t ask for, but I’m a chef, remember!) couldn’t fix the dish, just like the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink production can’t make save this song. Such a promising intro ruined by a little too much of everything. 
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