The Singles Jukebox

Pride Month may be over, but midnight rides on…

[Video]
[4.27]

Kylo Nocom: Orville Peck, as far as I’m aware, has always been bad winking kitsch with an occasionally tender moment. Kylie Minogue’s brief, inexplicable genre dalliance was underappreciated for its solid pop songwriting, overshadowed by the easy headline of “Kylie Goes Country!” Diplo is somehow still getting work. Unfortunately, this track is like the worst instincts of each transformed into some horrific hydra. Orville’s pained groaning clashes against Kylie’s whispers and belting, neither finding a spot where they complement each other; still, the song chugs on! There’s even a goofy whistle drop thrown in there, like a “fuck you, I’m here too!” from Diplo himself.
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Alfred Soto: I guess they’re going for the contrast between Kylie Minogue’s libidinous squeak and Orville Peck’s bullfrog gravitas. Perhaps all involved hoped the presence of Kylie would transform “Midnight Ride” into “Baby I’m Burnin'” for the post-Diplo era. I’ll admit it sounds as uncharacteristic of its moment as Zach Bryan’s “Pink Skies.” 
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TA Inskeep: Peck’s and Minogue’s voices pair okay enough, but Diplo (I’m gonna blame him) doesn’t bring much to the song’s production. If you want true disco country, go for Adam Mac’s “Disco Cowboy,” which gets it right in every way “Midnight Ride” doesn’t.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: This is extremely sexy until you come to the realization that it seems like within the canon of the song Orville Peck is wooing Kylie Minogue, and then it’s suddenly hilarious but not quite camp. It doesn’t help that the chirpy whistle motif sounds jacked from a Flo Rida song. 
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Ian Mathers: Peck continues to have the kind of voice that makes questions of camp and pastiche irrelevant (it is and it isn’t and who cares?), and as great a performer as Minogue is, always, her voice pales in comparison. Diplo’s production continues to be either uninteresting or so ubiquitous as to seem uninteresting — suggesting, once more and with renewed force, that it’s probably worth finding someone else to work with.
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Nortey Dowuona: Fuck Diplo and fuck critically engaging with his music. (Orville and Kylie sound real fucking good tho.) (Also the drum programming is fucking terrible.) 
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Katherine St. Asaph: Fuck Diplo. That out of the way, Orville Peck is still kinda giving Meat Loaf, and the panting melodrama certainly aspires to be giving Jim Steinman, though its execution lacks chest heave.
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Taylor Alatorre: “Fake it ’til you make it,” they say, but this song’s fake-confidence in its own radio potential is stripped bare after the tongue-in-cheek harlequinisms of the spoken-word bridge. It could be that Orville Peck became aware that “Midnight Ride” wasn’t organically generating the sense of windswept drama that he’d been banking on, and so a turn to the extra-musical was a brute necessity; or he was so starstruck by Kylie’s presence that he wrote an entire song for the sole purpose of reciting this breathless soap opera dialogue with her. Either way, it’s a creative choice that communicates far more than the arid verses or the overcrowded choruses do, though unfortunately far less than the Diplo-by-numbers whistle hook does.
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Brad Shoup: Peck is snapped to Kylie’s wavelength, from the sneaky homages in his phrasing to the unapologetic pleasure-seeking: inhaling all the heat he can before getting bored. That extends to the production—not the campfire camp, the vibe of which is essentially “Big Enough” with the sound off—but the cruise-control disco. There’s barely anything left for her to do! He gets to wriggle a little on the spoken bridge, but this is more a one-reel gag than a widescreen romp. 
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Jonathan Bradley: For all the gothic Western drama Peck promises in “Midnight Ride,” he delivers a trot through a rather featureless landscape. Perhaps that’s for the best as far as Kylie’s concerned; her last collaboration with a theatrical baritone prima donna gave her a much richer role, but she also ended up bludgeoned beside a river. Here, she’s just whistled at.
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Mark Sinker: “Dumb or not much to say?” porque no los dos.jpg 
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