And yet, for some reason, it appears she’s gone for the song that has her and Beyonce yelling at each other as the single instead. Funny, that…
[Website]
[5.67]
Matt Cibula: “I am on the verge of being embraced by a bunch of internet music critics; what can I do immediately to kill my momentum?”
[3]
Ramzy Alwakeel: A choppy, iron-pumping electro production bears much the same relationship to the song’s germinal material as GaGa’s striking marketing does to her capabilities as a songwriter. The waveform is high octane, but the lyrics have no more wit nor manners than “Lucky” by Britney Spears, while the harmonic work here has all the sophistication of recent Snow Patrol.
[4]
Chuck Eddy: Starts out mixing doo-wop Morse code with porn-moaning metal machine music, turns briefly into Grace Jones covering the Normal, then into upbeat downbeat dance-pop that, on a Gaga scale at least, feels kind of generic. Some generic, huh? Then stick a “Vogue”-type rap in there somewhere, and stuff about being a dressed-up vamp tonight. All in week’s work, and her week beats your year.
[7]
Kat Stevens: The compressed saxophone hook is absolutely rotten and the chord progression is even duller than “Just Dance”, barely registering on the batshit-o-meter. Then Gaga whips out a spoken word middle eight with ‘find your freedom in the music, find your Jesus, find your Kubrick/you will never fall apart Diana, you’re still in our hearts’ and the big red arrow swings firmly back into the WTF zone. Is she actually taking the piss?
[5]
Edward Okulicz: Gaga’s voice is chopped and mangled in highly unpleasant ways, which sadly detracts from her most intriguing production yet. The “Vogue” rap is delightfully off the chart in terms of nuttiness, but for all the wide-eyed, coded sincerity, this is like being comforted by a robot with a broken speech synth.
[6]
Alex Ostroff: The Fame Monster seems to be where GaGa’s hooks finally catch up with the rest of her persona, adding more influences to her bag of tricks. “Bad Romance” updated “Poker Face” with baby talk and Hitchcock references, while “Alejandro” cribs Eurotrash, Croatian melodrama and Ace of Base. “Dance in the Dark” aims higher than both. The track is lusher than most of her earlier singles, and finally ditches the JustPokerDirtyBoysDance synth patch that made The Fame sound particularly same-y. Lyrics that, for the first time ever, approach emotionally resonant are just an added bonus: “Baby loves to dance in the dark / cause when he’s looking she falls apart.”
[7]
Ian Mathers: The unabashedly sincere, temporarily Madonna aping “Dance in the Dark” is either the best or worst sign for Lady Gaga’s possible longevity yet. It lacks the daffy, witty insouciance of Gaga’s best material (“Pokerface” “Paparazzi” — even “Bad Romance”, which this song helps me realize I underestimated) and that “Vogue” section is a shame — if there’s any modern pop star who doesn’t need to pay homage to her predecessors, it’s Gaga. But even though “Dance in the Dark” has less of her ‘voice’ than Gaga’s other singles to date, it’s still a pretty great song, the stuttering crashes of the production segueing surprisingly well into a warm 80s throwback of a chorus. To the extent that the song succeeds it’s down to Lady Gaga the craftswoman rather than Lady Gaga the personality, and she pulls it off.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Stuttered vocal sample, machine gun sample, Kraftwerk-esque synth line anchor, stupid lyrics about silicon, saline, and her boyfriend thinking she’s a lez — the first seventy minutes shove their smutty pleasures hard enough to compensate for an underwhelming chorus. So what. This record is sensationalist from start to finish, seeking no referents in everyday life or how human beings talk to each other. It’s a drag queen version of life, actually, which, if you peek beneath the silicon and saline, says loads about how human beings should talk to each other.
[8]
Anthony Miccio: Why does she even release songs before videos?
[4]