Much hair, few pants.
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[6.33]
Edward Okulicz: Cilla Black does Dragonette? I’m confused but not repulsed, and while I can do without “boom boom baby” and “zoom zoom to me,” an unfittingly blah couplet if ever there were one, her chorus is a pure pop delight and the wailing over the middle shows a rough but appealing side to her voice. A fine, uncomplicated little pop song of no particular ambition.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: As follow-ups to the still-giddy “Beat of My Drum” (a 10 for me now, after months of listening) go, this could have been worse, and the hyperactive background and the childlike sweetness mark it as very much the product of the same sensibility. But it reminds me a bit too much of Lily Allen’s first record, without her quick snarl to balance out the mannered rush.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Wonderful for the precise reasons — vocal quirks, extended chirpiness — that people will hate it. You can take the Diplo out of the production, but you can’t take the personality out of Nicola.
[7]
Ian Mathers: While “Lucky Day” is slightly more conventional than “Beat of My Drum,” it’s just as commendably forthright. It also foregrounds her actual voice a bit more, which highlights both its power and its rougher edges (it’s one of those voices, basically, that I found slightly grating at first and now just think is powerfully expressive). And interestingly, unlike a lot of pop songs that upfront about sexual desire, it doesn’t posit Nicola as either a supplicant or a goddess. In other words, she’s awesome, but not so awesome that she can assume you’ll give her what she wants. Isn’t that what life’s like?
[8]
Brad Shoup: I can’t ever imagine wanting to hear something like “WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA.” As delivered by Roberts, it’s a moment so cringeworthy, it’s perversely admirable — and then she tops that with those to-the-nosebleeds kisses. She wreaks havoc right down the length of this otherwise boring Dragonette track, hooting and slurring all over the place. “Are you gonna take this golden opportunity,” she asks, sounding like the world’s looniest Three-Card Monte operator. I’m passing for now, but it’s got to come together soon enough.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: Thankfully more streamlined than her unpleasantly slapdash previous single “Beat of My Drum,” but no more compelling for it. That song flopped because it was music for people with an imaginary platonic ideal of pop that has nothing to do with the messy, shifting consensus that pop actually is. “Lucky Day” might have worked as a 2002 Kylie Minogue b-side — or rather, a guide track for the same — but that’s as far as her rather lucklustre presence would extend. Roberts’s old group Girls Aloud once released a manifesto in which they defended their status as “manufactured pop, as if that were something to be ashamed of.” Great Britain, the missive declared, is a manufacturing country, and should be proud to be produce such music. Sure, but Nicola Roberts is an industry that only survives through generous subsidies.
[4]