Dull Alice – Wait We Actually Like This One
[Video]
[6.89]
Hannah Jocelyn: This song is insane and sounds fundamentally disjointed — I tried cutting the second pre-chorus or shuffling different sections around to figure out what wasn’t working, but it simply had to be this way. Dreamy Wolf Alice normally outdoes their British-rock-savior mode (“Yuk Foo” and “Giant Peach” are low points); this goes in a completely different direction, into the arch art-rock Last Dinner Party think they’re doing. TLDP try to be edgy, but don’t actually risk sounding off-putting. l had no idea Wolf Alice had something this baffling in them, and it’s funny that it took Greg Kurstin of all people to bring it out.
[8]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I do not understand the internal logic of this song at all — I am on record not understanding why Wolf Alice songs do the things they do, generally — but understanding is overrated. This has an exciting lack of sense, building from a riff that, to any rational observer, belongs on a smartphone ad circa 2013 into a rolling barrage of Ellie Rowsell’s voice, contorting and sharpening into devastatingly fine points. It’s thrilling; the only thing I’m left wanting is another pivot, a third act to even stranger territory.
[8]
Jel Bugle: It’s alright when it gets going a bit, but this is nothing that special hitting like a souped up Last Dinner Party, with a repeating groove. I just can’t get particularly excited about this one! I’m sure the fans will dig it, they go crazy!
[6]
Ian Mathers: Did you know we’ve covered six Wolf Alice songs on the Jukebox? I sure didn’t. I also have no memory of any of those songs, and I’ve blurbed one of them! Will I remember this one? If so, I suspect it’ll be on account of the piano/beat pulse threading throughout the rest of the song. The rest is pretty good but that’s what sticks in my head so far.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: Play this over this scene.
[8]
Alfred Soto: Up for a cha-cha-cha, even an ersatz one, I enjoyed this usually feral band’s take on 2017-era Paramore genre play.
[7]
William John: Someone more uncharitable than me might say that Ellie Rowsell’s vocal performance on this is in homage to the celebrated “holistic vocal coach”, the late Ariel Burdett. Leaving that dynamism aside, the arrangement reminds me of the angular thrash-outs on Paramore’s latest album, which mostly left me cold.
[6]
Claire Davidson: The stalking, maniacal piano chords that open “Bloom Baby Bloom” suggest a primal rage ready to erupt later in the song—why else would Wolf Alice incorporate such a deliberating alienating melody, one that feels pulled from an esoteric cartoon, if not to induce dread? Evidently, “Bloom Baby Bloom” is intended as a study in contrasts, using that cryptic opening to give way to a more ethereal hook, where vocalist Ellie Rowsell vows to use the angst present in her personal life as fuel for enacting a more sustainable form of growth. For all the beauty that’s meant to emerge from this transformation, though, the song never feels all that inspiring; in lieu of anything resembling a melody, the hook simply replaces those piano stabs with an equally thudding kick drum march, hardly evocative of the transcendence Rowsell seeks to achieve.
[5]
Taylor Alatorre: Sometimes what you really need to do is combine all the worst qualities of your worst critics into a single imagined person – a surrogate hater, to borrow from Girard – and then just really go to town on them. When I’m having arguments with this person in my head, I too like to punctuate my thoughts with occasional one-second bursts of upper-fretboard guitar riffage.
[7]