My tiger friend has got the sled…
[Video]
[5.11]
Alfred Soto: My appreciation for Dijon and Mk.gee colors my appreciation of “Yukon,” wherein Justin Bieber all but obliterates the petulant boy-squeak and replaces it with a high-end bug scratch. He repeats something about “Slide city,” though he might’ve sung “size 6” for all I know. As a left turn it works, especially on the radio, where it shows up Alex Warren and Morgan Wallen. I might stick with co-producer Dijon’s own album.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: Truly inspired, wild, freaky deaky and funky.
[8]
Julian Axelrod: When I first listened to SWAG, “Yukon” is the moment where all my fears of “Is Justin Bieber ok? Should he even be making an album??” faded away. Aggressively pitched-up vocals, gratuitous 2 Chainz ad-libs, dorm room acoustic guitar that sounds expensive enough to convey the singer never went to college; could a person trapped in a religious cult and a failing marriage make this?
[8]
Tim de Reuse: Under a loping, skeletal, instrumental, the new, Mature Bieber coalesces: chill, introspective, and unbearably self-satisfied. This is not the vocal performance of someone who’s trying to impress. This is the unearned confidence of the guy who brings a guitar to a party under the impression that emotional authenticity can turn his half-baked four-chord mumbles into a sleeper hit.
[3]
Ian Mathers: Whoever around him either failed to prevent Bieber from putting out a whole single using this silly-sounding pitched-up voice or, even worse, told him it was a good idea… Justin, they are not your friends. Completely tosses out any of the modest charms of “Daisies.”
[3]
Katherine St. Asaph: Doesn’t sound dated, exactly, yet somehow simultaneously sounds like an acoustic cover of 2012-era Drake, or perhaps someone in 2012 pitching up their voice in an anachronistically 2015 way thinking it’ll help them replicate “Crew Love.”
[3]
Scott Mildenhall: It’s Canada’s answer to Sufjan Stevens, with the first in a series of songs about… America’s massive cars? It could even be the one your mother tried to sell. That might be a level of world-building that’s beyond “Yukon”, which meanders without any kind of progression. Love as buying things with inexpensive-sounding sounds — there should be pathos, but there isn’t.
[3]
Claire Davidson: Whose idea was it to pitch Justin Bieber’s voice up to a register that renders him nearly unrecognizable on “Yukon”? Bieber already lacks real body as a vocalist, but this choice neuters him even further, and is even more baffling on a song so focused on accentuating his supposed sexual magnetism, as he brags about his presence in “slide city” and his ability to make his prospective partner beg. This being a Justin Bieber song, his posture is more corny than convincing; the line “pull up like Jimmy Neutron” is automatically disqualifying. The song’s barely-there instrumentation, consisting of little more than a placid guitar lick, keeps it from becoming actively offensive, but even then, whatever experimentation “Yukon” was looking to achieve was likely botched from the start.
[4]
Leah Isobel: “Yukon” echoes the Jack Johnson type of sunny, strummy acoustic pop, but the austerity of its arrangement and the pitch shift on Bieber’s voice pushes it towards something more complex. It strikes me as sorrowful, antiseptic, and icy: the blinding heat of stardom reimagined as a blank tundra.
[7]