Are we reviewing Carly Rae Jepsen or Kyle Shearer? You decide!
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Alfred Soto: For the first time she shows strain. The midtempo bits, an attempt to broaden what she can do with her physical range, drag. The concluding refrain (“I wanna be more than friends for the week”) gets sabotaged by the plinky-plonky piano line. “On Wires” maybe, but held together “With Gum” is more like it.
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Al Varela: Sad to say this is the first time Carly Rae Jepsen has outright missed for me. Carly is at her best with swift, flowing production that matches her jubilance. So giving her this absolute clunker of a song with staccato piano notes, lumbering percussion, and a blown out chorus without any grounding melody completely misuses her talents and it doesn’t flatter her at all. I get what it’s trying to do, add more stakes to her unhinged desires and passion for this person who keeps dancing around the possibility of them being together. I don’t mind Carly pivoting to a different sound than she would have used in the Emotion era or whatever. But the execution leaves me really cold, lacking in the whimsy and power that Carly’s music has had on me before. Maybe if the song had a stronger hook or the production allowed itself to be a little more loose I’d be more for it, but as it stands it’s one of the worst songs in her discography.
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Jackie Powell: When I saw that Kyle Shearer produced the track before listening, my expectations were high. He had worked with Jepsen on “Julien” from Dedicated and then titular track of her 2022 album The Loneliest Time, two songs that I adored on my first listen. Still to this day I listen to that duet with Rufus Wainwright to help my brain drift off to sleep at night. When I first heard “On Wires,” I was disappointed. Jepsen’s appeal has also been about how she uses her bright while airy vocal tone to create a girlish charm. “On Wires” conversely feels sultry and easy-breezy rather than the typical intensity that Jepsen’s best usually delivers. But then I listened with the lyrics, and my initial thoughts began to change. This is absolutely another one of her songs about yearning, but it’s quite literally a change of pace, more of a slow-burn than her disco tracks. “On Wires” instead moves and builds subtlety. This song is much more mysteriously flirtatious rather than in your face tongue-in-cheek flirty. Is this a sign that Jepsen and Shearer are maturing? It could be. However, the “I want yous” that function as the chorus remind the listener of who exactly Jepsen is: Canada’s most famous yearner has returned.
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Loreen – wildfire:A loose, bouncy house cut with surprisingly foregrounded kicks and percussion, but a dull snare that dampens the effect once its added into the mix. The lone bass riff is often swept by synth riffs and chords, but remains resolutely on tone. There are even sampled vocals cutting in from time to time, but overall the entire song is roiling with this loop holding it forcibly in place, no way to get loose or get funky to this.
August Ponthier – Bloodline: A wan, soft focus alt pop with wilting acoustic guitar and thin, plain keyboards over crumpled coke can drums that limply slog below, as the bass gently hovers in the bottom of the mix. The guitar and keyboard so soften into a prettier, vivid arrangement during the bridge but it’s too little, too late.
Lala Sadii – The One: Tin, poorly mixed Wurlitzer lingers over the poorly arranged drum patterns while the bass tabs lay flat under the pile up of synth tones splintering across the chorus to split up the otherwise dull arrangement.
If the producer of those songs and “On Wires” is doing a bulk of this next Carly album…expect to be disappointed.
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Taylor Alatorre: The nondescript, vaguely twee title does a heck of a job in leading the listener blindfolded to that chorus, a rare pop music jumpscare that gains power from repetition rather than losing it. The groggy guitar wonkery that pricks the dream bubble is a wordless restatement of one of Jepsen’s core themes: the transit between sublime and mundane, from the ethereal to the messily, inconveniently, tantalizingly tangible. A lot of “psychedelic pop” these days is less-than-deserving of the name, but if anything that undersells it here.
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Claire Davidson: The second I heard the plunking piano chords that open “On Wires,” my entire body tensed with dread—surely, I thought, Carly Rae Jepsen wouldn’t introduce the world to her upcoming double album by releasing a stodgy blue-eyed soul track. Much as I feared, though, the track’s torch song approach is as bad a fit for Jepsen’s usual brand of buoyancy as anyone could predict: the verses drench her voice in a grainy filter designed to add sizzle that isn’t there, and the chorus, anchored in some soaring guitar shredding, shoves her to the back of the mix to obscure just how little depth her belting conveys. I can hardly even fathom how Jepsen had a hand in something this cheap sounding, the song’s rickety piano line making an atrocious fit for the suppurating keys and flat percussion that surrounds it. If we have not one, but two LPs of this material due by September, I’m bracing myself for the worst.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Jepsen’s confessions are as earth shattering and bold as ever, but that chorus has the weight of a lead anvil.
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Hannah Jocelyn: On every other song, Carly would have resolved to Gb instead of hanging on B for this chorus. And that’s why this doesn’t work: we expect a Carly song to be perfectly constructed melodic math, perfectly produced glittery pop that always lands on the exact chords, and the math doesn’t remotely compute when she the song sounds like it’s building to something but “I want youyouyouyouyou” is the climax. This is not even interesting imperfect pop; instead, it recalls the music Carly became the alternative to, like Zayn’s similarly lugubrious “Pillowtalk”. Carly doesn’t do slow-motion lumbering rock like this, and it’s a terrible fit, more “Slowly Walk Toward Me” than “”Run Away With Me”. The Loneliest Time had its slower moments, but they were better written. I almost hope it’s a case of a bad rollout (justice for “I Really Like You”), but her lead singles are usually an unreliable indicator of the album’s quality. For now, this is baffling.
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Ian Mathers: CRJ goes a bit lo-fi? I really do love how stratchy this sounds, how resolutely it keeps up the bleed and blur even when the sunburst of the “I want you” refrain kicks in. And I cannot wait until I’ve listened to the new record enough that I know where this fits, sonically and emotionally, as one piece out of two dozen.
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Katherine St. Asaph: The most devastating song about unrequited love ever written is “Never Be Mine,” from Kate Bush’s The Sensual World. It is devastating when you are a teenager, it is devastating when you are in your thirties (as Bush was), and judging by the fact that Bush chose it to re-record on 2011’s Director’s Cut, it is devastating when you are in your fifties. There are painful and perfect moments throughout the song, but the foundational moment comes at the end of the bridge, where Bush emerges from the Trio Bulgarka’s churning vocalise, faces the maelstrom head-on, and cries, this is what I want! Musically, it is not really a climax; it’s the exact same melody she sang on the chorus, cut short and not sustained. Lyrically, it changes one word, not to obvious semantic effect. But Bush sings it so forcefully she almost seems martyring: as if she has decided that this love is so foundational, so clearly the culmination of her life, that she would sacrifice her vocal cords on its altar, because it is what they are for. (The line is actually somewhat buried in the mix, I assume because it would otherwise tear a hole in time.) Against reality, against inevitability, maybe against morality, Bush is asserting herself, her will, and her desires, and asserting that they are the same: external forces can change what she gets, they might even change what she does, but they can never change what she wants. Lots of musicians have replicated the belting part, and also the sense of emotional loudness. “Good Luck, Babe!” comes to mind, but only because of recency; it’s, like, the trick of bridges. But only a few have truly, fully, done it. Carly Rae Jepsen — whose music will also, semi-famously, devastate a person in teenage fashion at any age, and who’s recorded several songs that in retrospect seem like antepieces to this — has done the same thing. Electric guitars instead of Bulgarian vocals, but the same thing.
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