It’s Canadian artist day! Wait, no, it’s not always Canadian day around here, shut up.
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[6.50]
Andy Hutchins: Simultaneously the best 1997 song released in 2013 and a gorgeous tribute to what summer in 2013 sounds like. The hook’s not quite as hooky as any of the half-dozen knockout hooks on Kiss, but that bridge. And when Carly sings about wanting to live and be alive, she sounds like someone who enjoys living and being alive more than 99% of the populace; if it’s an act, it’s the best possible one.
[8]
Will Adams: Life isn’t fair, which is why Carly’s weak reception post-“Call Me Maybe” resulted in her participation in this marketing scheme, which follows another Hail Mary and further delays the release of “Turn Me Up” (I’ve given up hope it ever will see the light of day). It’s also why Carly is going to be the cautionary tale for crowdsourced pop songs. The process: Carly wrote three sets of lyrics and let fans vote on each couplet. The result: a jumble of signifiers that might as well have been ripped verbatim from a Buzzfeed post titled 12 Awesome Things About Summer. The production is similarly empty, its quiet baseline promising a Kiss but delivering the impact of a peck. The hook is a plus, as is Carly’s committed performance, though it only reminds me of what could have been.
[6]
Anthony Easton: The market is fairly random when it decides to nominate the song of the summer, and sometimes these things have long tails, so anyone working from a super-hit has to decide what to do and this was a good choice. The song is so breezy and light, but talks about the mediated pleasures of seeing through screens, a self-directed pleasure, which betrays a song that is much more sophisticated and self-aware than it might appear on first listen.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: You know what? The fansourced-lyrics schtick is a crappy (and already-tried) label gimmick, not a Hail Mary so much as a Jesus Mary We Can’t Hail Much Longer, and you’d have hoped even one person involved would’ve listened to Carly’s other album. But dammit, I like the idea of a choose-your-own-single; whoever didn’t devise a Crystal Warrior Ke$ha-style version deserves to be fired for insufficient innovation. Now then. The song’s as professional as they come, from the rotoblade guitars at the beginning to the pretty-pretty sighs to the choreographed dip into minor key as the song acknowledges autumn — but professional doesn’t mean bad, and messier striking lines like “I wish I had an electric moon” or “Polaroid through your lashes” made it through still. Faceless masses of people are people too.
[7]
Tara Hillegeist: We might as well be listening to the credits for the latest John Hughes flick. I’m sure I’m not the first to notice that same sense of populist immediacy funneled through crisp professionalism that’s led to CRJ’s zeitgeist control has its echoes in the late king of teen dramedy, but it’s more than that. The surreal playfulness of the (audience-chosen?? well, that makes the nonsense make a bit more sense) lyrics feels as much a callback to Hughes’ favored New Romantics as does the martial hi-hat trill that opens the track. And like the best of Hughes’ movies, its artificial paean to sincerity and nostalgia strikes the ear in such a way that it’s immediately affecting. In fact, just about the only cue this song wasn’t written nearly thirty years ago, before either CRJ or I was born, is the unmistakably of-the-era harshness of its mix. It amazes me I’ve spent most of my life with this sound somewhere in the background and not yet tired of it; I can only imagine what it must be like to be someone who gets nothing out of a song like “Take A Picture.” Small favors, though: at least it’s not those Gang of Four guitars again, yet?
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: “Call Me Maybe,” “This Kiss” and “Tonight I’m Getting Over You” all sounded effortless, the pop sheen of each always kept in check by Jepsen’s romantic longing. “Take A Picture” comes off as trying a little too hard – those soda-ad-ready “hoo-oohs” stretch for “sound of summer” status, and after a string of untouchable choruses, we get…one about taking a picture of someone taking a picture. Catchy, but that’s about it.
[6]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Have you ever taken a photo of someone as they do the exact same to you? It’s a goofy little experiment – you’re concentrating on becoming someone’s mirror image while you time the click just right. The resulting photo relies on memory – you find yourself wondering why you have a picture of somebody’s face obscured by a camera, notice the immediate surroundings and then build the rest from there. Rae Jepsen coyly describes taking a photo of a friend snapping her and fills in the gaps of her memory: fireworks, kites, blue jeans, summer. It’s all described with a smile and an understanding that the moment will soon pass. The music is featherlight, a dreamy confection of M83-esque drums and Smash Hits-era vocal hooks that evoke blue skies and blinding suns. There’s no space for melancholy in “Take A Picture,” just how there isn’t any in the silly photo at the centre of the song. It’s a cute snapshot of friends enjoying themselves, making the moments last a little longer.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: O-pen Ha-ppi-ness! No, it still doesn’t mean anything, but while that’s not to say that insidious little insignia cannot be used for good – “Wavin’ Flag (Coca-Cola Happy Celebration Football World Cup™ Mix)” can never be denigrated – it is, on this occasion, more than a trifle annoying. Furthermore, “crowdsourcing” lyrics is, in practice, a rubbish gimmick, especially when they’re simply chosen from three similar, equally bland options – “singing a song in the sun, friends are here; we’re having fun” isn’t actually one of those featured, but if anyone could read that thinking it was it would speak for the banality of the whole “project”. It’s like a “Dancing On My Own” written by a parallel-universe Robyn that doesn’t speak English.
[4]
Daisy Le Merrer: One could read these lyrics as a farewell to pop superstardom. Musically, it certainly sounds like miss Jepsen has given up on replicating Call Me Maybe’s success. Not that this song is bad in any way. It’s just too slight to ever have any impact as a single. She took a picture because it won’t last any longer, but she seems fine with that. There are lots of less graceful ways to quit the spotlight.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Picture taking as magic charm against the passing of time, the fading of feelings (yes, even more than normal); no wonder the energy here seems a bit more melancholy here. That steadily burbling synthesizer feels like the track’s hidden pulse; steady, even dreamy, but never really exploding. Sometimes that would be a deficit, but here it just feels right as it goes on and on and on. The relatively restrained joy and ache of Jepsen’s vocals go perfectly with a track about knowing that we can’t live this night forever, that there isn’t any electric moon, that wanting to take a picture of you taking a picture of me is as much about wanting to capture the moment you felt desired and desiring as much as anything else.
[9]
Brad Shoup: The valedictory sound is peculiar; maybe I should think of it as a victory lap before the next event. But there’s something bittersweet about the synth garlands and the image of two people locked in a photographic death-struggle. Everything here is modest, from the Coke-approved vocal hook to the puttering, locked-in bassline. Pleasingly Professional: that’s the attribute at the top of Jepsen’s character sheet.
[6]
Jer Fairall: Though it was only months ago, trying to pinpoint exactly when it was that I finally fell for Ms. Jepsen once and for all is proving difficult. Was it when, somewhere around my 200th encounter with “Call Me Maybe,” I finally noticed the heartbreakingly winsome ache of the lyric “you took your time with the call / I took no time with the fall?” Was it when each of the songs on Kiss (‘cept “Good Time,” because Adam Young) gradually snuck their way into my heart one at a time, even the ones (“This Kiss,” “Tonight I’m Getting Over You”) I had assumed I’d gotten bored with? Or was it when it finally occurred to me that Jepsen may have what I can only describe as the most ideal female pop voice of anyone since Belinda Carlisle? In any case, “Take a Picture” is the first new Carly Rae Jepsen music that I get to experience as an established fan, but if it is transitional for me, it is even more so for her. Recording (presumably) as a famous person for the first time, “Take a Picture” is a child’s mock-up of the experience of being a celebrity, all practiced poses in front of mirrors and playful movie-star vamping; this isn’t a walk down the red carpet, its playing dress-up in her mom’s fancy clothes and having a (boy?)friend play paparazzi. “Tomorrow always happens too soon,” she sighs, in what would be an acknowledgement of the fleeting nature and emotional tolls of fame were it coming from a more cynical author, but she perceives “tomorrow” only as some distant inevitability; she’s living for the moment, and she has every right to. This one is hers.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: “Take a Picture” boasts a pre-chorus melody that probably has been in every other song — or possibly just one of her own and maybe something by P!nk — and lyrics that go well beyond being inconsequential and right into inept. Without having read the other sets of lyrics, it’s very tempting to suggest she picked the wrong ones for the verses, and it’s not like the song makes much of an impact with its sound either. Jepsen’s been stiffed by radio unfairly, but she’ll need a better song than this to right the wrongs.
[4]
Alex Ostroff: The crowdsourced lyrics sap “Take a Picture” of one of Kiss‘s unheralded strengths, whose songs gave off the aura of generic relatability but were fully realized moments of nuanced emotion. Now, moments are more disjointed — a pile of Polaroids destined to fade by next summer. The contrast with Carly Rae’s pre-“Call Me Maybe” attempt at taking a picture is instructive; what that lacks in tempo, it makes up for with a sense of Carly that’s mostly absent here. Thankfully, her delivery remains one of the most winning in pop, and the central simultaneous picture-taking conceit is charming enough to keep the rest of this aloft.
[7]
Alfred Soto: It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the “Call Me Maybe” followups didn’t set the world alight, and this creamy keyboard-anchored track with an ooh-ooh-ooh refrain may not either. She doesn’t do Eurodisco Kylie eleison as convincingly as perk, as “This Kiss” proved.
[7]
Iain Mew: “I wish I had an electric moon to save the light”. With the way that she half-swallows the word “moon”, I would not have got that one without looking it up. My first guess was “loom”. That electric moon is a brilliant image, though, something surreal and not entirely understandable that fascinates regardless. When the song goes with soft longing “ooh ooh ooh”s and gentle guitars in the distance that sound weirdly like The Strokes, it creates a mood that matches that line and a sense of trying to capture something out of reach. Whenever the pre-chorus melody from “Call Me Maybe” re-appears, and especially when the pop synths start pounding and the picture taking bit of the chorus repeats, the mood evaporates and starts to seem like it might have been a fluke all along.
[5]