Not a Damon Albarn allusion…
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[4.57]
Patrick St. Michel: Well, Bruno Mars got me Googling about how Gorillas have sex, so uuuuuh good job?
[3]
Anthony Easton: This is almost as good as R. Kelly doing “Zoo,” but it’s weirdly more aggressive. There are elements of early Prince, but without the voyeurism or the sentimentality. It’s sort of like all sorts of ’70s-era light funk, or at least attempts to remake that — sort of like Cee Lo, but without the irony or sense of humor. None of this surprises, because Mars is so used to cribbing other people’s shit. His new album is called Unorthodox Jukebox, though up to this point it has been terribly orthodox, and, I mean, sweaty ape sex on cocaine is not the most radical thing in the world, but to have the dude who did things like “The Lazy Song” sing songs about hair pulling, or have a hook rest on the line “give it to me motherfucker” strikes me as a bit trying too hard, except the whole thing is so mechanically perfect.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Which is funnier: Bruno Mars sneaking kinky shit into a rockist’s dream power ballad (intentional), or these words coming from this dude (not)?
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: The best and worst of Bruno Mars all at once. As with “Grenade” or “Marry You,” Mars takes a single concept — in this case, the Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch” — inflates it to a proportion both ludicrous and all-encompassing, and then delivers it so straight he dares you to doubt his sincerity. But as with “The Lazy Song” or even the succeeding-in-spite-of-itself “Locked Out of Heaven,” the closer Mars gets to classic rock, the less charming is his guile. I don’t fault “Gorilla” its animal lust; I do fault it for thinking it should be stadium-sized.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Worthy of chest-pounding had he avoided the trap of so many of these pop professionals and mistaken the recording studio for Madison Square Garden. Stick a banana in it, Bruno.
[4]
Brad Shoup: He hashtags the title, then launches into this glorious cooed section. Un-fucking-fair. I’m down with the fourth-wall wink of the cocaine kicker, and the short-guy crotchtugging is an underdog story I can get behind. But that chorus is so un-feral, so widescreen and Bon Jovian, that all the kick hits in the world can’t fight the domestication. The man’s got a way with stings, though: check that damn falsetto.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: What does the gorilla make? Love, apparently, and that’s quite the image, but it’s unrepresentative of the overblown, underwritten tedium of this song. Maybe he’s just run out of interesting people and sounds to pastiche (there’s always Denise Welch, Bruno), or maybe he’s seen that Cadbury’s advert; either way he’s made a song that for the most part sounds like a Phil Collins album track. Yes, Phil Collins made some massive tunes, but “Gorilla” is not one of those.
[4]