Just add water…
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[5.09]
Alfred Soto: But Julian, I’m a little more robotic than you.
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: Please don’t settle for half-assed robo vocals, a cheesy guitar solo, and general plodding about. Especially with this in existence.
[2]
Jonathan Bradley: Nice enough as a subdued rehash of “Digital Love,” but why put a vocalist as distinctive as Julian Casablancas on your track if you’re just going to extract from his bored drawl yet another Daft Punkbot?
[5]
Madeleine Lee: Exactly what it says on the tin: it sounds like an Is This It outtake without sounding like a knock-off, and Julian Casablancas’s voice absorbs the Daft Punk robo-treatment well. No surprises, but no unpleasant ones, either.
[7]
Brad Shoup: It’s a consideration when you hand the tape to a vocalist: sometimes your structure may not frame his narrative. Like a languid Katy Perry production of my dreams, “Instant Crush” could support a stronger presence than Casablancas’s Method-style transformation. Where the Dafts drafted dreaminess, Julian sees a nest for his relational tail-chasing. Things brighten ever so slightly toward the end, but he’s made his cadence and he’ll lie in it, thank you.
[4]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Instant Crush” lumbers around with some flab on its brittle bones, the verses too long and the hooks too few, sounding like the first take of a demo. Even the born-deadpan Casablancas vocals are placed through the most expensive Insouciance Vocal Filter that Daft Arts could afford, a half-assed rendering of humanoid emotion. Even still, it’s crisp and gorgeous the way few bands sound, the elongated run (nearly six minutes; feels like eight) an understandable indulgence on DP’s part. But this isn’t a song, it’s the fetishisation of beautiful ornamentation. It’s a diorama.
[4]
Scott Mildenhall: It goes on a bit, doesn’t it? In the past when Daft Punk took cues from ’70s soft rock they reinvigorated things; here they’ve just watered them down. Power pop with all the power taken out, full of nostalgia and loss and with no consideration for anything else. Ash made this song a few years ago, and they made it better. Perhaps more pertinently, Daft Punk did too.
[5]
Anthony Easton: Early ’80s nostalgia for a kind of bored and druggy rock, an ennui/end of pleasure disco, stretching and pushing so much that it is the soundtrack to driving around the edges of someplace like Detroit. (Think of it like an update to the sex scene in Risky Business, but instead of a train, the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car.)
[8]
Edward Okulicz: Disco as twee, pulseless boredom, encompassing the joyless, fussy bloat of the ’70s it was the antidote to. Comes to life intermittently, but Casablancas’s cloying robotised delivery and the saccharine melody get in the way of what almost sounds like a dreamy chorus.
[3]
Jer Fairall: On the exhausting, overpraised Random Access Memories, this made some sense: the golden age of disco contextualized with a soft-rock pastiche that evoked the ways in which the ’70s actually sounded rather than how Daft Punk chose to remember them. As a single, this is less cute, excepting the great spacey guitar solo that shows up midway through before disappearing all too quickly. In either setting, Julian Casablancas’s irritatingly fey vocal spot remains the biggest problem, signifying post-millenial indie wussery far more than it does Laurel Canyon.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: Random Access Memories wasn’t overrated. Everyone just talks about the wrong songs. “Touch” is kitsch, “Doin’ It Right” is trash, “Giorgio by Moroder” is a cool interview, the singles you know, and they all cost planetloads of money and you know that too; but what I haven’t often seen touched on is how so deeply sad the album is, or rather the album tracks. Some are sad like robots in love are always sad (it is nearly impossible to engage with RAM‘s words without the cliché): vocoders distancing everyone from their humanity. “Contact” is lonely like a SkyRoads level (h/t); “The Game of Love” is like an AI trying to parse a breakup letter in a beachside bar; “Within” is like Sarah Brightman’s “The War Is Over” if it were covered on piano for Digital: A Love Story and wasn’t hopeful. But “Instant Crush” is all too human: she’s up all night till the sun, he’s up all night to get some, and that won’t end well. It’s simple enough musically — The Police ft. RoboCop — but hard to grasp, every sound too slippery, Julian Casablancas’s voice barely audible above its processing. When you read the lyrics, you’ll know why; “you used me once, you fled, looking, it was dark” is a love story where denouement comes before coupling, and Julian mumbles it like he’d collapse in shame if he said it any louder. The last words of the affair — “I listened to your problems, now listen to mine!” — are remembered eerily precise, albeit more petulant with clipping than they probably were. That last lilting “I don’t wanna sing anymore” devastates, even before — another nod to rock tradition — the guitar solo un-represses the feelings. “Instant Crush” alludes to a summer fling — RAM is a great summer album in general — but it could be about any instant, stillborn crush; it could break your heart, if you’ll allow a Daft Punk album to break yours. We never get to choose, do we?
[9]