We have none.
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[4.78]
Brad Shoup: Can you imagine art-pop written by a sixth-grader? Like, someone who listens to Grimes and Laurie Anderson and late-period Kanye West? I can barely believe this is real, let alone that this was an actual idea a grown-ass person had.
[5]
Will Adams: Atrocious GarageBand-level production, even worse vocals, awkward phrasing, all centered on an unbelievably stupid conceit. Barely worth discussion.
[1]
Anthony Easton: Sonic Youth gave me permission to love the Carpenters, so the intersection between lovesick vocal kitsch, and angular guitars is been an obscure love of mine. A brilliant exercise in the avant-garde potential of cliche–an extension of all the tragedy of Tunic.
[9]
Alfred Soto: The high notes are an affect too far, and this is a tune with a Jack in the Box melody and lyrics designed for David Brooks thinkpieces.
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: You either have to embrace technology fully to the point that you sound like a computer yourself, or you need to inject enough humanness into your plastic-coated song to disrupt the whole thing. The chorus revolves around saving a photo to your phone, and the music is shiny and factory-perfected: listen to the Disney-perfect stardust, or those faux-strings, or the digi-bubble-wrap pops surrounding the hook. Hannah Diamond, though, sounds neither robotic or like she’s letting her humanity splatter all over the music. She just sounds like a mediocre singer, and this is just a mundane song.
[3]
Scott Mildenhall: If there’s a story here, it isn’t clear. The tense changes from past to present at will, as does the implication of lovelessness into love, and with them, the view of the status of the relationship. Is it actually meant to make sense? The one real striking idea is that of reducing a person to pixels on a screen; bytes on a flash drive. The potential reasons for it, and the significance of it is pretty interesting, but the self-conscious staccato style makes for a less satisfying listen.
[5]
Juana Giaimo: It maybe is too early to have a second Purity Ring, but Hannah Diamond’s pop sensibility differenciates them. While Purity Ring especializes at creating spooky atmospheres and lyrics that fit them, Hannah Diamond is simply remembering a lover. Her childish voice and the twinkling electronics feel like a music box, only that it looks grey and lifeless, even though she wants us to believe that she “is better, really”.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: “Attachment” ziplines through an uncanny valley, but not the obvious one. It skims the chasm between real teenpop sounds — glittery waterfall effect, stuttered record skip, lush, vaguely sad melody — and anachronisms: burbling Grimes vox, deconstructed spareness, smartphone fixation (the title is a pun), and thinkpiecey ideas of love and tech conveyed via a bad book’s idea of vapid teenpop lyrics, “though I love you baby it feels kinda crazy” nonsense. It feels less like a track than an aesthetic, and sure enough it is: that of label PC Music. They’re too early along in their SEO game to knock the guys who make Quizno’s smell like Quizno’s off Google, but their honcho is London’s A. G. Cook, who with pal SOPHIE have gotten actual critical acclaim for projects they claim are influenced by Ark Music Factory. (Right???) So obviously it’s heavy on the retrofuturism, mega-high on concept, and easy to get obsessively into — see #seapunks, or the kids with Windows 95 Tumblr themes who follow my old PC image blog. But they trade on ideas of teen girlhood in disingenuous ways; SOPHIE is a dude who’s chosen a conspiciously millennial girl name, Cook often records through made-up, exaggerated teenage-girl personae, and it follows that much of Hannah Diamond’s press coverage covers her less like a rising pop artist than some dude’s project — so throw “singer-treated-as-paper-doll” into that list of authentic teenpop tropes. Speaking of, if ever a song deserved the “pop music for people who don’t like pop music” tag, this is it — note the jump in critical acclaim, or even attention, from actual teenpop, the real-fake kind, made for actual teens’ fandom, to who-gives-a-fake teenpop like Farrah Abraham, and then to simulations by “auteur shadowy music collectives.” (Tip for impressionable media: There is no such thing as a “shadowy music collective.” The “shadowy” part means “so swathed in PR they’re un-Googleable — so far,” and the “music collective” part means kids at post-collegiate house parties who are better-connected than you but equally drunk.) One suspects they’re not taking this seriously, and are in fact taking this very un-seriously, which results in the Sleigh Bells Problem, aka “these guys might actually scoff at my existence, certainly my 13-year-old self’s.” But hey — aesthetic!
[6]
Mallory O’Donnell: I’d say Rebecca Black meets Danielle Dax, but that actually sounds enticing and this is just an awkward series of notions staccatoed by beats. The best bit is the end, when all of its separate ideas semi-collide.
[4]