Star! Glow! Ignite! Warm! Flame! Heated blanket! Burning marshmallow!…
[Video]
[4.00]
Micha Cavaseno: Some spare Paramore parts that they must’ve gotten after Cassadee Pope’s Hey Monday fire-sale. Oooof, that chorus is terrible.
[1]
Alfred Soto: Take “Maniac” and the sound of Brooklyn circa 2001 and the result is Taylor Swift’s “Style.” This byproduct suffers from the curse of boasting a singer who isn’t Swift.
[5]
Anthony Easton: “Settle” and “brittle” do not rhyme, the flame metaphor fails to understand proper chemical reactions, and the wildfire metaphor suggests a facile understanding of land management. Also, I don’t think she has properly read Icarus.
[1]
Dan MacRae: Emerging from a warp pipe that might be connected to Max & Luke’s mid-00s pop-rock warehouse, “Ignite” offers up some fleeting thrills. There’s a Lotsa Fizz quality to this track where you’re delighted at first but the tingling goes away after about a minute.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: Barely three minutes but endless build and bloom and hyper-saturation. It makes me want to speed windows-down on the L.A. highway all summer, and I hate driving, summer, Los Angeles and L.A. highways.
[8]
Megan Harrington: “When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” roars an old timey voice, the introduction to Stars’ break-up behemoth “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.” “It’s my turn to ignite,” Liz Hill sings, as if offering an explanation for the song’s mediocre modern adult pop contempo rock pyre.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: Sounds like Ladyhawke trying to do a Paramore song. Of course, Ladyhawke herself wouldn’t do that, but if she did, she’d do it a lot better than this.
[3]
Brad Shoup: Electro power-pop with a Nietzschean yearbook heart, played about 10% too fast.
[4]
Will Adams: With enough inspire-the-fire cliché to make Alicia Keys cringe, “Ignite” is terminally ordinary pop-rock that leaves my consciousness even before its three minutes are up.
[4]