Remember Jodeci?
[Video][Website]
[3.40]
Thomas Inskeep: This is insane: a video reminiscent of Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” (really, you should watch it) and a song that loops vocal bits from Jodeci’s “Freek’N You” into a circa-2002 UKG track. I kind of love it. I’ll probably be annoyed with it in a month, but until then it’s a near-constant earworm that I don’t want to be rid of.
[8]
Jonathan Bradley: As a rule, UK garage was more exciting when it focused on singing rather than rapping: it produced frisson, not clamor. For this (welcome!) throwback, Tough Love reuses some actual R&B, and Jodeci fits in well with unfamiliar surrounds. It’s a bit rough and ready though, and that the components don’t quite interlock as smoothly as they might lends the track a bumptiousness appropriate to a hook this priapic. Even so, two-and-a-half minutes might be stretching the ideas here to their limit.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Congratulations, your bass house turned Jodeci lyrics into Napoleon Dynamite dialogue.
[4]
Micha Cavaseno: *sighs* Well, at least the house revival is creeping a bit further into garage territory. Its a shame I’ve heard this exact track at least 400 times beforehand.
[4]
Scott Mildenhall: There was an independent bric-a-brac shop in Hull in the early ’00s that for many years stocked no music but multiple binfuls of the absurd chef-d’œuvre “Bound 4 Da Reload”, on sale for the princely sum of 20p. Those bins may well be long out of action, but they clearly live on in spirit, there evidently now being far more suitable cargo. This sounds like a parody.
[5]
Will Adams: What I thought was a trend of the mid-00’s still carries on today: boring house music that can barely stretch a sample to three minutes paired with a textbook-gaze video meant to distract you from the nothing at the song’s core.
[2]
Patrick St. Michel: I spent the last weekend feeling really sick, hit with the sort of fever that makes you feel like your body is covered in Icy Hot patches. Accordingly, I spent the duration of this illness on the couch burning through the British MTV reality series Ex On The Beach, which is basically Geordie Shore except ex-lovers keep showing up to add drama to the proceedings. Between awkward dates and the throwing of rainbow-colored drinks at one another, the show features transition scenes soundtracked by cheesy dance music that sounds like a generic-brand version of a bigger hit. It is repetitive, one-note and boring, the sort of thing that would be a pain to listen to for more than a shot of someone staring sadly at the ocean. “So Freakin’ Tight” would fit in great on this show.
[3]
Alfred Soto: The steel drum preset is an annoyance by itself, but the repetition of “freakin'” is at a Rand Paul level of falsity and grossness (no, I wasn’t crazy about “Freak Me” either).
[1]
Josh Winters: I am not and will never be here for this kind of mindlessly crass bro-house. Throw it in the trash and give house music back to the queers, please.
[0]
Katherine St Asaph: Freak this noise.
[1]