Can’t stop looking at song/artist name combo and reading “Ted Cruz,” send help.
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[6.09]
Micha Cavaseno: *points and laughs at all the Sam Smith/Disclosure fans on TSJ* TAIO CRUZ MADE A BETTER VERSION OF “LATCH” THAN YOUR FAVES. HAHAHAHAHAHA! OWNED!
[7]
Brad Shoup: Look, if the disco revivial taught our pop stars nothing but surrender to the squelchgroove, that’s fine. Taio’s walking against the wind here, doing some sort of Lionel chartmove versus painful transitions and a really angry drumtrack. He loses, utterly, but I want to plant a monument.
[9]
Alfred Soto: Like other men (hi, Jason Derulo!) who discovered Ready for the World albums for pennies, Taio Cruz pours fork-tongued falsetto over a burbling electronic track. The suggestion of passivity is winning, but I don’t buy it for a second.
[6]
David Sheffieck: Even in a song that inexplicably boasts of “going till our hearts burn out”, “sexy round thing” seems almost aggressively bad, like Cruz left his thesaurus at home when he went to the studio that day. Lucky for him, the rest of the song is aggressively good: one of the more credible stabs at 80s-evoking pop to emerge recently, it’s anchored by a solid set of hooks, production that’s just glossy enough, and a laid back vibe that could only be more summery if listening gave you a sunburn.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: Some pioneers are simply left behind, and that’s what’s happened to Taio Cruz. For better and for worse he is a latter day Craig David, only with less recognition to start his fall from grace from. Both are talented songwriters who became figureheads for British R&B movements; both now spend their time posting predictably ridiculous platitudes on Twitter. For Taio, his last attempt at a single, the defeatism-tinged strumalong “Don’t You Dare,” seems to have been scrubbed from the face of the earth, and this one is similarly underwritten. The globular synths of a PRS-free tribute to Disclosure hint at a new idea, but the song is far too thin. Not to worry though: simple logic assures that whoever the 2023 version of Disclosure is, they’ll be crediting him as an influence. (Possibly.)
[5]
Will Adams: Well, it was clearly rushed in order to swipe a piece of the discopop cake that Maroon 5 and Jason Derulo have been enjoying (hear how they just… didn’t write a bridge?). But where “Sugar” and “Want to Want Me” pleaded and pleaded to a fault, “Do What You Like” doesn’t ask for much beyond getting up and dancing. It’s easy enough, with that thick, bubbling bassline underneath. Taio Cruz has never been one for depth or persona, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing; sometimes all you need is someone to start the party.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: Aspires to be a 2nd-rate b-side from FutureSex/LoveSounds.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: Deliberate, obvious summerbait, from the shimmering-mirage synths to the rubber-inner-tubes sequencer to Taio’s carefree delivery. But I’m sitting in front of an open door letting a breeze in, and I can report that it is doing its job.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: This is like how a bad movie would imagine the “song of the summer” to sound, all of it acceptably fun but also incredibly bland. I guess it will do its job and soundtrack plenty of fun memories, but geez so incredibly phoned in.
[4]
Megan Harrington: It is there, like styrofoam. It doesn’t degrade so much as gradually refuse to cohere, leaving small spherical particles embedded in your carpeting until you resist resisting and vacuum.
[5]
Madeleine Lee: “Dynamite” is my guilty pleasure jam. I try to avoid using “guilty pleasure” when I like a song that’s ubiquitous, but in the case of “Dynamite” my enjoyment of the song coexists with my judgement of the song as cheap and bad, and if I throw my hands up in the air sometimes (to this day!), it means at least some of my taste is bad taste. “Do What You Like” is obviously calibrated to be in good taste: the falsetto chorus and synth bass and drums are retro redemption by numbers, and “guilty pleasure” even comes up in the lyrics to refer to someone who is not Taio Cruz, though the lean is more on the pleasure part than the guilt. For all that, it comes off less desperate than “Want to Want Me,” a similar good-taste effort; the difference is clear from the titles alone. I think it works. Certainly, I’ll feel less self-conscious asking someone to put this on at a party than I would about “Dynamite.” I might start talking a little louder every time “sexy round thing” comes up, though.
[6]