Today, a Jukebox tribute to the tenth element on the periodic table…
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[3.92]
Alfred Soto: You got that right.
[2]
Thomas Inskeep: Some blurbs just write themselves, don’t they?
[0]
Ramzi Awn: If you name your song “Songs I Can’t Listen To” and it’s not perfect, you’re asking for trouble. Unfortunately for Neon Trees, their nod to Brenda Walsh’s broken heart falls flat. So flat, in fact, that it would be far less painful to actually dig up those broken records and mourn your past relationships all over again than listen to this single.
[1]
Josh Love: The concept of a bad break-up ruining music you used to love is hardly original yet certainly ripe for further investigation in the right hands, but Neon Trees invests minimal effort here in giving it life. I mean, for starters, when they talk about “a list of songs I can’t listen to,” how about actually listing some songs? Literally any songs, it doesn’t matter, at least there would be some color and personality here that otherwise is totally missing. “Tennis Court” and “We Can’t Stop” and “Pumped Up Kicks” and “Love on Top.” There, I gave you four in a rhyming couplet to get you started.
[3]
Leela Grace: “These Four Walls,” “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” “For Real,” Is This It, “Cocoon,” “This Time Tomorrow.”
[5]
Nina Lea Oishi: The subject is worthwhile; we all have that song that has been irreversibly changed by someone we once loved, that song where every line, every note, every breath is tinged and traced with memory. But an experience so essential to being a lover and a music-lover deserves better than this — lame and toothless, never reaching real anger or heartbreak, cardboard lyrics ripped out of a middle school girl’s diary.
[3]
Will Adams: The title immediately sent me trawling through my iTunes library, searching for a song that had inextricable associations with past lovers. I found none, perhaps because I’ve never been in a relationship, or because I wouldn’t have those songs on my iPod anyway. I did, however, find a song that I could listen to. It was Florrie’s “I Took a Little Something,” which I downloaded on July 31 of last year. I had just come home from an awful Tinder date that ended with us arguing for hours via text message over who said what, who lied about which fact, and who was the one with the problem. I gave up on the conversation; it was the rare time where I refused to put myself in the wrong. When I plugged my headphones in, played that song, and stepped out of the subway into the sticky Manhattan air, I smiled. The song’s looped joy was so at odds with my mental state, but I didn’t care. It inspired me to say “fuck you” to the way I had felt, to all the bullshit I had put up with. “Songs I Can’t Listen To” is competent enough, but I’m waiting for the song that celebrates the opposite, the music that reminds you of breaking away from those coulda-beens, those worst people you’ve met, and empowers you to let the negativity go.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: A winning conceit, albeit one already won categorically by Annie. This is different, though, because she never admitted to hurt herself, and could only hypothesise about music’s potential for it. Instead, this is far more tricksy: using music to talk about avoiding music to avoid pain, yet in effect also to give people a way to use it as a diversion from or even channel for pain. It’s a conflict, which either way spells pain, and if people didn’t like a modicum of that, songs like this and “Sleeping With a Friend” might not exist. Exactly as that did, it carries just the right level of distress, bearing the rawness of recency but also, in its final, drifting, detached trills, a hint of acceptance, if not a resolution.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: “DJ, Ease My Mind” crossed with “Best Song Ever” crossed with every Neon Trees song ever (granted, they’ve really only written one) and soaked in despair, except the result is so impermeable no despair got in. We all have those songs, playlists full — and speaking of, “erased on my music machine” is the most craven attempt to avoid taking lyrical sides in the Great Spotify/Apple/Google/Tidal Battle of 2015 I’ve yet heard — but I can’t imagine anyone avoiding them with this.
[4]
Mo Kim: I like the echoey, movie-set Wild West texture of those guitar licks, and here they escalate the tension in a way that words can’t quite manage. This captures well the way in which broken relationships circle like broken records, the questions that will never get resolved, and the decision to play with the emotional dynamics of a familiar situation via the instrumentation is a clever move. All in all it’s a pill of a song, a measured dose of nostalgia and bitterness and even a little joy: you might not be able to listen to it, but you can dance to it!
[7]
David Sheffieck: The production’s in need of something to put it over: a heavier bottom end, a more chiming top one, the outro layered over the hook throughout, maybe a more interesting guitar solo. Neon Trees’ execution is just a notch too anemic to click, essentially. But I remember all too well forswearing songs after every teenage breakup I had — it might as well have been a list, for how codified it was. I’ve long since made up with almost every one (I never quite got back into the Ramones, of all bands) but if Neon Trees had been around a decade or so ago, this would’ve featured on every CD I burned myself; it’d slot right in next to The Ataris’ “Song For A Mix Tape.” If the personal resonance isn’t there anymore, I’m still glad to see the tradition — of songs about songs, of songs about songs about relationships, of songs about relationships about songs — being carried on.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Another airtight composition from the Trees: static and dry. The image is flogged — unwisely, we hear the phrase “broken record” before the chorus is sung another two times — but not the emotion. Mini guitar demolitions are triggered to push this thing along, when a better-developed topline would have done the trick.
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: Even when they’re trying to be sentimental and direct, every Neon Trees song can be summarized with me looking at them and wishing they would calm the fuck down.
[2]