Fortunately, the Jukebox offers feelings ’round the clock…
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[6.14]
Ramzi Awn: A veritable next-level bop. Lykke Li delivers the performance of her career and Mark Ronson finally proves himself on “Late Night Feelings,” conjuring up the best of Expose with skill. The single manages to pull off the sunkissed-songbird-on-coke routine surprisingly well, and the vibes are just the cherry on top. With echoes for days, Ronson and Li nail it –down to the last vocal breakdown.
[9]
Scott Mildenhall: A bold choice after the torrential downpour of “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart”: a persistent mist with a hint of drizzle. It’s a more lingering melancholy, but perhaps also one with more localised impact. Lykke Li’s customary vocal amalgams are given to this kind of intimate plea for intimacy, and they sit comfortably with its flittering dejection, but they could also go harder — if this is the headline for an album of “sad bangers”, someone perhaps should have given The Magician a call.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Lykke Li’s mild voice isn’t up to Mark Ronson’s ideas about forward motion, which themselves outpace Ronson’s beats (trop house accents? really?). Better vulgarity than this polite thing.
[5]
Vikram Joseph: A song called “Late Night Feelings” should at least attempt to build atmosphere; a song with Lykke Li on it shouldn’t make her sound this interchangeable. Mark Ronson is so unmemorable at this point that it’s no wonder I keep confusing him with the guy that wrote that book about being publicly shamed.
[3]
Iain Mew: At a time when the producer-guest singer carousel spins ever faster and ever with less direction, it’s nice to hear a song where the two people’s sounds are such a natural fit. Even if the disco touches are strangely muted and Lykke Li does more gesturing towards feelings than exploring them, she inhabits and breathes life into the aesthetic in a way no one has since Bruno Mars.
[7]
Ian Mathers: Ronson’s ostensible value proposition is so “retro” and “tasteful” (both, of course, terms that can be taken as virtues or vices) that it’s surprisingly easy to treat him like two different acts, one that consistently puts clever spins on the sounds of the past and the other of which feels uncomfortably out of touch… even though the gap between those two extremes doesn’t actually stretch that far. Better performers than Lykke Li have been rendered fairly anonymous by the process, but really we’re here for the feather-light quasi-disco groove of the chorus, and she does just fine there. This one lands just on the right side of the gap for me, but check again if it blows up “Uptown Funk” style.
[6]
Will Adams: For a producer whose biggest hits are defined by their bombast, this is a surprisingly adept attempt at tasteful disco. The steel pans in the distance distract, but Lykke Li’s sprawling vocal and an unexpected (but welcome) tempo shift make this worth revisiting.
[6]