Time to get whatever is an appropriate amount of hype for whatever time it is for you…
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[6.29]
Vikram Joseph: Tune-Yards is here to tell us that they fuck you up, your mum and dad; to this end, she largely eschews chaos for an unexpected sincerity and melodic directness. Disconcertingly, this results in a song which for much of its duration sounds like M People hired Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips as a backing band (chronologically speaking, it’s just about plausible). “Hold Yourself” is full of slightly cloying universalisms (“We all have doubt! We all have rage!”) which are undercut by the gentle but unsentimental core message: you need to look after yourself, because no one else is going to. On first listen the chorus sounds self-conciously anthemic in a way that feels facile and unearned, but the dark humour of delivering this message in a drive-time-friendly package starts to become apparent, especially as the song disintegrates into a more familiar atonal squall towards the end. In the end, Tune-Yards finds multiple ways to make even her most direct pop songs unsettling, which is certainly a skill.
[6]
John Pinto: Just in time for ESPN’s latest 30 for 30, Tune-Yards pull from their Oakland roots for what is clearly a retelling of Mark Davis inheriting the Raiders from his late father Al. “Hold Yourself” can be about that if I want it to be; when the group’s trademark cacophony overtakes the back half of “Hold Yourself,” the lyrics go slack enough that the mind starts to wander. It’s an attempted escalation to universalism that doesn’t quite land, largely because the (excellent) first two verses work in the opposite direction, towards specificity, with the difficult truth of “Parents are children” winnowing down to the painful realization “Child, I won’t have you.” You don’t have to always go big! Sometimes you can just go home — God knows there’s plenty of drama there, with all the children and bigger children (parents).
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: PARENTS: “Uh, sorry about the suffocating and whatever, but maybe you’ll change your mind about kids one day. On another note, can you please return our old records? What’s with your generation and soft rock, anyway?”
[5]
Alfred Soto: The first half creates the mistaken impression that Merrill Garbus has Settled Down: the drums and spare synth setting suggest It’s Blitz!-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She even proffers self-help maxims. For whom is she holding herself? As a decently raucous looped cacophony slows down the track, it’s clear the advice proffered is self-care.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: A semi-normal indie pop track until about the 3:25 mark, when layers start getting heavily layered atop each other: vocal harmonies, saxes, more sounds piling up. That’s when it gets exciting. (Also, I love the snappy snares through the entire record.)
[6]
Samson Savill de Jong: I usually have a bit of a soft spot for songs that are somewhat of a sprawling mess, because they’re at least trying something. But I don’t think this one works. I like the chorus, but the other aspects don’t quite hang together for me, whether this is the psychedelic Beatlesque outro or this be the verses. Compare it to Bizness, where all the elements do come together, and it becomes clear that there’s an element missing, or possibly too many elements there.
[4]
John S. Quinn-Puerta: I could talk about the cathartic experience of singing “We all have doubt / We all have rage”. I could talk about the way the drums never cease, anchoring the song to their syncopation. I could talk about how easily the lyrics take the maudlin premise of parental failures and turn it into something that is not hampered by sentiment, but embraces it. I could take about the sinister pre-chorus, underscored by groovy bass. I could talk about the escalating chaos of the final minute, the flight of horns egged on by the hi-hat’s flanger. But, truly, the ultimate metric of this song’s merit is, in my eyes, the drive to dance I felt while hearing it for the first time, even after I’d taken my melatonin and started brushing my teeth. My wife said it best: “You are entirely too hype for 11 PM.”
[9]