Dog puns! Get your dog puns here!
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[5.30]
[3]
Alfred Soto: The electronic girl group arrangement works like syrup poured into a bowl of sugar. It’s a dog, all right.
[3]
Megan Harrington: The old rockist trope goes, “It took how many people to write this song?” With sheer delight, I discovered it took 36 girls to sing this song.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: The song here is besides the point, more so than with most AKB48 singles — people will buy the ten-dollar CD version of “Labrador Retriever” to procure a ballot for the annual AKB election, in which fans choose who the most popular member of the year is. Some will buy dozens, if not hundreds, of these plastic discs to get a paper slip in a yearly display of what hyper-capitalistic democracy looks like. The results will be broadcast on national television in a four-hour extravaganza, and more people will vote in this election than in some real-world mayoral contests. The song itself will be forgotten until the end of the year, when it inevitably tops the year-end sales chart. It exists as a flimsy excuse to put the members of AKB48 in bikinis because “summer.” And fittingly, “Labrador” sounds like a slightly more easy-going version of the last four election singles, uptempo but breezy enough to justify the video’s beach setting. It sounds vaguely like a sketch of an old Shibuya-kei song, or a far more boring version of what Vanilla Beans used to do.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Labs are mostly too big for the room, they get up all over in your business, they knock things over, they have little or no personal space, they are thought to be friendly or even cute, but are mostly over rated and kind of hostile.
[2]
Madeleine Lee: The Wall of Sound always gives me that soaring-heart feeling, whether it skews more Glasgow twee or “Be My Baby,” and multiple key changes deployed just at the right moment only seal the deal. I find AKB’s singles always tend to drag towards the end, but when the landscape I’m being dragged through is this sunny, I don’t mind a bit.
[8]
Thomas Inskeep: J-Pop meets ’60s Motown girl group — it’s the musical equivalent of Bob Ross’s happy little clouds.
[5]
David Sheffieck: The synth-Motown strings made me weak in the knees, but it was the dynamics of the backing vocals that won me over completely. A brilliant case of production making a catchy song irresistible.
[9]
Brad Shoup: This sounds a little like Ben Folds (the older, sentimental version) writing an homage to “Beach Baby,” one of the Seventies’ best singles. The impotent rage has been leached, but the expected signifiers are here too. And so is a decent drummy intro, and a robust melody that’s not afraid to go out of season.
[7]
Will Adams: There’s more than adequate technology today to reproduce the Spector Wall of Sound. I can only chalk up the flatness of “Labrador Retriever” to the probable difficulty of mixing 36 tracks of vocals. Very little bark, even less bite.
[4]