Anotr ft. 54 Ultra – Talk to You

It’s Euro Hits Wednesday, starting with a song that reminds us of a lot of things… 

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[5.67]Claire Davidson: “Talk to You” reads like a Mad-Libs game of tropes pulled from songs you can find playing in retail stores at any given time: blandly androgynous vocals; passive, anonymous lyrics; and, most exasperating of all, a frictionless, plasticized guitar loop that gestures at disco without ever forming a penetrative groove. The song features a brief interlude powered by a brisk keyboard line, but even that novel diversion is too chintzy to impress. You’re better off listening to “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” at 1.25x speed.
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Oliver Maier: Pleasant French house pastiche, lacking a bit of bite but not massively to its detriment. Put it up against the Hugel track from Monday and these boys may as well be Daft Punk.
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Julian Axelrod: If the names Breakbot or Chromeo bring to mind memories of carefree college summers, first let me say: sorry you’ll never own property! Second, can I interest you in this breezy jam by Anotr ft. 54 Ultra? It’s not the same as owning a home, but it’s the perfectly frictionless disco confection they stopped making around the time you graduated college with a useless liberal arts degree. (Not speaking from experience, of course.)
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Alfred Soto: A positive review will depend on the nostalgia for, say, Chromeo and Classix around 2012. No tension disturbs the Chic-y guitar and serviceable hook.
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Iain Mew: Not sure if this song’s incredibly slow ascent to the UK top 5 was a case of waiting for summer to kick in with a vengeance, or just waiting for the nostalgic indie sleaze/landfill indie revival to get around to Friendly Fires.
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Ian Mathers: Love a song that makes my brain go “she should be at the club” where “she” = “me” (and yet, I stay not going to the club).
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Nortey Dowuona: Jackson Shanks has the problem of playing dull, generic soundtrack drums underneath limp, dulled guitar riffs when left to his own devices. Hank Korsan is capable of assembling hard, spacey deep house with otherwise unimaginative bass loops and cloudy, flimsy synths highlighted at certain intervals with light piano. Thus, the ANOTR duo at the center of this production quartet lay down some bright, busy synths and sharp, slightly off of center drums alongside Shanks and Korsan, filling the mix with a light, dust scattered across the tabletop guitar licks; bass the mahogany below the grains. Altogether a well assembled jetski, but not one meant to carry more than one passenger.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Another dance track ruined by YouTube, but this time it’s on the artist. But maybe that’s not the preferred term, given the name of the label postfixed onto the title: “ANOTR ft. 54 Ultra – Talk To You [No Art]”. My instinctive urge to parse that like “[Clean Version]” or “[Slowed]” siphoned off some of the track’s appeal — though there’s a limited amount of appeal in blog house now that all the blogs are dead.
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Leah Isobel: I’ve been struggling with my cynicism. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older. When I started reading and writing for TSJ [signal garbled] years ago, I had highfalutin ideas about pop music’s ability to serve as a conduit for spiritual edification in a godless world. Now, as I’ve grown more spiritual internally and more suspicious of anything that aims to access that spirituality from the outside, I wonder if that kind of mass edification actually numbs instead of awakens; if pop music, a medium developed for marketability and novelty, for the separation of person from cash, can ever be anything other than product. That’s probably a lot to plug into a review of a basic Stardust-bite like this! But that’s what I thought about when listening: all I can hear in this song is the echo of the echo of the shadow of moneyed excess, the tasteless gleaming reverb literalizing the empty space between now and then and you and me and life and death. Whatever, I’m doing too much. It’s fine.
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