“Flat for a Heart” is my new sad breakup song. Then “Prat for a Heart” is the angry one.
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[6.70]
David Moore: If you’d told me that Ashlee hooked up with some random basement producer to put out a quickie indie single based on some scribbles in an untold number of notebooks amassed since her last album and came up with “Bat for a Heart,” I’d be encouraged that she found a way to keep making pretty good, pretty weird music solo. Learning it was co-written by Linda Perry leaves me a little nervous — it’s a dark dance-pop throwaway apparently masquerading as a bigger deal than it probably should be. There’s the sore thumb “fuck you up” in the chorus; she could hit harder by implying she’d fuck you up, from the righteous and angry fucking up (“I won’t change for anyone like you“) to the psychological deep scar tissue fucking up (“you don’t love me like I love you, baby, ‘cuz the broken in you doesn’t make me run”), to name two of about a dozen examples. Glad to see her making music. But the further I get from it, the more perplexed I am Ashlee Simpson even happened in the first place.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: It’s tempting to read more into this because Ashlee’s earlier had such lyrical bite that made her a great child-adult transitional pop star years before Taylor Swift happened. The difference now is that you’ve got to read her mind; those first two albums were fine poetic musings on confusion, identity and love that were wise beyond her years and experience. Strange how, now having lived so much of what she’d previously just sang about, she doesn’t sound like she has any connection to something that on paper is so true to her own life.
[5]
Brad Shoup: “A bat for a heart, sucking up air” is too distorted an image to register: Simpson’s ragged delivery ought to be warped enough. With the dot-matrix synth and background sirens, the track suggests someone cutting a demo in a crappy apartment five stories up.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: There are few artists for whom the critical bubble’s floated farther away from earth than Simpson. That said, I can’t imagine what earth would make of this: no discernible label; Linda Perry past her zeitgeist and sounding nothing like herself; house piano and synth-bass out of vaguely now, squiggle out of 2008 MGMT and cool vocal out of 1997 alternative anything. But then again, Simpson’s fallen so far off the music (if not tabloid) news transom that the earth probably wouldn’t notice. It may well have comments on those vocals, given the SNL meme, but Simpson’s aiming for, oh, Anna Waronker, not the robo-nightingale voice that hecklers always demand of female singers. It’s spiteful, albeit not as spiteful as it should be (and I’m predisposed toward spite, lately). “Bang bang, fuck you up” arrives with no recoil. And though I like the production, Perry says it’s just a demo, meaning this will either politely disappear before the album or get broken in remastering like “Everything is Embarrassing” was. So many caveats, in other words, for an artist who needs nothing less.
[7]
Alfred Soto: It’s rare enough for a Linda Perry song to simmer that I was tempted to overrate Simpson’s first single in four years, but this was before the keyboard screeches and Simpson making good on the refrain’s promise impressed me. But other listeners will appreciate the abruptness with which it ends than I did.
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: Ashlee Simpson as a defunct spacecraft: barreling into the void and still emitting signals but beyond the realm of influence or interaction. “Bat for a Heart” doubles down on the spunk of “Boyfriend,” but the eerie motorik pulse smears over promises to “bang, bang, fuck you up” until they might as well be only digital noise. I loved Autobiography because of Simpson’s ability to sound messily human, but this new single is light years removed from the mundanely detailed joy of “Love Makes the World Go Round” or the unbounded wail of “Undiscovered.” Yet still she is as bracing as before; she has the power to make being smothered as horrifying as being emancipated was exciting.
[8]
Frank Kogan: Socially naive and emotionally complex. Her voice drops to a menace that only she and not the rest of the world will take seriously, edges that only she sees as such and trips over. And then there’s the absolute but barely perceptible precision of “bang bang, fuck you up, twist you out inside of my head” (emphasis added). Shots she’ll never fire, madness she’s too sweet for, but there it is anyway. I mean all this as an OTT compliment, her absolute psychological realism no matter what she attempts, but for me the thinness of the singing doesn’t meld well with the moodiness of the track.
[6]
Anthony Easton: The sweet spot where cratedigging retronauts and ironic fags combine to find something sexy is usually the place where high artifice meets real feelings, and things get really really complicated, really really quickly. The best example is the Tarantino-blessed Nancy Sinatra, and there have been half a dozen attempts post-Kill Bill to recreate that for modern ears. This might be the most successful.
[9]
Ian Mathers: Plenty of friends and writers I respect care a lot about Ashlee Simpson, but my primary exposure to her work has always been their writing rather than her actual music, which means I can’t talk much about what “Bat for a Heart” means in relation to her other work. What I can offer you is this: I really like that little synth squiggle that plays during the chorus.
[7]
Alex Ostroff: Ashlee is more lyrically oblique than ever before, and her delivery is far more detached. Still, there remains something interesting going on beneath the surface, especially in the bridge. “My heart is cursed cause you were never there,” packs some emotional weight, but it’s nowhere near as complex as more apparently straightforward tracks from Autobiography. On the otherhand, vague menace is a better sound for Ashlee than the mish-mash of (very good but not entirely cohesive) Bittersweet World. Honestly, I’m surprised that she’s still making music in 2012, let alone music this great. Does this mean I should expect a new Skye Sweetnam album?
[7]