It’s thhheee eeeeeeccccccoooonnnnnnooooommmmmyyyyyyyyy (duh.)
[Video]
[4.71]
Kylo Nocom: “…Why should I be scared?” I ask, watching Au/Ra coo and hum while rapping her fingers on a table. She leans in and whispers, “Everybody’s scared.” I step away to eat lunch with Billie Eilish, who recently discovered how to flip her eyelids inside out.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: If I were still in the business of overblown trend-projection I’d suggest, at length, that the comeback of apocalypse pop makes a lot of sense when the world is worse by every measure in 2019 than in 2011, when fiction’s gotten there first, and what the future holds is just getting destroyed by the upcoming recession. It’s right there in the lyrics — “everybody’s scared,” “you really thought that growing up would be easy?” A more plausible explanation is that Billie Eilish very recently had the No. 1 song in the country, so everyone is going to make Billie Eilish songs now. But if the way you make a Billie Eilish song is to do the songwriting trick — which is really just the “Problem” trick — of adding contrast to your dance-pop via a whispered, close-miked chorus, then the rest of the song has to go all the way to a banger, not 60% of the way to one. The early-2010s stuff understood that part quite well; I guess I’m saying this should be a Kesha song.
[6]
Will Adams: Much as I welcome a post-Eilish wave of close-mic’d, skittering dark pop, “Dance In the Dark” is far too derivative. It’s all here: dentist drill noises, vocal distortions, even the half-time coda from “Bad Guy.” Not helping is the tell-not-show approach to atmosphere, summed up neatly by the opening lines of “shock shock, horror horror.”
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: Have you ever visited a shop that pipes in admirably professional facsimiles of contemporary pop music — original pieces, not covers — in careful avoidance of anything demanding royalties? It’s often impressive stuff, inside the shop.
[5]
Tim de Reuse: There’s a hyper-trendy, streamlined version of Ladytron somewhere in the core of this tune, and I might’ve felt all right about that, but I’m having trouble getting to it through these blocky, mid-heavy kicks standing awkwardly in the front of the mix.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Maybe if Billie Eilish hadn’t spent the spring and summer whispering about what she looked like, figuratively or otherwise, in the dark wearing a crown I’d see the originality in Au/Ra’s big beat. Also: the dark isn’t very erotic, sorry. Do it with the lights on.
[5]
Iain Mew: The cover art, with its “turn yourself into an anime character!” sponsored link pic and its faux-Japanese script, at least suggests fully committing to an aesthetic, even if it’s a horrendous one. For the song, Au/Ra chickens out of even that. Such is the timidity that it only risks the kind of whispers and electronic grind that recently featured on the most popular song in America at the very end. That’s still the best part of the song.
[3]
