Return of the Max…
[Video][Website]
[4.62]
Jessica Doyle: The original belongs in the tradition of deliberately simple Eurodance: look at the lyrics and you’ll see that all those la-la-la’s are meant to be reflective of a dazed happiness. It is possible to turn the cheer of such a song into something menacing, with enough skill, but this isn’t skilled enough. “When angels tell you to run/And monsters call it love” is a decent couplet, but Ava Max doesn’t commit to being passionate about or terrified by her maybe-bad-for-her lover, and the whole thing floats away, somehow less weighty than its predecessor.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: Yes, the source material of this is cheesy as heck, and so cheesy it doesn’t need any lyrics other than “la la la la la,” although it did bother with them. It seems to me that removing the tasty cheese and writing new lyrics is a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the original nagging and great. Also nine singles off an album, even taking into account a re-release — well that would make Katy Perry blush in shame.
[4]
Alfred Soto: The determination to offer a good time comes through in Ava Max’s confident blank voice; the sample of “Around the World (La La La La)” doesn’t defeat her, it empowers her. One of the better recent bits of anonymous dance floor gymnastics.
[6]
Juana Giaimo: Ava Max reminds me of Mabel, in the sense that I’ll never hear a song by them on the radio and recognize them. This dance-pop track features everything expected from a radio filler: a wide vocal range (lacking personality), silly wordplays (“my mind’s got a m-m-mind of its own right now” would be a good line in a song that wasn’t just about an ex), a la-la-la post-chorus (that isn’t even catchy), and some background disco violins (because of course you have to add disco violins in 2020).
[4]
Thomas Inskeep: As disco-tastic as the best Dua Lipa records, only Ava Max is at best about half the singer the former is. But this does pump.
[6]
Vikram Joseph: Ava Max continues to pursue the Budget Dua Lipa market, which is a tough one to corner at a time when Dua’s doing her best to lock it up herself by releasing a diluted Future Nostalgia cash-in for every wave of coronavirus. “My Head & My Heart” is fine, I guess, packing big only-gay-bar-in-a-British-town vibes, with a pleasantly numbing disco-house chorus that pretty much sells you five Jagerbombs for 20 quid and tells you that nah, sorry, they can’t play Robyn because she’s too depressing. Basic to an extent that’s almost radical, really.
[5]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Last week, I was sitting in the passenger seat of my (straight, white, male) friend’s car when a (different) Ava Max song came on the radio and — knowing how much I love Lady Gaga — he turned to me and began to go on and on about how much he admired Lady Gaga. I let him babble on for a good little while, eating up his genuine and heartwarming performance of allyship, before finally alerting him that we were, in fact, listening to Ava Max and not Lady Gaga. He was embarrassed; it was adorable. But to be sure, he’s not that far off: most Ava Max songs sound like a not-as-good-but-close knockoff of something better. Any pleasure derived from “My Head & My Heart” comes from its sample of ATC’s hook from “Around the World”; removed from that hook and other references, I’m still unsure of who or what Ava Max signifies.
[3]
Andrew Karpan: On a deep level, the insistent comparison to Lady Gaga has nothing to do with Ava Max’s voice or even their shared love of haircuts as branding exercises, but comes from their technique of cutting-up ideas and dispassionately arranging them together. When the chorus of “Sweet But Psycho” boldly rips off one of the biggest songs of the 2000s, to me it feels authentic and real because it comes cold and without reverence. Gaga is just a past which Max is mining, but she can gracefully move anywhere else with ruthless ease. “My Head & My Heart” literally interpolates one ’00s one-hit Eurodance hit that was, itself, an interpolation of a ’90s one. Like Gaga’s early hit records, these are songs so pre-made to be experienced as camp that it’s easy to squint appraisingly at a line like Max’s “’till I cut the strings on your tiny violin” in order to imagine that the past was somehow capable of creating more profound imagery. But it’s a knee-jerk reaction that’s bitter and worth examining and, I think, in laying all that out, I learned a lot about myself. Thank you, Ava Max.
[5]