A year on, we farewell Tim Bergling…
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[4.00]
Scott Mildenhall: Avicii and Mike Posner were friends. So when Posner used his name as a touchstone for uncritical hedonism, he would probably have been keenly aware of the subtextual tragedy that, obviously, taking a pill would not make Avicii think he was cool. More appreciable, though, will have been the metatextual issue of casting that uncritically hedonistic caricature in the public imagination. Detractors didn’t need that grist to their mill, because dismissing DJs is easy already — just like all public figures — but there it was, and is, for all time. “SOS” is not Avicii’s finest work, but at least now its point may be better heard.
[6]
Tim de Reuse: For better or worse, it still sounds like Avicii, with perhaps a tad more restraint than I remember — but all the parts that might have sonic detail worth diving into are covered up by lyrical wonders like “I’d let go, but I don’t know how/Yeah, I don’t know how but I need to now.”
[3]
Ramzi Awn: American men have their work cut out for them when it comes to pop music. Repetitive lo-fi synth loops have a way of making almost anything sound good, but they can’t quite lift Blacc out of his lament, as insipid as it is innocent. “SOS” borrows the basics of “I Gotta Feeling” without the objectivity, and more than its share of Creed-tinged Christian rock.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Tracks like this grab your biographical distance, crumple it, and set it afire with the lighter with which you packed a bowl. The late Avicii’s tricks make a final appearance: keyboard stutters, distant minor key banging on a keyboard for wistfulness, a singer with whom he achieves mind-meld. That was the description part of my blurb. Now read it as criticism.
[3]
Jonathan Bradley: Can Avicii endure as a tragic figure? His death was tragic, as were the addictions that clung to his life, but his music defied (mostly) the preternaturally haunted quality that attaches to the work of artists who most infamously die too young. Avicii songs, if they had any particular quality, typically didn’t accumulate greater import: they were rushes of EDM conceived thinly enough that they could stretch to festival size. Their sense of uplift, so plain in intent that it refused individual engagement, understood that the lowest-common denominator made for the broadest community. The lyrics to “SOS,” with its rubbernecked references to substance abuse and redemptive overtones, were written before Avicii died, but the decision to make this his first posthumous single was made afterwards. Returning collaborator Aloe Blacc sings it like an Avicii song — that is, with feeling and no sense that anything he says will matter once this set has finished — but he can’t redeem the icky sense that “SOS” is meant to carry elegiac weight that Avicii’s music was never intended to.
[3]
Ryo Miyauchi: Avicii’s image remains stuck as the face of the shiny, shit-faced culture of EDM promoted through his early-’10s anthems like “Levels,” perhaps permanently now that he’s no longer with us to take his music forward. But as “SOS” attests, he has been following the trajectory of his peers and adapting into proper pop production. He stays up to date, borrowing the mold of the Chainsmokers from the soft drop to Aloe Blacc’s yearning for a less ephemeral kind of love. Consequently, the song ends up as anonymous as many others using the same template, elevating itself out of the pack through sheer name recognition of the producer responsible.
[5]