Possibly one of those kids named after the Twilight books? Where are my dentures…
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[6.33]
David Sheffieck: I’m sure you could find any number of other recent pop songs in the DNA for “Call It Whatever,” but I’m also sure I don’t care. The sense of glee characterizing this shiny, brash ode to self-determination and love is impossible for me to resist, and its Radio Disney aesthetic is equally impossible for me to criticize.
[10]
Katherine St Asaph: Someone played Victoria Justice’s “Gold” at double speed in the studio, then Ke$ha and Daft Punk crashed it. (As a scenario, this has maybe a 5% chance of ever having happened.) Songwriting’s better than par, vocal production’s worse than par — I’m a singer, I know the passaggio’s tough, but “don’t need no” and “diamond ring” are clearly two separate takes — and par for fizzy teenpop is pretty impressive.
[7]
Alfred Soto: No way I can call those Gibraltar-sized programmed drums whatever, and the glam chorus would impress Hayley Williams and Ashee Simpson enough to ask for a rewrite. Too damn vague. Lyrically too.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: How about we call it really cloistering, that work for you?
[4]
Anthony Easton: So much fun, with those high energy vocals, slightly-bratty spitting chorus of whatever, and how it all begins with hand claps, resting on a message of carpe diem teenage pleasure that is delightfully ambitious. I want to hear this loud in the front seat of a Toyota Corolla running through the suburbs. Extra point for the ever-so-slight use of Vocoder/Auto-Tune.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: Applying “show, don’t tell” to a song is one thing, but actually writing one about it is another — you simply cannot claim unprompted to not want to talk about something without talking about it. The lyrics are altogether sketchy — they can’t make their mind up whether the song’s about privacy, disinterest in labels or not being a “typical girl”. The singing, too, really isn’t very good (that first “ready for the riiide” should never have been left so exposed), but then sounding Just Like You! is a quality of its own, and it’s one perfect for a chorus as insistent as the finest monophonic ringtone sound seen on this site since Phyno’s “Parcel”.
[7]
Brad Shoup: It’s a bit like the Tove Styrke song, with its cheerstomp and all those voices poltergeisting the margins. I feel like the organ is having a pop moment right now, or at least people seem to be using it right; here, it’s just a pipping earworm. The stuff about diamond rings would seem to be premature for a relationship Thorne can’t even define, but it sounds like she’s got a lot of people in her head. One of them’s bound to be particularly pushy.
[8]
Will Adams: The ambivalence toward defining the relationship by society’s terms, an empowering message I can certainly get behind, unfortunately spills over into the lyrics themselves. The verses provide the flippancy that was probably intended, while the chorus skews toward the anti-materialist sincerity that’s already been done perfectly before. The music: it’s whatever.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: You can hear that Thorne’s a Disney Channel alum by the sound of this record, which is like a Kidz Bop version of a Carly Rae Jepsen album cut. Inoffensive tween-targeted pop is the order of the day here.
[4]
Andy Hutchins: So saccharine it ought to come with a pamphlet about diabetes. It’s at once too young for Thorne, Disney’s latest sure-thing-as-soon-as-she-escapes-Disney star, and too old for her Shake It Up fanbase (“Don’t you know I’m not another typical girl? / Skip the fancy dinners, we go straight for dessert.”)
[3]
Zach Lyon: By-the-numbers teenpop dressed to the nines. More than anything in the modern cheersquad canon, this actually brings to mind Jesse McCartney’s “Leavin'” — a modern classic with a similar melody, but, more importantly, the implicit understanding that the only thing a song really needs is a nice thwacky drum that sounds mammoth even on a distant, fuzzy radio station. If only Radio Disney songs actually made it to the radio.
[8]
Megan Harrington: Thorne walks a fine line between endorsing dudes who only text during the witching hour and endorsing a metric other than monogamy to define your love life. At her best, she’s intoxicating and free spirited, at her worst I hope someone who loves her dearly throws her iPhone in the toilet.
[7]