We think Ciara needs more work. Not necessarily this, though.

[Video][Website]
[5.27]

Anthony Easton: Love the pinched buzzing and the creamy smoothness, shouldn’t work together, but it’s unpleasant enough to be interesting.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: Sort of summery, I guess. But trust me, if you say “ditto,” I will not “hit you back.” I also don’t understand why somebody shouts out to the German art-rock band Notwist at the beginning. But I have to hand it to the high-voiced guy who brags about how his girlfriend buys him rubbers — as ways out of having to make a highly embarrassing drugstore purchase go, it probably beats piling up your shopping cart with other items you don’t need.
[4]

Hazel Robinson: The trendy product placement at the start of the video for this made me think for a moment they were marketing Strongbow. As it is, how many people involved in this record are actual children? Ciara looks like she’s corralling the playgroup. Distractingly awkward, otherwise as anodynely sexless/harmless as you’d expect.
[5]

Zach Lyon: I remember hearing the original a while ago, and it wasn’t very good. But this is good! The new, sort of twerky synth-Middle-East production is magnificent. The original beat was by-the-numbers bubblegum while this has that ton of freshness required to make bubblegum work (bubblegum = youth = FRESH). And I’m an unequivocal fan of everyone’s performances here, none of which are worthwhile in a vacuum but shine in the spirit of the song: I have a weird desire to see Tyga succeed despite few returns (this is perhaps entirely owed to my love of “Cricketz“); Lil Twist’s croaky voice is perfect for this, where he comes off sounding like a big cartoon; Ciara’s emcee serves as the self-aware, babysitter-ish flirtation for the boys, like Drew Barrymore in the Bar Mitzvah scene in The Wedding Singer. And Mindless Behavior, with a name that could only have been brainstormed by the mind of a record agency, are the reason they’re all there. With the lack of any new Kingstons or Biebers, it’s just about the only real neighborhood poolside music we’ve gotten this year.
[8]

Ian Mathers: There’s this overwhelmingly bright synth part that comes in whenever they sing the chorus, and I just want to steal it and put it in the middle of a good song. One that doesn’t repeat the line “we just two lovebirds, that’s why we always Tweetin’.”
[4]

Alex Ostroff: After much contemplation, I’ve come to the conclusion that Ciara is magic. There’s no other explanation for her ability to turn any track into a summer jam. And I mean ANY track. Ciara’s half of the remixed chorus proves that she’s better at capturing the effervescent vibe of summer puppy love than an entire boy band who are young enough to actually experience it. It’s still not the best phone-related song Ciara song, but it has effortless charm that’s well-suited to the July heat.
[7]

Michaela Drapes: This updated version of “Candy Girl” sucks all the fun out of things with the Twitter references, etc. — but honestly, I really can’t get past Ciara’s cameo to be anything but totally grossed out. She’s, like, a little old for them, right?
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: On Bieber’s “Baby,” Luda sounded like a fond uncle; here Ciara sounds like a babysitter. And, given her meagre presence, a poorly attentive one at that. Her charges don’t have the Biebs’s charm, either, though their hook is better than anything he ever laid claim to. I wish it belonged to a better song. The boy band comeback hasn’t begun yet.
[3]

Jer Fairall: Maybe not quite a less-than symbol number three, but elicits a definite colon-hyphen-end-parenthesis from me.  
[7]

Al Shipley: Didn’t expect to enjoy listening to Ciara babysit half a dozen incoherent little moppets, but that bright melodious beat makes it so much more tolerable than it should be.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The original’s generic but cute, this one merely generic except for the presence of a certain beleaguered R&B songstress who can communicate joy through clenched teeth buried ten feet in the ground.
[4]

Lustful and sinister, apparently.

[Video][Website]
[6.90]

Alfred Soto: What she says pales beside her signifying: dirty organ, industrial percussion, vocals that evoke several generations of feminine desire. As much as I love this noise collage for its own sake, I don’t hear cohesion.
[5]

Kat Stevens: The last tune by EMA was a true nadir for my 2011 but after watching the video for “Milkman” — a Nathan Barley outtake where she dances under a row of tampons and vomits up a Kinder Egg onto a staircase only for it to explode in a cloud of powder — I get the joke now! I really hope the milkman in question is from a rip in the space-time continuum.
[4]

Hazel Robinson: PAGING INDIE VOCALISTS: if you’re going to sing loud, be comprehensible. That said, this does have something; it needs a total remaster to sort itself out, though. Noise is all very well, but this is basically a Knife song played through the world’s worst speakers.
[5]

Ian Mathers: I can’t decide whether I think this will go over better than “California.” On the one hand, it’s definitely more of a “song,” if that’s your thing; to quote, well, myself, it “sounds like Excepter and Xiu Xiu playing at the same time.” On the other hand, it lacks some of “California”‘s singularity and verbal punch, and, well, it sounds a bit like Excepter and Xiu Xiu playing at the same time. But if you can’t get behind the ecstatic panic of “he’s the milkman/he brings you your – milk!” I kind of feel bad for you.
[9]

Michelle Myers: EMA’s hyper-hip blend of distorted noisepop and gothy aesthetics works because she actually knows how to write a good tune. “Milkman” is energetic and catchy, and EMA’s voice grates my ears in just the right way.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Lyrically, “Milkman” is simple: desire as guerrilla battle. Sonically, it’s as clattery and distorted as if EMA drove a truck full of rusty bolts over the melody and her voice, and it’s as overstuffed with sound as any single of 2011. But everything crests and subsides rather than arbitrarily bludgeoning you with noise, making this exciting rather than painful.
[9]

Michaela Drapes: When EMA writhes and wails in this filthy little lust song, it’s remarkably free of tired feminine cliches — both of the good girl gone bad, or the bad girl who was never good to begin with. Her sexuality is incandescently boundless, borderless, engulfing, breathtaking.
[8]

Jer Fairall: Painted in the broad, menacing strokes of a fairy tale boogeyman, the blanks that she leaves to be filled in are all the more frightening for the knowledge that whatever occupies these gaps, it can’t be anything good. The music is far less evasive in its seething tantrum, though, and even if I appreciate it somewhat better on Past Life Martyred Saints, where its squalls disrupt the thickness of the atmosphere like a shower suddenly ejecting scalding hot water, it remains no less scarring in isolation.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Removed from the context of an album firmly stuck within one woman’s headspace, it’s remarkable how bright and energetic “Milkman” sounds. The guitars could have appeared on a Smashing Pumpkins record, and the key change going into the chorus almost counts as a pop move. It is Erika Anderson’s treated and distorted vocal that sends the tune to places stranger than post-grunge, however; why is she, as she drills into us repeatedly, “gasping”? Could the suffocating density of the instrumentation have something to do with it? It doesn’t quite make the titular milkman sinister, but the tape-loop stutter closing the song isn’t exactly comforting either.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: “Mikman” is a fairly unsympathetic mix of ideas both good and indistinct, arty but too overstuffed for its own good. I’m excited about the idea of women wailing and yowling and generally getting their sexuality on over something dirty, gauzy and dissonant, but this feels like the sort of thing first-year media studies students are given to study as “text.”
[5]

He didn’t really write a song for Bieber did he? Really? Really?

[Video][Website]
[7.50]

Anthony Easton: Woozy and sweet, a little lonely, and there is a domestic failure in how he yearns through the fuck fuck fuck…I like the waking up after an evening out, and the meta-ethics of pleasure worked out by libertines.
[9]

Dan Weiss: His affect is so soft that I groused at first. “Novacane, novacane, novacane/Numb the pain, numb the pain, numb the pain” – so what? Then I noticed the pill popping (Viagra), the cocaine for breakfast (“yikes”), the ice blue bong on the lawn at Coachella (“whatever”), and those are just the known stuff. “What are we smoking anyway?” Ocean worries. “Don’t let the high go to waste,” she snaps. The she is a would-be dentist slumming in porn (“At least she workin’” is the best of Ocean’s many smart and compassionate asides). R&B—sorry to call it that, Frank—has rarely approached such scripted dialogue and cinematic color outside of novelties, like R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” mini-dramas or, I don’t know, “Thriller.” When Ocean follows up “stripper booty and a rack like wow” with “brain like Berkeley,” the music stops. As in did you just say that. As in genuine shock. And this guy’s in Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.
[9]

Michelle Myers: It tries sordid R&B about cocaine and heartbreak, but it lacks the drama and expressiveness that makes R&B slow jams so good to begin with. Still, I’m drawn in by Ocean’s lyrics; he’s a good storyteller and he keeps my attention even when the music is a little boring.
[7]

Hazel Robinson: For the first minute or so I thought “the problem with Odd Future is that I had some stoner friends when I was a teenager and they thought being a troll was hilarious too but I’m not friends with them now because they’re boring” but this gets way better than his last, MGMT-sampling single. It’s not a pinnacle of metaphor but there’s some pretty great crooning here.
[7]

Michaelangelo Matos: The ambient impression I had of this guy was that he was some kind of free radical, or maybe I’m mistaking him for one of his 720 crewmates. At any rate, I wasn’t prepared for him to sound like such a putz. This must be what my friends who hated the Neptunes circa ’02 were thinking it was going to become.
[5]

Ian Mathers: The great and frustrating thing about “Novocane” is that, no matter how many times Ocean talks about numbing the pain, he never actually talks about the pain. There’s a gap at the middle of the song, somewhere in the loop of not feeling anything and taking things to make sure that you don’t feel anything. You can think he’s a spoiled First World brat or a pitiable figure in the middle of an existential breakdown, but by describing the hollowness/hangover/paranoia rather than the problem, “Novacane” becomes unsettlingly weightless. Facts on the ground are thin; he doesn’t know what he’s taken, he can’t feel his face, he doesn’t know what the problem is. Who does?
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: The only drug I use regularly is Motrin PM, to sleep. None of these sex-and-tripods goings-on go on here. But I understand “Novacane.” The only time Ocean sounds animated is during the backstory, and other than fleeting change-ups, the track goes nowhere, suffocating in its five-ish notes. It’s a fetid conflation of withdrawal, heartbreak and depression, to the point where you don’t know which causes what. The half-deflated harmonies could almost be called beautiful if you forgot where they came from, and the half-spoken syllables could be words and sentences if you thought Ocean even half-knew what he was saying. It’s seductively pleasant to listen to, but it’s also the saddest song I’ve heard this year, and I never want to hear it again.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: Ocean tries to paint himself as both the ruiner and the ruined, which is a tough trick to pull off, but if there’s been a better vocal impression of numbness, I haven’t heard it this year. There are ominous clouds and beats which are pulses behind the pain, which give it a cinematic quality, and the lyrics are like a detached exposition. There’s the odd clunker — I cringed at the Eyes Wide Shut reference, but his little asides — “at least she working” — add colour to the vignettes. It sounds like a brilliant and meticulously-constructed piece of craft even as it simultaneously sounds stream-of-consciousness. I’m an Odd Future sceptic, but with or without that context, “Novacane” is a harrowing but haunting track that gets a lot of things right that it’s easy to get spectacularly wrong.
[9]

Michaela Drapes: You can’t help but feel for Frank Ocean; he seems so out of his depth in this melancholy love story. He just wants to, you know, connect with something real in a field in the California desert — but you already know that it’s not going to end well when he’s at there for the mainstream hip-hop, and she’s there for what goes on in the dance tents. Oh Frank, you should know there’s no happy endings to be found at a Coachella afterparties.
[7]

Zach Lyon: This makes me want to go all Lex on everyone. It’s alright, but it doesn’t go anywhere, and it just putters off after clinging to its clever tricks for five minutes.
[4]

Alfred Soto: A spare, slivery track in which admissions of swinish behavior and professions of love intermingle, uneasily. Thanks to the swelling synth patterns out of nineties R&B and false endings, it’s hard to know who’d doing what to whom, or even when metaphor ends and referents begin, which, thanks to Ocean’s haunted vocal, might be the point.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: This love story starts at Coachella: he went to see Jigga, she went to see Z-Trip. (The appended “Perfect” is one of two great ad-libs Frank Ocean interjects into this tune; the other is the Warner Brothers-esque “Yikes” that follows “Cocaine for breakfast.”) From there Ocean drifts off into a haze of narrated drug use and musical anesthesia, transforming the precise details of the opening into a dragged out stretch of numbed hypnogogia. The intention is to mimic the melancholic state of a decaying relationship, but, really, it succeeds for a much simpler reason: the whirring, vaguely ’90s-style beat keeping time throughout the tune. It’s enough of a hook that Ocean has room to stretch out his songwriting nous and limited but creamy vocal. The sound is something different for R&B as well: not for its supposed “indie” outlook, but for its suburban aesthetic, and the way it avoids setting youth and maturity at odds. The result is beautiful, and proof that this shit doesn’t have to be grown to be sexy.
[9]

One person’s summer hit is another person’s last summer’s hit…

[Video][Website]
[5.80]

Ian Mathers: They have a horrible band name. If you try and listen to the lyrics, they’re a pretty dire and weirdly lightweight Columbine narrative. If you watch the video, the band seems pretty annoying. I strongly suspect that I will never like any of their other songs even a little. If this reminds me of anyone else it’s Broken Social Scene when Broken Social Scene is being especially annoying. And this is getting played everywhere right now, and few things feel more like summer this year than driving around in the afternoon with the chorus of “Pumped Up Kicks” looping out of the radio. I adore it to distraction, which outweighs all the other shit.
[10]

Kat Stevens: This would have fitted right in on the Xfm playlist in 1999, during the post-Travis indie drought when Gus Gus was the most exciting thing on offer to these ears. Mid-paced sing-song from under the sink! RUSH IT TO ME IMMEDIATELY. Not for the first time have I thanked fuck for the arrival of Britney Spears.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: I know I don’t keep my ear to the indie ground like I used to, but I could swear this sounds exactly like 2005. Is this the first wave of Bush-era nostalgia beginning to crest and bury us all?
[6]

Alex Ostroff: I’ve had this song floating around my hard drive since last summer, and it sounds like it was meticulously focus-grouped to appeal to my (20something, indie-ish, urban hipster) demographic. Washed out sonics, vocals pleasantly unassertive, mumbled through a processor and buried in the mix, vague lyrics (that are apparently about gun violence among disaffected youth), whistling. Normally, I would resent this sort of thing, but God save me, I can’t help myself. It floats insubstantially in the back of my mind on loop, plays on repeat in my headphones in the summer sun, evaporating in the heat until I think I’ve finally forgotten it — at which point it comes back in full force. Or at least, it did last summer. In 2011, its hold on me has weakened. Still, it’s the song of a summer, even if it isn’t the song of my summer. Hearing it emerge from friends’ cars, windows and house party sound systems, the sense of nostalgia ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ tries so hard to evoke finally sounds genuine.
[8]

Jer Fairall: In which Peter Bjorn and John’s “Young Folks” states its case as the most noxious musical influence of the 21st century.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: This is the American “Young Folks”. All the pieces are there: the sleepy sounds, the whistled hook, and further, it was a moderately enjoyable radio hit when you heard it occasionally, but repeated exposure — especially as it’s now a bona fide mainstream pop hit — hasn’t been kind to its charms. Six months ago, it would have been a [7] but now it’s just too mumbly, too faint, too ignorable.
[5]

Michaela Drapes: I wouldn’t normally do this, but the fact that these kids are a bunch of slick appropriation artists has forced my hand. Here’s a list of things this song rips off: “Jeremy”, “Young Folks”, Beck, Soul Coughing, that Cake song in the iTunes commercials, the Beta Band song in High Fidelity, Ezra Koenig’s delivery, the bassline from Duffy’s “Mercy” … I mean, it’s not even a coherent collection of things to steal from! Perhaps some day we’ll look back on this and laugh, and remember it as the doom anthem of of all the forgotten Hype Machine bands.
[0]

Hazel Robinson: I shouldn’t really like this but I’m a sucker for a creeping bassline and the restless feet-itchiness of that agitated synth over the top let it get away with sounding like a slowed-down version of the Caesars. And it’s got a clap breakdown — you can’t really hate on that.
[8]

Renato Pagnani: Never has a murderous shooting spree sounded so funky, and rarely has wisp sounded so substantial. The verses are almost rendered useless by their lazy megaphone delivery (although they do mimic the sun-soaked lethargy of sizzling July afternoons nicely), but the walking-the-dog bassline and massive stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth-sweet chorus more than make up for this.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: I’ve gone through so many rejected idea for this blurb, including puns about Peter Bjorn and Jindie and a conclusion that it’s music for shopping at Urban Outfitters to. (The problem with the latter is that I like shopping at Urban Outfitters.) All of those approaches show a glib disregard for the song’s audience though, and it would be wrong of me to do that simply because I imagine they’re people who think themselves fashionable. Use my stalling as an indication of how cautious and uneventful “Pumped Up Kicks” is. The internet tells me the band is from Los Angeles, and I suspect on a sunny Californian day with little to do, the melodic bass line and telephone vocal would be quite suitable to be used as background noise. Possibly in an Urban Outfitters.
[5]

Not so close you can almost taste it, evidently.

[Video][Website]
[5.64]

Alex Ostroff: Simple Plan cropped up in Canada in 2002, breaking into the public consciousness at the height of the power-pop-punk scene. But while Sum 41 were having existential crises and rocking out in empty pools, and Good Charlotte were attempting to ignite class warfare and rocking out in empty pools, the nice Quebecois boys of Simple Plan were penning pop songs about girls and breaking up and love. So while this feels a bit mellower and more polished, the transatlanticism of “Jet Lag” isn’t that much of a departure from their previous material. Long-distance relationships are fertile ground for the melodrama required in a good pop song, and create a legitimate in-plot reason for a duet; TashBed feels like an odd choice for a ‘rock’ song at first, but acquits herself fairly well, especially on the pre-chorus cry: “Trying to figure out the time zone’s making me crazy!” The song isn’t really cleared for take off, though, until the chorus — a mass of tightly coiled lines and yearning harmonies. “Jet Lag” would get an easy [8] if it weren’t for the existence of a French version featuring Marie-Mai. Her voice fits more smoothly with the track than Bedingfield’s, and the lyrics somehow seem less forced than the English ones at times. Plus, the bilingual love story sells the distance more effectively. It also makes me think of this recent bit of Quebecois film, perversely convincing me that despite the glorious romanticisation of distance in pop songs, this flight is probably doomed to crash, lending the entire affair an unintentional and lovely ephemerality.
[7]

Hazel Robinson: Simple Plan? As in the Canadian Good Charlotte without the propensity for incredible pop choruses? Natasha Bedingfield? As in Bridget Jones Pop? How have they ended up making a song that sounds like the cast of High School Musical performing the hits of U2? If it’s to try to recreate the dislocation of jet lag then good work, people. Although there’s an app for sorting out the time zone, dudes, it’s really fine.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Nearly a decade after their debut album, what always seemed the most interminably tedious of Canadian pop-punk acts has emerged from the chrysalis. “Jet Lag” is the kind of travails-of-touring tune that should not be relatable in the slightest to those of us who don’t live Spinal Tap lives, but Simple Plan buries the jetsetting and shoves the loneliness to the forefront, giving the tune an appropriate emotional versatility. “You say good morning when it’s midnight” doesn’t even need to be about literal time differences. All of the tyranny of distance stuff is just frosting, though. The spark behind the song’s enormous appeal is its bottle rocket guitar line, its stuttering “heart-heart” chorus, and, of course, the vocal interplay between Pierre Bouvier and a Natasha Bedingfield surprisingly suited to power chords.
[8]

Ian Mathers: These guys are responsible for the mewling “Welcome to My Life,” my default answer when someone asks me what my least favourite song is, so I’m predisposed to hate everything they’ve ever done. But “Jet Lag” is such an adorably runty attempt at power pop (they’re just trying so hard not to be shit) that I kind of adore it. Maybe it’s the good influence of Tashbed (I love that I can say that with a straight face here!), but I find myself not wanting to punch Simple Plan guy even a little.
[7]

Jer Fairall: A fitfully engaging example of what used to get called “power pop,” but exactly what audience do you think you’re courting when you recruit the previous decade’s blandest female pop vocalist as your guest?
[6]

Dan Weiss: Disappointingly catchy joyless professionalism from two dunderheads so equally has-been I can’t tell which one drew the short straw.
[4]

Zach Lyon: My girlfriend recently spent two weeks in Ireland, a five-hour timezone jump. You get used to it pretty quickly, you dumb goons. Good job coming up with a simple hook and turning it into the most dramatic, whiny ordeal you’ve ever been through, something that wouldn’t be out of place in the middle of a Disney Channel movie about teenage rock-stars-in-love going on separate legs of a tour.
[2]

Michaela Drapes: No, this isn’t the most creative lyric or production of all time, but Bedingfield and Bouvier’s voices slide up nicely together, clearly benefitting from being smoothed over by a slick mix that seems a thousand tracks deep. It’s a charming bit of disposable transatlantic romance fluff, destined to become the lead track on a million long-distance couples’ iTunes playlists.
[4]

Alfred Soto: This ode to the rigors of the touring life is a descendant of “Leather and Lace” and Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock’s “Picture,” with a dash of Fountains of Wayne. If the arrangement weren’t so perfunctory — if the guitars didn’t chug so predictably — including Bedingfield herself, who sings like she’s the one with jet lag, we’d have something.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: I was hoping for the long-awaited unification of pop-punk and pop-pop; I got a mopier “Need You Now” without the relatability.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: We tell ourselves that now we’re older, we have too much in the way of critical faculty to enjoy such a fluffy, silly concoction as this cuddle-punk nonsense, but this has so much conviction that my guard is down. Bedingfield’s voice holds up better over something with some pace and volume than I’d have expected. The lyrics don’t so much as flirt with triteness as get to third base with it but as far as workmanlike attempts to evoke a very specific feeling, it’s not as bad as it could have been. Above that, it is dangerously catchy, which forgives sins far worse than that.
[8]

In American English, it would be “Swagger Jacker,” but then it wouldn’t rhyme…

[Video][Website]
[4.93]

Alex Ostroff: After being blown away by her rendition of Keri Hilson’s “Turn My Swag On” that first exposed Cher to the public eye, I had high hopes. While I’m not sure what I exactly wanted her to be doing, a hip-house schoolyard chant about brushing off haters and Tweeting, with a chorus that Swagger Jags the chorus of “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” was definitely not it. She does her best with the material she’s given, but it’s a patchwork quilt of awkward bits stitched together to a beat. The last twenty seconds or so are a fairly irresistible dancefloor banger, though.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Ah, TV talent shows. While watching the journey to stardom, you’re bound to find at least one contestant you can get behind, whose voice or story or look resonates with you and makes you like them enough to keep watching the rest. As a person or a pop star? It doesn’t matter. You’re watching. Clearly the same maxim applies to the construction of this debut from Lloyd, as it throws so many barely-connected ideas at the listener over the course of its length that surely, dear listener, you’ll like at least one bit of it enough to keep listening, even if the rest of it is the most annoying thing you will ever hear.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Fuckin air-horn synths, man. I can like a lot about this song, up to and including the nonsensical use of “jagger,” but once those Rotemmy sounds come in all interest crumbles into dust.
[4]

Ian Mathers: Surely doing your damnedest to win The X Factor should come with some sort of prohibition about complaining about people talking about you for at least a few years, let alone making that the subject matter of your renewed grab for public attention? This shit is getting positively Ouroborosian. Still, god help me, I actually quite like the melody of the part of the chorus where she sings, and even her voice; but if that’s a 7 or 8, the bulk of the track is about a 2, so…
[4]

Anthony Easton: A little kiddie pop, but there is still a bit of fascinating triumphalism like transubstantive magic.
[7]

Hazel Robinson: I like how playground this is, I like that she sounds like herself, I really like that Will.I.Am is not involved. Every time I hear it, in fact, I like it more — she’s loud and unapologetic and there’s something deliciously mean about the ridiculous chorus, matched against such competent proof that she can do better than that; it’s not her singing “Waltzing Matilda”, she’s mocking older people and why not? She’s snotty and she’s bratty and she’s singing about the things that matter to her: who her friends are, what people are saying about her and to some extent, partying. Also (and this is an almost-certain-to-be-crushed dream) imagine if that bit that sounds like Swedish House Mafia at the end signalled this was the first track of an album that went into the brattiest 4/4 rave you’d ever hear for the next ten tracks. No ballads, no fucking around. Amazing.
[8]

Michelle Myers: I loved Cher Lloyd on X Factor, and I really do think that she’s going to come out with song amazing pop songs. “Swagger Jagger” is a fine showcase of Lloyd’s cute girl swag, but a little to busy for its own good.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: So this is the swag when it’s turned on? Cher Lloyd’s X Factor turn was a YouTube hit because it featured a preternaturally mature voice taking on one of Soulja Boy’s ricketiest instrumentals. “Swagger Jagger” is the reverse; a girl sounding younger than she is lost amidst an overstuffed backing track that suggests the producer couldn’t find a single idea worthy of confidence, and hoped a surfeit of weaker ones would compensate. It’s a poor song that can’t wring awesomeness from a teenager sneering “Hi hater/Kiss kiss, I’ll see you later.”
[4]

Michaela Drapes: It’s a bit rich to have your first single coming off a TV singing contest that you didn’t even win be an ode to haters. If anyone were actually interested in stealing any of Cher’s uh, mojo, this song would make more sense, I guess?
[0]

Sally O’Rourke: If “Moves Like Jagger” weren’t already climbing the charts, everything about “Swagger Jagger” would still scream cheap knockoff: the public domain-sourced hook; the eighteenth-place-in-Eurovision beats; the “eff y’all haters” lyrics cut and pasted from half the other songs in the Top 40.
[2]

Zach Lyon: One of those tracks that are perfectly OK until you spend a day with it stuck in your head with no access to something different. You do your best to scrunch your face and at least morph it into “Oh My Darling, Clementine” but you find you suddenly hate that by proxy.
[2]

Jer Fairall: Derivative, yes, and of Ke$ha no less, managing to swipe the shameless appropriation of a classic melody a la “Take It Off.” But this particular melody comes from “You Are My Sunshine,” a song that it is probably impossible to render in any way other than absolutely joyful, and this girl delivers it all with a cheerful exuberance that is miles removed from Ke$ha’s smug, taunting cattiness. “Girls Fall Like Dominoes” remains my (and apparently no one else’s) summer jam of choice, but I’ll take this over just about everything else currently being offered up by the charts.
[8]

Frank Kogan: This song contorts its face in 50 different ways, and honestly I don’t know if I get it, or if it pulls together nearly enough, but I just love Cher Lloyd, she’s utterly adorable and can stick out her tongue and roll her eyes all she wants.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: “Swagger Jagger” could be a year-2200 oddity-museum exhibit about summer 2011. There’ll be a lengthy placard about how this rapper/singer/walking embodiment of attitude — played by an off-duty security guard, of course — was meant to seem, already somehow, like a Kreayshawn successor, not to mention Nicki (from whom she jacks facial expressions and play-acting) or Ke$ha (from whom she jacks pitch-shifting and Platonic form.) The guide would take five minutes to sweep over the last decade-scape of reality singing competitions and the politics of fanbases and personae and coming in first vs. not-first. Then she’d note “Swagger Jagger”‘s off-kilter, post-BEP synth and trace it as far back as she has knowledge and the museum has a budget (some things never change) and mention how the track takes a dark turn toward the end like the charts’ surrounding apocalyptica. “Swagger,” “Jagger” and Twitter would be explanatory footnotes. The curators would be boggled by the chorus, of course, having to pull out “Oh My Darling, Clementine” and J.R. Rotem and cheesy ’90s Eurodance to even come close to explaining it. But it’d be much easier to explain the video, with its ’80s-rip colors and public dance and the fact that “Swagger Jagger” starts out with its own shitty, tinny ringtone simulacrum and that everything looks like an iPod. The clientele will either be terribly confused about how this all fits together or blase about how simple and unadventurous this is compared to their 2200 trash-compactor jams. The ghost of Cher Lloyd will be overjoyed that she lived on in museum form, not just ephemeral tweets and blog posts and the pence she’ll see in royalties. Forget the realer music you’re about to run to: history will remember us like this.
[6]

Sings like computer.

[Video][Website
[4.36]

Michaelangelo Matos: Why, look! It’s the brand new hit single by prime-time TV star and late-night talk-show regular Adam Levine and his blonde female sidekick whose last album flopped . . . er, I mean, by Maroon 5 (is a group!) and Christina Aguilera, who knows all about playing to the camera since she starred in the ultra-amazing Burlesque. But here she just jumps in with only a hint of the usual “HEY-yeah!” growling that has become her default vocal position. Adam, meanwhile, sounds like he’s auditioning for Chromeo. Uh-oh. Think they wrote this one after the Grammys? Or were they just trying to get Mick to make a surprise appearance on The Voice? Maybe next season, eh?
[4]

Alfred Soto: “Wishful thinking” is the obvious response. This sparkly Pro Tooled-to-death stomper is closer to “Moves Like Timberlake,” especially when the guitars mimic the Chic sample in Modjo’s “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” and Levine actually sings “take me by the tongue” as if he thought it was a sexy come-on. As for the other billed has-been? Now that we’re talking Stones here, anyone remember Lisa Fischer?
[5]

Michaela Drapes: I’ve always found Adam Levine nasty and unappealing; the idea of him and Xtina having “kinky” roleplay sex where he’s Mick Jagger and she’s Jerry Hall (better fit than Bianca, or anyone else, right?) is even more appalling. Gross!
[0]

Kat Stevens: This is both terrible and amazing! The seesaw of my opinion bangs firmly down on the dog turd splattered part of the playground whenever I think about how much Adam’s voice sounds like Phil Collins (but with less gusto); it soars high up into cotton-candy clouds with a great view over the city whenever I picture Adam and Christina aged 65, gyrating to this at a wedding disco to the disgust of the younger generations. Sitting on the middle of a seesaw is unpleasant but sometimes necessary!
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: “Misery” attracted so little company on the charts that Maroon 5 would likely become a nonentity if not for one problem: you have a crush on Adam Levine. You, reader. It is a phenomenon so pervasive Kay Hanley wrote a song about it. It’s not just his looks but his voice, by now so slithery with AutoTune it resembles a sitar. On that strength, he landed The Voice, added televised snark to his Jaggerly moveset and thus got an excuse to release one more song. You’ve heard it before: it’s “Give a Little More,” sexual politics intact, plus a Mick Jagger reference somehow not accompanied by “swagger,” plus total disco (see the “lyrics video,” which abandons all menace for primary colors and pink Katy Perry script.) There’s also Christina Aguilera, and her half-presence raises more questions: is she losing her voice or just being coy with it? Why’s she evoking Britney by clipping her notes with a groan, but evoking her old self with that “Genie in a Bottle” reference? If you subscribe to either The Voice‘s or the tabloids’ versions of Adam and Christina’s inter-coach rivalry, there’s probably some extra frisson to the power dynamics here (and vocal dynamics–when the hell else has Xtina been made so peripheral?) If not, hey, she’s easily ignored. “Moves With Jagger” is also laced with whistling. Somehow, this explains everything else.
[8]

Alex Ostroff: I’ve been known to enjoy the white boy funk of Maroon 5 on occasion, but when fused with electrothump of 2011 vintage, any swagger that Adam Levine may have once possessed is leeched away by the same force that sucked out his sense of syncopation and his sleazy seductive qualities. Plus, whistling? I can’t think of a song involving a prominently whistled hook that doesn’t inspire me to fits of rage. I’m sure one exists, but this most certainly is not it.
[3]

Hazel Robinson: This has got whistling, which immediately sets me against it and the disco element is so inoffensive it could be on a Sophie Ellis-Bextor record. Except that Man From Maroon 5 is not an ice queen and Christina can’t do minimal, so although there’s probably something catchy in there it’s too wordy to even be an advertising backer.
[6]

Dan Weiss: The best thing about Maroon 5 these days is their font. I mean it: “Makes Me Wonder” and “Won’t Go Home Without You” deserve a poptimist reevaluation from critics now besotted with Rihanna and Robyn. This is sticky, kinda. Chorus is an OK “Makes Me Wonder” retread, and Aguilera’s contribution is graciously brief, but who knew whistling could be so wordy?
[5]

Jer Fairall: Pop’s most aggravating male voice teams up with its most frequently squandered female one for a song far too limp to evoke its titular subject’s late 70s disco flirtation, the only even remotely plausible point of reference here. Not that such a thing is anywhere within Adam Levine’s abilities to begin with, but Christina has actually performed with Mick, so perhaps she should know better. Then again, 90% of Christina’s career has consisted of things that she should know better than.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: The firmer (not to say duller) thump of modern pop gives a grateful bottom end to what would otherwise be an exercise in twee nostalgias, all sprightly indie whistling and disco dressage and Maroon 5’s own thin, anxiously reverent parlor-soul. Christina takes the “featuring” credit seriously, keeping her orgiastic pipes in check so as not to blow Adam out of the water, and the result is a strutting confection that is both entirely ridiculous and, given the right spot in a playlist, utterly charming.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: In the interests of research, I watched some videos of Mick Jagger dancing to refresh myself as to what his moves look like. Fluid, but untrained, his dancing combines looseness of limb with exuberance and a genuine love of his own material. “Moves Like Jagger,” on the other hand is as stiff as a board; its beat is flat and pat and its guitar sounds like Chic as described by someone who’s never heard let alone enjoyed disco. Adam Levine’s voice is so slick and frictionless he could be a robot programmed to sing and the vaguely reptilian charm he had on something like “Harder To Breathe” is a distant memory these days. Christina Aguilera’s bit can’t even be called a diversion, that’s how boring it is.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: Comes on like a brand new Stardust single released a decade too late. The reference to the titular Rolling Stone is too gimmicky to steer the hook sufficiently far from novelty; I tired of that trick when Pimp C used it twice on the one UGK album. Confirms that the platonic ideal of Maroon 5 was the disco rock of “Makes Me Wonder.” Disco house works for them, but it reduces the value of Adam Levine as a frontman.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Now, maybe I’m being overly literal in my reading of the lyrics, but if “I don’t even need to control you / Look into my eyes and I’ll own you” really does stem from “moves like Jagger,” should we be calling in Van Helsing or something to deal with that shit? Adam Levine makes a shitty Renfield, anyway.
[4]

Frank Kogan: OK, my towhead grandchildren, let me geeze and wheeze at you and recount the original days when I knew people who tried to move like Jagger, and some of them did it credibly, not a swagger (as has been claimed elsewhere) but a cold deadly stalk. These were the guys who terrorized kids in school lavatories and who mocked and humiliated misfits and even went after yours truly. So there’s a little bit of the old freezing-on of fear in the hairs that stand upon the back of one’s neck when this Jagger move is recalled; though ears I had too and so kenned that the Jagger Man put forth words that seemed to break his own legs and cut himself off at the kneecaps, if viewed correctly through the cold long end of the telescope. But the man moved his cold walk anyway, as if he hadn’t heard what he himself was saying, and few others seemed to see this. “Did anyone notice that he’s just drawn a parallel between himself and a man who gets his sexual kicks by torturing defenseless black women?” No, not many did apparently, as black girls in the summer heat walked around with “Brown Sugar” emblazoned across their tank tops. Anyhow, this Levine character, nice enough guy, it seems, has no pretensions to move like a Jagger in the forests of the night, so the song’s something of a gag, the point being the distance between this and that. Just a nice song, a good little semifunk that needs a bit more from a singer who usually gives slightly more. I don’t hate it, but I miss the past, and the power, as horrible as it was. Missed opportunity, as the slight self-mockery and slight gleam and groove from Adam could’ve been part of a better song.
[4]

And then there’s BABAbababababababababababababababaBABA

[Video][Website]
[6.55]

Kat Stevens: Baa-baa ba-ba-ba-ba-BA ba-ba-ba-ba-BA ba-ba-ba-ba-BA-ba. Doo-doo du-du-du-du-DU du-du-du-du-DU du-du-du-du-DU DOO. Neee-neee ni-ni-ni-ni-NI ni-ni-ni-ni-NI ni-ni-ni-ni-NI NEEEEE.
[8]

Jer Fairall: As playful, exuberant and eventually annoying as the playground chants its chorus so aggressively affects.
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: I have a hard time resisting anything this silly, when it’s done skillfully. There doesn’t seem to be much care in it; the rhythms have many tendrils and are so brute that precision is the least of its evident concerns. Still, it wears.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: The return of Buraka Som Sistema is repetitive and abrasive, but that’s nothing new. The array of guest vocalists and the different ways that BSS played to their strengths was a highlight of Black Diamond, but the endless stream of monosyllabic chanting on “Hangover” might be even better. Lyrics were never the point. The point is massive bass, repetitive ping pong synths and a groove with real physicality. Consider “Hangover” as a warning shot; another album is coming, and you will be held hostage to the beat, so you may as well just surrender now.
[8]

Chuck Eddy: I’m enough of a Teutonophile that I’d probably give at least a conditional thumbs-up to any song that dares rip off George Kranz’s great proto-industrial beat barrage “Trommeltanz (Din Daa Daa)” — Flo Rida, Pitbull feat. Ying Yang Twins, whoever. But these consistently intriguing kuduro Euros go one better by basically just outright covering the German classic, and making it feel African with heaving hard percussion (ba ba BA ba, nyeh nyeh NYEH nyeh, doo doo DOO doo) from machines and mouths alike.
[9]

Anthony Easton: I love this entirely for the BABABABA chorus. The magnificent squelching electronic noise is just a bonus. Add a point for the dog.
[8]

Hazel Robinson: This might well work live, which is what I’ve given it credit for. On record, though, it’s a terrible racket and the lyrical content (or well, lack thereof) bothers me on the level that I suspect it’s roughly how Daily Mail readers imagine all music from outside the UK to sound.
[5]

B Michael Payne: I really hope it’s a language barrier that’s making me at first think the video is a little exploitative and mean. Otherwise, I can kind of see this song being great, but not without problems, when deployed in a social setting.
[5]

Ian Mathers: I feel like I don’t have enough alcohol or sugar or whatever in my system to appreciate this song. Play it for me again under the right circumstances and I may even love it; right now, it feels like that title is a painfully self-fulfilling prophecy.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: I don’t get it. The synesthesia of a hangover is Yuck. What are these guys drinking to make it sound like this?
[6]

Michaela Drapes: Well, I guess this is going to be the track that’s stuck in my head for the next week. And I have no doubt that this track is a completely accurate representation of what it’s like to be afflicted with “dor de cabeça” after partying in Lisbon or Angola or Cape Verde.
[6]

There’s collard greens, which Big K.R.I.T. is very astute to like…

[Video][Myspace]
[7.33]

Chuck Eddy: Yeah yeah, more collard-green rap — I always have a soft spot for that kinda stuff, but this guy’s neither the first nor most countrified to try it. Fairly propulsive, though, in its monotonal way.
[5]

Michelle Myers: Big K.R.I.T. follows in an established tradition of hip hop auteurs–rapper/producers who create rich, self-contained worlds with their music. On 2010’s K.R.I.T Wuz Here, he combined classic Dirty South beats and workmanlike rapping with rich local flavor. “Country Shit” works as that mixtape’s centerpiece, a vivid portrayal of K.R.I.T.’s Mississippi hometown with plenty of collard greens, trunks banging and kush blunts.
[9]

Hazel Robinson: From that sped-up soul sample to the aggression with which foodstuffs are listed in this, this is proud and angry in a way that probably at least Ludacris doesn’t have a right to be about these things by this point, it’s got a strange sort of power in the way any locality love-letter does and hefty dose of party that should get it sponsored by the Southern states’ tourism boards, if anyone had any sense.
[9]

Anthony Easton: Love this. Wonder if it saw the cock-measuring and psycho-geographic jingoism of recent country (see “Ala-Freakin-Bama”) and how the edge cases moved fairly close to hip hop or fully crossed over (see Colt Ford) and said “fuck it, I am going to back a battle track that says this is our space, this is African American space.” I’m waiting for the Trace Adkins guest on the next track.
[9]

B Michael Payne: I’ve been getting pretty deep into G-Side and Kristmas, so I’ve been calibrated for a significantly less brash version of Southern rap than this song presents. In fact, it sounds kind of like a Yelawolf song without any of the heart. Plus, every time this song ends, Big L comes on and I’m like, “Uhhhh why isn’t rap more like this?”
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: To some extent country rap is like the other kind of country music, a form that innovates by introducing variations around a set of fixed signifying elements. So K.R.I.T. has got his Caddy and his drank, his gray tapes and his trunk thump, his soul food and his crack rocks, and he deploys each of these ideas with the mastery and commitment to form required of any student determined to keep his UGK GPA up. And yet he feels like an average of past greats, with none of the idiosyncrasies that made them exceptional; a collection of signifiers is supposed to be the start point, not the end. But even if he’s not Boosie or early T.I., it works as riding music. Where country shit is concerned, that’s important.
[7]

Michaela Drapes: Love the production, not keen on Big K.R.I.T’s flow. I’ve never been a fan of the languid sound of 90’s Southern hip-hop MCs; I’m much happier when scrambling to keep up with the stylings of slicker tongues. Still, if I had a drop top and a sweet sound system, I’d drive around blasting this one every now and then, just to feel the speakers shake.
[6]

Ian Mathers: The original benefits from being even more compact and relentless than the remix with Luda and Bun B; both of them are entertaining as always, but when it’s just K.R.I.T. going hard over that post-“A Milli” production/loop, “Country Shit” gains a kind of cramped intensity, even when things slow down a bit.
[7]

Josh Langhoff: The trouble with the remix is that Luda and K.R.I.T. don’t sound uncomfortable enough — they’re all joking around, voices dancing nimbly around the beat when nimble dancing is the LAST thing you wanna do in the oppressive swamp coffin that is country heat. (Bun B sounds nimble too, but he is great and impervious to heat) But on the original — let’s say the kick drum is the heat, or at least the pulsing headache you get while you’re staring at the heat rising in waves off your 33-inch (YEAH I SAID IT) rims. K.R.I.T.’s slow flow is at war with the kick drum heat, scraping against it like the metal-on-metal sound FX during the verses, until in the second verse he’s reduced to a bunch of cranky rhetorical questions like “Why is y’all stankin’?!?” You know how often people ask me that every summer? It’s about time my summer jam did the same.
[9]

There’s this damp sigh, that only Matos likes…

[Video][Website]
[2.46]

Michaela Drapes: The faux Postal Service does a track with some faux Kanye clone. Horrifically awful.
[0]

Michaelangelo Matos: I can’t believe I’m going to give this Nerf ball anything over a [5], but this is pretty irresistible, with Chrystopher’s advanced Sesame Street flow making the sharpest (and most ’86-like) synths he’s programmed seem trickier than they actually are. And do my ears deceive me or did Adam Young’s balls finally drop?
[7]

Dan Weiss: I had a lot of fun watching Death Cab snobs–god–get really, REALLY angry at “Fireflies”. But I can’t believe this is a song. It sounds like the “y” in Shawn Chrystopher’s name.
[2]

Zach Lyon: Oh, wow, did you know that taking Mr. City’s voice out of his songs actually makes them sound alright? Mr. Chrystyphyr’s verses sound like they’re in a completely different song, so that when he starts echoing the chorus like a hype man it sounds both disorienting and hilarious. I’m no fighter, but if the word combination of “alligator” and “sky” were a human being in my general vicinity, I would become a murderer.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: By the sound of it, an alligator sky is the kind you soar through when something really amazing has just happened, like solving a moderately difficult problem on your math homework. Reward yourself with this song if you think a celery stick and a glass of two percent milk would be too exciting.
[2]

Chuck Eddy: As songs about alligator lizards in the air go, nowhere near as good as “Ventura Highway.” And I never understood that one, either — haven’t flying reptiles been extinct since the Cretaceous ended? “Owl Sky” would make a lot more sense. That said, this is pleasanter than I would’ve predicted.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Have Owl City made it their cause to appropriate every member of the animal kingdom? A project no less ambitious than the wanton slaughter of metaphors.
[0]

Pete Baran: A lyric from this stupendously ill-conceived single suggests that Owl City’s “imagination is taking them away”. It is not a lot of imagination, but I do like both their and Shawn’s suggestion that one can get a rocket to the sun. That’s the kind of fireflying I want to see Owl City do. In the meantime, Shawn Chrystopher appears to want to be the featured rapper on a 1989 indie dance single, with his awesome ad libs featuring my favourite: “like a rocket from the ground”. It ends like the producer lost all the will to live.
[1]

Hazel Robinson: Shit, I’m so old people are sampling bands I liked when I was a teenager and rapping over them. Who knew Death Cab were so– oh, never mind, it’s just this prick again. This is less offensive than “Fireflies” until there’s a pause just before the chorus and he attempts an attitudinal ‘uh’ shortly before Shawn Chrystopher helpfully explains physics: “like a rocket from the ground up“. For fuck’s sake.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: The charm of “Fireflies,” if you were at all charmed, was how different it sounded from anything on the radio—if not from the Postal Service—and how its ideal listener would hear Adam Young’s interrogative sigh and doodle him with ladybugs into her daydreams. “Alligator Sky” inches this toward a bland “Airplanes” round of wistfulness. Somehow, that’s an improvement.
[4]

Jer Fairall: The least painful Owl City single to date, though only by virtue of the prominent guest rap requiring less time spent listening to Adam Young’s infuriatingly over-earnest, over-enunciating, dweeby Big Bird vocals. All of which means that this comes off sounding more like a particularly shitty B.o.B track rather than someone’s embarrassing attempt to replicate The Postal Service from their own bedroom in spite of their clear ineptitude at differentiating synth pop from soft rock.
[3]

Ian Mathers: Thanks for making me lament the demise of Space Shuttle again, you Gibbard-sounding motherfucker. My next Owl City blurb is probably just going to be all-caps profanity, especially if he keeps basing the titles for his disgustingly sugary, meaningless, weightless, gutless musical-equivalents-of-airbrushed-van-paintings around nonsensical animal-themed phrases (or gives any more work to the idiot cousin of Del’s verses from “Clint Eastwood”).
[1]

Alex Ostroff: It’s a bad sign when your single sounds like a Weird Al parody of yourself, right?
[3]