No actual pictures of them ever having been in the same room together, so this’ll have to do…

[Video][Website]
[4.80]

Iain Mew: “S&M” was previously a rather by the numbers Rihanna banger that was never as naughty as it wanted to be. Adding in a lot more specific references to hurt and pain, rather than the previous approach which was a bit “chains, whips, fill in the details yourself”, and handing these lines over not to an assured Rihanna but to a Britney who sounds more strained and robotic than ever, makes it veer from blah right over to disturbing. Not really an improvement.
[4]

Zach Lyon: “S&M”:S&M::”I Kissed A Girl”:lesbian makeouts.
[3]

Anthony Easton: Closer to a real S&M scene, in its almost liturgical attachment to ritual and etiquette plus how it delicately and carefully calibrates power exchange — though Brit tops from the bottom in a few places.
[7]

Martin Skidmore: This is a major pop powerhouse team-up, on a housey Stargate number with a punchy chorus, though Britney’s contribution seems kind of unnecessary, more about star power than adding anything much. I’m also not entirely convinced by this ode to S&M — it reads more like they are posing as daring than confessing to or bragging about something real.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: If you have to brag about it, you probably are not as kinky as you think you are. Then again, maybe that’s why this hits me as more endearing than nauseating… Well actually, X-Ray Spex’s (R.I.P. Poly) and Devo’s and the Dazz Band’s and Madonna’s and Samantha Fox’s and the Crystals’ odes to bondage and/or discipline were cuter, but who’s counting? Still not sure if they’re really saying they “like the smell” of “sex in the air,” though. Like, on a trapeze??
[6]

Alfred Soto: I don’t know if it’s whips and chains or the prospect of yet another number one single that’s got this icebox excited — something’s got her to sing like the Auto-Tune is a cat o’nine tails. Britney, who at this point in her career lives for this kind of opulent electro-porn, exerts herself as if her agent promised her she could kiss Rihanna at the next MTV Video Music Awards.
[6]

Asher Steinberg: This song was an atrocity the first time around — appallingly literal, forced, and blaring — and Britney doesn’t really help; alongside Rihanna she sounds like a callow kid trying to impress/imitate her big sister.
[2]

Jonathan Bradley: Britney sounds like nobody explained to her what was going on before she was shoved into this, and she still hasn’t quite picked up on some of the finer details. The best hook here is still Rihanna’s cocksure “I may be bad but I’m perfectly good at it,” though even that sounds diluted with her growling performance trimmed by a half. Alone, Rihanna approached the tune with the single-mindedness required to maintain the suspension of disbelief; with Britney she just seems distracted.
[5]

Jer Fairall: There is nothing technically wrong with listening to a pair of high profile pop stars, one an abuse victim and the other a mother of two with a history of possible mental illness and/or drug addiction, engage in a little chain-‘n’-whip play for the titillation and grotesque fascination of their audience, but there is plenty about it that is creepy, gross and potentially cruel. Almost as cruel as placing Britney’s breathy nothing of a voice next to Rihanna’s actual one.
[2]

Doug Robertson: Other than her name, what exactly is Britney adding to this track? Of all the things in the world that really don’t need to exist, this is up there with ITV2 and Garfield cartoons.
[6]

Pretty sure I’ve been to a goth club in Leeds that had those exact tables…

[Video][Myspace]
[5.86]

Doug Robertson: In every city there is a club that has never moved on. The dry ice fires out unpredictably, dappled with laser blasts and strobing lighting effects. They might be playing this song, they might be playing something a bit like it, it doesn’t really matter because at that time of night it’s not about the specifics. The only important thing is that it sounds amazing, connects directly with the dance centre of your frontal lobe and takes over the room like an oversized lemur. God bless that club. God bless it.
[7]

Hazel Robinson: Out of all that greenish gloom in the back of the Sucker Punch posters comes an 8-bit arcade-lit club which the floor periodically falls out of and Emily Browning’s intense gaze meets yours at at the drop, all frightened exhilaration. I have a very active imagination. Having been a big fan of Chase & Status before they confused power with putting a guitar on it, I really like the way this triple-bluffs me into thinking it’s going to go into some latter-day Pendulum bullshit and then instead flattens me with some sort of bass railgun. I didn’t like “Me & You”, but with this I’m suddenly gripped by an urgent need to find out if I can make Unreal Tournament work on my Netbook so I can draw cocks on buildings with the Plasma Rifle, so well done all concerned here. Especially since for all the ballistic acrobatics, there’s that chipmunk-tweaked, desperate trance vocal that might as well stab itself straight into my circulatory system for the same heartclenching rush effect. V GOOD, TICK.
[9]

Jer Fairall: I kinda, sorta liked the last single we reviewed by this lot, but that one placed its emphasis on its King Kong-sized hook, whereas this, for all of its buzzing and stomping, ends up defined by the singer’s piercing nuisance of a voice. Probably captures something of the ecstasy-fueled delirium of the right club on the right night, but on headphones it’s a headache.
[3]

Mallory O’Donnell: Why are they bothering to write an answer song to that one Chase & Status jank now?
[3]

Anthony Easton:Llike a disco ball set between two rococo gilt mirrors, on one of those 80s mirrored coffee tables… recursive!
[7]

Ian Mathers: I’m not usually a fan of this kind of thing (too often they’re either painfully mawkish or boringly functional), but “Guilt” succeeds on the strength of a few surprisingly scuzzy sounding synth melodies and the uncharacteristically intense, relentless (at least in this single edit) vocals.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Nero, it seems, only had enough spare parts to make one “Me and You,” so instead they get Alana to crush a recitative down to the size of a hook and plant some New Age synths in the middle for extra seconds. Amazingly, it almost works.
[5]

And if you’ll just take a look to your left, I think you’ll see we’ve finally got our top 10 in full effect. Now that’s what I call AWESOME!!!!…

[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Al Shipley: Lloyd is such a tender, sincere young man that his actual surname is Polite fer chrissakes. And that means that even his uptempo club records have a certain gushy, emotional quality that so few of his contemporaries can muster even on their ballads. It’s pretty puzzling, however, that nearly 5 years after his big chance at solo stardom came and went with “Throw Some D’s,” that Polow is finally taking another feature credit on a big single, but under a goofy alias and just shouting a bunch of ad libs.
[7]

Zach Lyon: I’m having trouble figuring this out. You have Lloyd and Polow da Don, together, for a second time, and they sound so gloriously mismatched here that the first collaboration seems like a surprise. Everything clashes: Lloyd’s voice, the lyrics, the beat, the BEAT. And it works? Lloyd’s voice sounds weird here, sticks out in a way that it didn’t in “Lay it Down,” even though he was actually doing difficult things with it there. He just has this weird mid-level croon thing going on. And the lyrics are pretty awful. And the little MIDI trumpet samba line just sucks. But the BEAT. It just ties this all together into one magical glitter unicorn of juxtaposition, and those flaws sound essential and awesome (and intentional) because of it.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I will always believe that Lloyd’s “Southside” is a classic (as I wrote for the original Jukebox’s farewell tour), which both hurts and harms any other Lloyd singles I hear. Sure, I’m favourably inclined towards the guy, but everything else (so far) disappoints compared to “Southside”. “Cupid” doesn’t measure up either, but with those peppy little horns parping away during the lightweight bliss of the chorus, it comes surprisingly close. I have a history of initially underrating how much I like Lloyd’s work, so I reserve the right to regret calling this a trifle in a couple of months. But even if I don’t, it’s an awfully sweet trifle. And hey, he’s looking a bit like Wallace Fennel these days, which doesn’t hurt.
[8]

Doug Robertson: Take that mask off Peter Andre. You’re fooling no-one.
[4]

Martin Skidmore: I can’t entirely get on with his singing style – he always sounds to me about half his 25 years – but this has a nicely pulsing beat and a cute song, its sweetness suiting his Michael Jackson style well. There is also some grinding musical energy in places, and Awesome Jones!!! contributes some useful shouting and Barry Whitesque voiceover, so this does a pretty good job of converting me.
[8]

Asher Steinberg: Lloyd’s always been a bit of a throwback to the 80s bubblegum R&B of New Edition et al., and I like him that way. So while this song is pretty and summery enough, especially on the verses, it’s a little disappointing to hear him doing something so traditional, especially those almost gospel-ish bits on the hook.
[6]

Chuck Eddy: Takes guts for a soul crooner to revive an old Sam Cooke title (which maybe he’s too young to know about — he does remember “Cupid Shuffle” though, right?), but Lloyd’s sure got one pretty falsetto — at this point, it might even give El DeBarge a run for the money. Thing is (at least in his ’80s prime), El would’ve been brave enough to let the beauty stand on its own, without all the busy extraneous hooting and hollering, which I assume is the doing of this Awesome!!!! fellow. In other words, I tend to think the man of many exclamation points subtracts more than he adds.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Buoyant vocal — not by accident does Lloyd evoke Eldra DeBarge. But DeBarge also boasted El DeBarge’s songwriting and production.
[7]

Not about snooker…

[Video][Myspace]
[5.71]

Martin Skidmore: I have no idea what he’s going on about, but this is a lively Southern rap number, with autotuned vocals making it even harder to understand. It kind of finds its groove at the start and just sticks with it, every line feeling much like every other line. It has some energy, but it soon bored me.
[4]

Al Shipley: I listen to enough southern rap that I rarely shrug “I have no idea what these guys are saying” and usually regard people who do as squares and herbs, but the extreme consonant-dropping combined with AutoTune make this damn near incoherent to me. It’s at least more spirited and memorable than the Roscoe Dash joints it most resembles, though.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Most of the time, I at least get a kind of bracing thrill out of music that makes me feel old. When I was a teenager I actually wondered what would come along that would cause me to react with the kind of instinctive revulsion my parents’ generation had for most of what I listened to (I never saw 3OH!3 coming), but even the much milder disorientation that something like the digitally-slurred-into-incomprehension chorus of YC’s “Racks” gives me can be kind of neat. I’m not trying to overemphasize how different “Racks” is, because aside from the type of processing it’s been through, it’s really not that far from a lot of what was around when I was at a prime pop cultural age. It’s just that I’m now separated enough from it to have a moment of “oh, is that what the kids like these days?” And unfortunately, that frisson is all that “Racks” really has going for it.
[5]

Chuck Eddy: Kind of monotonous — same theme, repeated over and over and over — but a kind of monotony I don’t think I’ve heard before, and that actually draws me in and feels more open-hearted than most any new hip-hop I’ve heard lately. I get the idea it’s about his car, though that mostly has to do with all the horn-beeping — think he mentions keys and a garage in there somewhere too? Also, these young girls won’t let him be, just like Warren Zevon. Very good chance that I’m missing whatever the point is. But I dig this regardless.
[8]

Zach Lyon: Well, respect to YC for managing to be this anonymous. It almost takes talent to lack any distinguishing features (like talent). The track is nice though; I wouldn’t change the station.
[6]

Asher Steinberg: This just isn’t making the triumphalist grade for me. The sing-song delivery really works for a while, until you realize they’re going to keep singing the same melodic fragment over and over and over. Even the hook isn’t as big as it should be. That said, it’s at least half of the way there to being a pretty great song.
[6]

Mallory O’Donnell: If you’re going to be thunderously repetitive, at least be some kind of hypnotic. “Racks” is, and not because they say “racks” 122 times. Although that helps. I mean, clearly we’re dealing with an abundance of racks here. Racks upon racks, even. But what really sells these particular racks is their ability to make the listener feel like Theo LeSeig driving a pimp wagon. And that, YC, is worth so many of your American racks.
[6]

Video features cameos from Every Talented Person In America Today…

[Video][Website]
[4.44]

Zach Lyon: Bin Laden is dead! The past ten awful years never happened! Party like it’s August 2001! But not to the Beastie Boys! They’d still sound way too old for this shit!
[3]

Doug Robertson: It’s not earth shattering, but it is body moving, and it ticks enough boxes to keep the idea of new Beastie Boys material as a good and exciting thing and not that of a group whose best days are behind them.
[6]

Alfred Soto: If this sounds like it belongs on Hello Nasty, consider it progress: most of To The 5 Boroughs sounded like nothing at all. From sipping prosecco to opening a restaurant with Ted Danson to cowbell to Elijah Wood, Danny McBride, and Seth Rogen, this is the most exhilarating kind of retro-made-new.
[7]

Jer Fairall: I wonder what came first: the anachronistic Ted Danson reference or Danson’s equally anachronistic appearance in the celebrity-laden video? Sadly, “Back on the mic it’s the anti-depressor” aside, the song gives me little else to notice.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: If you’d have told me when they were one of the most exciting acts in the world, 25 years ago, that they’d still be going now and would have made so few records I liked, I’d not have believed you. This has perkily squawking synths, and their hopelessly dated rapping, and feels entirely redundant.
[3]

Mallory O’Donnell: I can’t really dislike this on an objective, purely musical level, but, honestly, how hard did they have to work to come up with it? It’s fine, in a barer year it might be decent, but at this point in the history of music what 15-year old with a working knowledge of the canon and some credible gear could not have delivered as good as this or even, easily, so much better, given two weeks to create a believable “Beastie Boys” number?
[4]

Al Shipley: The Beastie Boys were not my personal white suburban rite of passage into liking non-white suburban hip hop, but I respect that they were for enough of my peers that there’s a certain reflexive nostalgic attachment to any new output from the group. But as someone who only kinda cares about the Beasties even when they were at their best, I have no reason to give a shit about their diminishing returns.
[3]

Chuck Eddy: As a throwback to the point in their career when I first stopped paying attention (that’d be Check Your Head), not unlistenable. At least if you ignore MCA’s voice, which to the distortion’s credit is too concealed here to be really painful.
[5]

Kat Stevens: Wickee-wickee-waa! Fun fact: I can totally gargle the opening bars of ‘Voodoo Chile’ after 3 pints of Ordinary.
[4]

Our new favourite Welshies…

[Video][Website]
[6.80]

Al Shipley: Heard this band in passing recently and was surprised to find myself intrigued, since I’ve generally regarded U.K. rock as consistently on the wane for my entire lifetime. Hunkering down and focusing on an entire song is less rewarding, but still, not bad.
[6]

Doug Robertson: A good rule of thumb for judging indie music is that the higher the registers they hit, the better it is. An obsession with bass tones tends towards music that is sludgy with all the imagination you’d expect from a mud pool, while aiming higher on the scale often indicates a desire to soar higher than what’s gone before. So it is with the Joy Formidable, whose treble-tastic tastes provide a lift that pours out of the speakers like quicksilver, dripping with light and a hint of danger.
[7]

Iain Mew: I still haven’t worked out if The Joy Formidable are a shoegaze band who can’t help but write immediate pop melodies or vice versa, but either way it regularly makes for thrilling stuff. “Whirring” makes “Austere” sound tame in terms of both earworm hooks and feedback drowned breakdowns, the latter drawn out for four minutes in increasingly breathtaking fashion until it dwarfs the actual song part.
[8]

Zach Lyon: This doesn’t stand out to me as much as “Austere” did, but I still love that guitar and her voice and their constant sound explosions.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: This reminds me of An Horse, another indie rock band that charms by investing traditionalist guitar pop moves with a new intensity. Joy Formidable singer Ritzy Bryan does much of the heavy lifting on “Whirring”; her vocal lifts the sparkling riffs to even higher altitudes. The effect produced is one of nervous excitement, like the band is on the cusp of something great. Perhaps they are.
[7]

Martin Skidmore: The buzzsaw backing sometimes has some energy here, but by and large they sound like a band whose ambition is to have supported the Primitives, and it seems just about possible that they might eventually make a single in that class, but this isn’t it.
[3]

David Katz: Case in point of how bread-and-butter indie rock improves just by the addition of a lead female vocalist. I like how singer and guitarist Ritzy Brian evokes Corin Tucker as she bellows over the din of guitars. Suitably epic and earnest stuff for early 10s indie, but with a welcome dash of grit.
[7]

Alfred Soto: In honor of the late Poly Styrene, I resolved for the reminder of the week to be kinder to the female voice anchoring a punk band. Luckily, this act’s single is one of the good ones. Burying the line “Turn the dial on my world” behind a wall of shoegaze goodness required no further explanation. If the single had ended at the 2:45 mark it’d have been a minor classic.
[7]

Jer Fairall: A charming, chiming little jaunt in its embryonic EP form, “Whirring” now explodes from a three-and-a-half minute quirk into a nearly seven minute widescreen panorama befitting of an album titled The Big Roar. Even heard in isolation, though, nothing about the final four minutes of pummelling instrumental cacophony feels fatty or gratuitous, resembling instead something closer to the cute nerd you ignored in high school after a couple of years of hitting the gym, letting his complexion clear up and confidence build enough to suddenly demand and warrant the attention deserved all along.
[8]

Ian Mathers: If I were to use the classic critical tool of reductive caricature on this song, the Joy Formidable appear to be Emily Haines from Metric fronting a slightly more vicious Mew circa Frengers. But that’s an approach that overlooks all nuance and shading. Where do I get the album?
[8]

And now, an ode to gingham…

[Video][Website]
[6.11]

Jonathan Bradley: “Kitty Wells dresses,” sings Laura Cantrell, were “modest and sweet.” So too is this rather plain stroll through country music nostalgia.
[4]

Alfred Soto: In which Cantrell recasts Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” for the sake of another country icon. Very pretty, and Cantrell’s voice is crystalline, but it does little besides excite a No Depression fan.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: I thought I’d missed Laura Cantrell’s voice, and I suppose I have, but what I miss more is her A-game songwriting or equally wondrous gift for picking covers. Her singing is so warm and sweet but her best songs have never settled for mere nostalgia, they have always had intelligence and emotional depth that made her both a gifted interpreter and a devastating observer in her own right. This song is merely fond when it needs to be vividly reverent.
[5]

Ian Mathers: I’d only ever previously heard Cantrell on a Peel Session duet version of Ballboy’s ”I Lost You, But I Found Country Music,” which happens to be the best possible version of a modestly devastating song. “Kitty Wells Dresses” is a gorgeously wrought piece of complicated wistfulness, but two things are holding me back from adoring it like I do her turn on “I Lost You, But I Found Country Music”; on the one hand, we’ve got a song about heartache versus this song, which is about cultural codes that, in some cases, stand for various strains of heartbreak. And on the other, I’m too far away from those cultural codes to do much more than admire the craft of “Kitty Wells Dresses” (and, for that matter, of Kitty Wells’ dresses). If I’d grown up in certain parts of America, or even just on a diet of country music, I believe this would put a tear in my beer.
[8]

Martin Skidmore: “Every girl’s dream”? The dress sense of Kitty Wells? Surely not. Try image-googling her name. This is folky country, paying tribute in a bizarre way to a great singer. It’s sung without any detectable emotion, and no irony I can spot, and while it’s pretty enough, its subject matter mystifies me.
[5]

Jer Fairall: The sweet, plainspoken, slight off-keyness of her voice is the first thing that sells me on this, coming as it does from the exact opposite end of what it is that so alienates me about today’s pop country. The rest of the song turns out to be just as genuine in its humble, deeply felt sentiment, a tribute to virtues worth celebrating for the sheer wonder they once inspired in their audience, rather than simply “tradition” for the sake of it. Possibly the best artist tribute song since The Replacements’ “Alex Chilton,” and oddly enough for some of the same reasons.
[8]

Iain Mew: I have to admit to not knowing who Kitty Wells was before looking it up, but to me this sounds like a cloying and overworked confection and the chorus about how the dresses are “every girl’s dream” jars a lot. Hate the way she sings “Paree” too.
[3]

Chuck Eddy: Despite key adjectives like “old-fashioned” and “modest” that I read as much as rationalizations for Cantrell’s stodgy folkie musical aesthetic as fashion signifiers, I’d like this homage to frugal clothes-shopping habits more if it wasn’t for all the clunky historical name-dropping. (A common tactic in alt-country, probably even more than in Nashville country, that’s supposed to let the legends’ greatness rub off on the current performer in our minds even though they probably don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence.) I’d also like it more if it sounded less modest and old-fashioned. And maybe even if Laura didn’t pronounce “Paris” funny. On the other hand, it’s still a pretty song about pretty dresses. And hey, I shop at thrift stores, garage sales, and flea markets myself. So especially in this economy, I relate to the cheapskate stuff.
[6]

Anthony Easton: My mother, when I grew up, did hysterically funny impressions of Kitty Wells until we asked for it a little too much, and she stopped doing it, because she was worried about being cruel to Ms Wells. Not because of any respect for Ms Wells, but because she spent most of her life being essentially kind to people. My mother is very smart, and very plain, and very kind. Essentially kind, in the best Christan way, and I learnt about all sort of things from her Kitty Wells impression. I learned not to be cruel for the sake of being cruel, and I learned that making fun of someone for their god-earned talent was excessive, and I learned to sing in church, loud and pure, because G-d didn’t really care about quality as much as enthusiasm. I was thinking all of this a few weeks ago, when my friend Sholem talked about me having this urbane gay wit, and this old weird America side — and my momma, in all of her earnestness, had a wicked wit and righteous anger. She moved on to sarcastically decimating those who deserved it. All of this sounds cloying, but one of the reasons why I love country music, deeply, is that it allows for earnestness and sentimentality to be legitimate. I learned to love country music when my mom sang it to me as a kid, when I heard my dad’s copy of Folsom Prison Blues, and when the radio played on the way to school, to scouts, on trips to southern Alberta for Easter or Christmas. I still listen to Country radio when I travel more than a few hours. Nostalgia may be toxic, but like any opiate, it makes me feel better in the midst of pain. I am sitting here, in the middle of the biggest city of Canada, on the morning of Easter Sunday, and I yearn to go back home for a couple of weeks. I am tired and frustrated, and worn out and all I wanna do is go home and visit my mother and watch TV and play cards, and eat ham and scalloped potatoes for dinner. The song is pretty much the embodiment of Cole Porter’s sharp line about the power of a cheap tune, except my Mother and Ms Wells and Ms Cash were never cheap, and I would never be as thrifty, or virtuous or holy as they are.
[10]

It’s hardly “Sandcastle Disco”, though, is it?…

[Video][Website]
[5.85]

Katherine St Asaph: Beyonce hasn’t sounded this much like her old group in years. Part of it’s the “Lose My Breath” (or “Pon The Floor,” whatever) military beat, but even more than that, this reminds me of “Independent Women Part 2” (i.e. the one that isn’t a Charlie’s Angels ad). I could talk for hours on this: how it sucks that Beyonce needed to go all Benjamina Button on the title or add a dreamy “JK, hope my boyfriend don’t mind it” interlude, how DC’s “if you ain’t in love, I congratulate you” lyric sounds just as radical now as it did as to a nerdy 13-year-old girl. There’s also hours of talk in how Beyonce (and Pink, for that matter) have become the second-wave feminists to, say, Ke$ha or Nicki. But for now, I’ve got about fifty perfect melodic lines to hear, a pressing living-room dance engagement and a worldlet to run. See you in a few.
[9]

Jer Fairall: DESTINY’S CHILD REFERRED TO AS ‘FEMINIST ICONS’ WITH STRAIGHT FACE, snarked an Onion headline a decade ago, but it is to her credit that Beyonce has continued to make her admittedly reductive brand of female empowerment a constant theme. Still, I think I like her best in the moments where she either scales this perspective back to something as human-sized as “If I Were a Boy” or forgets herself just long enough to indulge in the delirious pleasures of something like “Check On It”. This is another Beyonce message song, basically, and the message is the exact one that we’ve come to expect from her, but this still wins some major points from me for the unusually non-materialistic “raise a glass for the college grads,” the enthusiastic way in which she reps “Houston Texas, baby!” and for how the martial drums and stuttering vocal distortion bits reveal how closely she’s been listening to her copy of Kala.
[7]

Asher Steinberg: These guys say it all. Just another episode in the never-ending vapidity of Beyonce Knowles, whose idea of a feminist empowerment anthem is saluting “all my girls that’s in the club rocking the latest/who will buy it for themselves and get more money later”.
[1]

Al Shipley: B has had a penchant for shrill, bombastic, attention-grabbing lead singles, ever since she and/or Destiny’s Child were big enough to command feverish anticipation with “Survivor.” This sure isn’t a homerun like “Crazy In Love,” but it’s also not even as overbearing as “Lose My Breath,” just kind of thin and ill-considered.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: Nothing that reminds me of this can be bad.
[9]

Anthony Easton: Though she uses the word “girls”, this is about women, and its relentlessness is terrorizing. She connects secular power with motherhood, with education, and ties it all together with an all consuming H Rider Haggard-meets-Leni Riefenstahl line about devouring; how she cuts fucker from mother recentralises and emphasises the sheer excess of it all.
[9]

Doug Robertson: My head hurts after listening to this. It’s like every noise that Beyonce has ever heard is all happening at once, and unfortunately this surfeit of ideas ends up as an awkward cacophony. There’s about three amazing songs going on here, and it’d be better if they were allowed the space to breathe, rather than being crammed into one disjointed whole.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: Oddly reminiscent of Rihanna of several years ago, Beyonce gives us a dancehall number with beats like a military tattoo and another of her female empowerment lyrics. It’s a bit frantic, often raucous and stuttering, and I’m not sure it’s the best showcase for her powerhouse voice, but it’s kind of exciting too.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: The beat feels propulsive for a few seconds at the start (briefly reminds me of “Ass On The Floor,” sort of), then gets less so once all the pointless prog-hop changes set in. And I can see how those changes might be interesting in theory; in a perfect world, the operatic parts could flash me back to “Hocus Pocus” by Focus, and I’d find this audacious and hilarious. But Beyonce is her usual zero-personalty ice-queen self, and I’m bored.
[3]

Kat Stevens: Swizz and B join one of those musical collectives that bang dustbin lids together in the Blue Peter studio: cheerleader squad choreographers rejoice; feminists heave sigh; Kat remembers to dig out that great Fela Kuti/Swizz mashup of ‘Money In The Bank’ again.
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: Oh, it’s “Pon de Floor” with Be’s usual one-womanist anthem sprinkles on top. Cute, but I’ll take that jabbering yip from the original over it anyday.
[6]

David Katz: The stuff of dream artist collaboration message board threads. “Pon de Floor” gets the dominating vocal performance it deserves. We get the radio-overplay payback for Katy Perry. Everyone’s happy ’til the summer’s last encore.
[8]

Alfred Soto: If she’s so sure, why remind us?
[4]

Now definitely our most-reviewed artist evah…

[Video][Website]
[5.69]

Kat Stevens: Is there a word in German for when the difficult second album is actually the difficult second album and a half? Something that sums up the feeling of disappointment after an artist has shown so much promise of long-term success (the 1.5 albums creating an illusion of consistency), but also taking into account the leniency one allows for an artist to make (and learn from) sophomore mistakes as they mature. How about ‘Mugler’? “Yeah mate, I thought Bad Romance was alright but the chorus on this one is a bit Mugler, innit?”
[7]

Martin Skidmore: If you loved “Bad Romance”, you’ll like this one, since it sounds a lot like it. I didn’t and don’t: the thumping Red One beats rather bore me, and I continue to dislike her nasal vocals. It has a bombastic catchiness that means it’ll be another global smash, but she always irritates me.
[3]

David Katz: “Born This Way” felt like a placeholder, a garlanded victory lap to remind everyone of her musical existence, giving away nothing more. “Judas”, then, does as expected from a follow-up: blows up her club and glam-rock predilections to heights befitting the fanfare of brand new material. But it’s a big shame these promising elements fit so crudely. It lurches from an ’06-bloghouse-vintage dance breakdown into a chorus that is pretty enough, but feels rather meek amongst its gaudy surroundings. Hoping for much, much better from the LP material, even if she can’t top “Speechless”.
[6]

Al Shipley: Campily croaked verses and airy Europop choruses are two of my least favorite default Gaga modes, so I actually like this more than I should have any right to expect.
[5]

Doug Robertson: Even without the assistance of Weird Al, it’s very easy for an artist like Lady Gaga to descend into the realms of parody, and already she’s beginning to sound like someone who needs to use their own back catalogue for inspiration. It might have been the differences that originally attracted the world towards Gaga’s embrace, but these similarities are going to repel equally strongly.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Gaga’s confident enough now to blast through a weak chorus, but while I find the wordless chanting almost as compelling as Britney’s recent attempts at same, I’ve heard the thick Euro-friendly block of backing track from her too often. And I wish like hell she’d found the musical correlative for the Madonna-cum-Oscar Wilde kick of “Jesus is my virtue/Judas is the demon I cling to.”
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: She’s trying too hard. The showbizzy melange of styles, a hook (“I’m in love with Judas”) that seems to punch the clock in its attempt to whip up a little instant controversy, the passel of outfits she decides this one will best benefit from: at this point it’s starting to lose its luster. Remember, Madonna’s records kept getting better during her ascent.
[5]

Iain Mew: This is more like it! The recycled elements are of minor consequence next to the way the beat clangs with awesome industrial force like nothing else she’s done, the best thing about it. Then there’s the sweet and addictive hi-NRG chorus and the way that that and the heavier elements are not so much stitched into a song as crammed violently together into the same four minute space. The effect is actually to make both of them sound all the more strange and exciting and the straight-faced nonsense delivered over the top works perfectly in that context.
[9]

Chuck Eddy: I like her so much more when she is ripping off Boney M than we she’s ripping off Madonna! Well actually, I haven’t figured out which Boney M song this rips off, but I’m pretty sure it rips off either them or someone very much like them. Or at least parts of it do. Kind of slides downhill when it gets less Euro-weird, though — including the part that reminds me of “Like A Prayer,” come to think of it. When your more conventional parts bring to mind “Like A Prayer,” you’re probably doing okay. Even if your shtick’s wearing out and your theology is a mess.
[7]

Asher Steinberg: At heart, Lady Gaga’s always been a not very bright kid who took a few too many Madonna Studies courses in college and decided she’d become a performance artist. For a while, this was partially masked by her ability to write a decent pop song, but now she seems bent on eschewing any commercial standards of craft in favor of full-bore, Madonna-biting “art,” and the result is fragmented dreck like this. Gaga alternates from “Bad Romance”-esque chanting, to pointless and horrible Jamaican-face, to a respectable imitation of Tiffany album filler (the only good thing in the song), to some spoken word nonsense about Mary Magdalene, to more “Bad Romance”-esque chanting, all without any coherence, purpose, or meaning. She has nothing to say about religion; the only reason this song is called “Judas” and not “Jared” is to gin up some meaningless controversy. It’s like she listened to “Like a Prayer” and drew the conclusion that drawing parallels between religion and sex is “interesting” per se, even when such parallels run no deeper than giving fictitious significant others biblical characters’ names. And I don’t think she has anything to say about relationships or attraction either. There’s a definite thesis here — I’m in love with the wrong guy — but nothing else, no feeling or insight or detail, which will happen when you subsume what you’re actually trying to say into a ridiculous concept.
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: So let me get this straight. First she’s kinda falling for Judas, then he betrays her three times so he’s Peter, then he’s some tongue-in-brain eldritch thing? And first she’s Mary Magdalene washing his feet, then maybe Lloyd Webberish Jesus, then her character from the “Telephone” video bantering with Honey B, then a fame hooker/prostitute/wench; the ’90s processing on her voice in the choruses makes her Madonna, but what if she’s the Madonna? Theologians don’t even agree on how precisely the Trinity is three in one; this is the stuff of endless schisms. That is, if the “Bad Romance”-with-more-Richter beat doesn’t crack things first.
[7]

Jer Fairall: Back in the day, Prince and Madonna straddled tensions between the carnal and the spiritual in their music in such a way that pop has pretty much thoroughly abandoned since, having either consciously made its choice of one side over the other or having since become so grounded in the secular to have rendered said tensions irrelevant. Credit Gaga, then, for at least engaging in the conversation at the heart of pop since the birth of rock and roll, particularly coming, as it does, after an astonishingly safe event single calculated to offend absolutely no one. But pop music is more than just text (and even if it weren’t, “Judas” would still be a pretty awkward one, cursed, as is increasingly becoming the case, with Gaga’s occasional lyrical fumbles), and as a composition “Judas” is energetic but derivative, full of “Bad Romance” lurches and “GA-GA”s, and further proof that she only knows how to write exactly one kind of chorus melody. I’m intrigued, disappointed and torn all at once.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: This is also a song.
[6]

Our first spin with her, oddly…

[Video][Website]
[6.70]

Chuck Eddy: I like how this sounds not remotely country; comes off more like an old-school, more R&B than C&W-based, adult contemporary ballad, circa 20 years ago. Like, say, Vanessa Williams or somebody might do. Refreshing, rather lovely, and not at all what I’d expect of Gretchen, who has often over the years made me wonder why she does ballads at all.
[7]

Pete Baran: In the opening seconds I doff my cap to the minstrels who welcome me to Gretchen’s simple manor house. But sadly it shifts from being an intriguing fusion between a 13th century courtly love ballad and a country song, to just a quite dull ballad. It seems heartfelt, but an alternative reading of the chorus suggests she wants to kill her lover. So medieval enough, then!
[4]

Martin Skidmore: Her career has rather sagged after a strong start. This is a slow, sensitive ballad, and while I think she’s best when she’s being ballsy, I rather like her restrained delivery of this, over acoustic guitar and strings, and it’s a very pretty song.
[7]

Michaelangelo Matos: Nice to hear her essay a real ballad; “When I Think About Cheatin’” was my second-favorite on her debut. The arrangement is so bare that her voice can dominate it without raising above a whisper. The song, alas, isn’t up to the performance.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Clay Walker has made a career of slightly chiding anthems against sex in favour of a mooning monogamy. I believed it when he sang this. Gretchen Wilson is a belter of hard edged party songs. This one is just a little too careerist for me to buy her doing it.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Affecting in its tentativeness, this ballad represents a break from Wilson’s string of barnstormers. She doesn’t quite transcend these origins, although her breathy, unsure singing comes close. I’d love this to be her first.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: There’s plenty affecting here: how rickety the guitar strumming is, how Wilson’s brassy voice becomes tentative in miniature, the relative complexity of the narrative — layered a bit more once you realize this is a cover that isn’t completely gender-swapped — the cellos. Any one of these things might’ve been the one to grab me; I suspect I’ll need many more listens to narrow down which.
[8]

Zach Lyon: I guess there’s some interesting stuff to talk about here: it sort of genderfucks a Clay Walker song, insofar that it seems more about deflowering a boy than deflowering a girl, which is something rare; it sounds musically like it’s tailored for wedding receptions when it’s all about premarital sex; there’s probably some other stuff but I was originally inclined to just leave my score and “this makes me cry too much.” That isn’t a common thing and maybe I’m alone in it. But I love the way her voice enters just a biting, unsung yelp in “I don’t care if I’m your first love,” making it sound like she’s struggling to convince him of this after a long prior discussion we haven’t heard (compare to Eric Church doing the same, just with reprehension), and the way the middle eight leads to a final verse that’s packed with relief and finality.
[9]

Iain Mew: It’s interesting how she sings “I’ve never been too big on looking back” but spends a large part of the song doing just that. She’s realised that she has to finally come to peace with how things haven’t gone perfectly in order to throw herself fully into her relationship now — and does so despite it not being completely clear that her partner reciprocates. The title line is a clever and beautiful sentiment and it’s delivered with a really light and deft touch, conveying the blooming of something wonderful but still a little uncertain.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: It’s very rare that I find song with a tempo this slow this affecting. Sure, it can double as a lullaby, but its stillness exudes such confidence and poetry that it’s pretty hard not to love, try as I might.
[7]