[insert rebloggable John Green quote here…]
[Video][Website]
[6.88]
Alfred Soto: Another cheerleader-pop winner, another example of Charli surpassing her clients in charm and will. I prefer the verses, though: the chorus comes too easily.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Unlike “SuperLove,” “Boom Clap” retains a fair bit of Charli unexpectedness: verses of nocturnal fog and strobe-light stars, the hook hinging on “come on to me,” how much Charli sounds like Tori Amos in places; but the chorus is the exact pop refrain you’d write given the words “boom clap” and an ultimatum about your label job. In one sense Charli XCX finally getting a bona fide hit is heartening, but given that True Romance — along with Kiss and Beyoncé, one of the decade’s few truly great pop albums — has been written off as a flop in favor of this John Green–approved, Iggy Azalea-trailing weaksauce, I’m probably always going to resent it a little. Then again, a week ago my stance was “I resent this a lot, fuck this,” so my resistance may fully crumble yet.
[7]
Jer Fairall: A True Romance leftover that sounds like one: there’s no lack of Charli’s particular beatific energy, but the lyric is underdeveloped enough that it almost sounds as if she recorded these ones as a placeholder and then never got around to filling the track in with something characteristic of her usual wit. If Charli’s going to have any kind of ubiquity in 2014, though, gimme this over that Iggy Azalia monstrosity any day.
[6]
Brad Shoup: I felt so bad for her, trying to convince everyone that she was the best part on that Iggy-Ig track, and she had this in the wings the whole time. Like, all of it: the movie tie-in (which seems thematically accurate, I dunno), the lust-for-life thrust of her headlining efforts, onomatopoeia of which like we haven’t seen in a while. And she makes the grumpy kick drum the star, the boom that detonates the verses in a series circuit.
[8]
Crystal Leww: We don’t talk enough about Charli XCX’s ear for percussion. Her percussion choices are so good that they often overshadowed her throughout True Romance, her voice inflecting urgency but still threatening to get lost in the flurry of bleets and waves. “Boom Clap” lets the beat simmer in the verses before exploding in the chorus. In a smart move that remedies her tendency to get lost, Charli becomes an active participant in that very beat, shouting out “BOOM! CLAP!” right with the drum hits. It’s so damn euphoric, so damn cathartic. It’s also the type of track that might help her achieve mass appeal.
[8]
Jonathan Bradley: The Jukebox has reviewed seven previous Charli XCX singles for an average score of [7.18], and I haven’t found myself with anything to say about any of them. Neither objectionable nor striking, her songs strike me as the pop equivalent of a photo shot through an Instagram filter: a lot of alluring haze and allusive artefacts overlaid on to something not inherently remarkable. The result is almost compelling, and artful enough that, for me, criticizing it has seemed as forced a task as praising it. “Boom Clap,” then, is the first time I’ve really felt anything about a Charli XCX song, and I feel that I like it — a lot. It punches with the force of the titular onomatopoeia, and Charli delivers these exhortations with the same spirit she did her hook on Icona Pop’s “I Love It.” The undulating waves of electro still seem designed to call back not to synth pop in its original incarnation, but to contemporary music that seeks to invoke those older records, but here the recursion properly aches with the romanticism of forced nostalgia. This is from the soundtrack to a movie based on a young adult novel I haven’t read, but the song feels like the best kind of young adult novel: urgent, vital, and overwhelming in its immediacy.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: It’s not like Charli XCX has been shying away from mainstream attention over the last few years, but she’s never sounded so safe as she does on “Boom Clap.” There’s no shadow bordering it’s radio-eyeing hook, and the music avoids taking any unexpected turns in favor of being good mid-tempo fodder for The Fault In Our Stars romance-montage makers of tomorrow. The love-as-drug metaphor appears again here, but with absolutely no sinister implications. It’s not bad — she can still write a solid chorus, which is all this really needs — but is definitely a scrubbed-up version of what makes her interesting.
[5]
Will Adams: “Boom Clap” is exciting, not necessarily on its own merits, but for what it can mean for Charli XCX’s success. If it puzzles you why she didn’t quite hit her stride after “I Love It” stormed through 2013, consider that, despite her feature credit there, she is barely distinguishable against Icona Pop’s shouting and is ultimately invisible in that song. Fast forward exactly one year later, and Charli not only has full visibility in the recently-minted Song of the Summer “Fancy,” but a spot on a hip soundtrack to one of the summer’s most successful films. Charli XCX seems primed for her own career to launch in the US, and thankfully, “Boom Clap” balances accessibility — staple music-as-love metaphor; repetitive sing-song hooks like “on-and-on-and” — with her signature style of frothy electropop tinged with a beguiling but ominous darkness.
[7]