From Argentina (yes, again!), a former model and ex of Gustavo Cerati, who might be best described as Argentina’s Bono…
[Video][Myspace]
[4.29]
Anthony Easton: As innocuous, efficient, and competent as a TV sitcom theme. Extra point for the hand-claps.
[6]
Brad Shoup: It sounds all like capturing a flaccid feeling — specifically, the feeling of wanting to upgrade to slightly out-of-date Apple smartphones — but those po-faced guitar slides are neat enough to demand some kind of showcase.
[4]
Will Adams: My mind has linked this sort of lilting folk-pop – glockenspiel, there must be glockenspiel! – to commercials for home improvement products so much that listening to “Irreal” makes me smell Febreze. Deborah’s more expressive than Colbie Callait, though, so there’s that!
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: If I had actually managed to retain more vocabulary from my high school Spanish classes, “Irreal” might have been a bit more exciting to me. Just listening to the audio, I heard a bouncy song lacking any real hook, a too-relaxed track similar to Rosario Ortega’s “El Pozo” from earlier this week. Then I watched the video and, as Deborah De Corral smashed stuff up, realized I should check the lyrics out. Putting my faith in Google Translate, I found out “Irreal” pulls the old happy-music-not-so-happy-words trick, featuring lines like “I hope you can not sleep or think” and “I would kill you, I would erase you.” Had I heard this naturally, I probably would have reacted more positively to the song. Instead, this revelation was more like a pleasant surprise after I’d grown bored of the music itself.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: I wish there was more of the gleeful destructiveness of the video in the music, rather than (or in addition to) those comfortable bassoon burps. I guess that’s what the run-on-sentence rush of the chorus was supposed to achieve?
[5]
Iain Mew: I am never going to like something which reminds me this much, in its lazy bloodless swing, of Olly Murs.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Her sob doesn’t sit well against those handclaps and horn swells.
[4]