DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ – All These Years

Today’s theme is Long Runtimes! This selection by Emile is the shortest, clocking in at a breezy 7:56…

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[6.11]Emile Simon: One of the reasons I obsessively tune in to every DJ Sabrina release is that despite featuring emotional peaks and production wizardry at almost every turn, it never stops being funny in a unique and twisted way. Her new album opener “All These Years” is a great example of her unique sense of humour: the opening chords backed by saxophone and some ethereal crooning are both impossibly tacky and sincerely beautiful. That foundation is joined by a myriad of seemingly random samples, from hushed whisperings, minuscule bursts of pop songs, and what sounds like a Megan Thee Stallion ad-lib, all in the first twenty seconds. The rich tapestry carries on during the rest of the almost eight-minute track that alternates soft pop samples with a pounding, swift house beat. Not unlike the Avalanches, whose work seems to be a constant reference for Sabrina, the layers upon layers of samples help transform what could have just been an excellent pop/house hybrid in a living, absurd world. Even though many of these voices don’t really serve a melodic purpose and could have been removed without anyone noticing, they help make feel the song lived-in and textured, somewhere between reality and fiction. Whenever I close my eyes and try to soak in all the detail I feel like this is the intro to a beautiful sitcom, the song gliding between all the main and side characters for the seconds you can hear them. They look in the camera and perform for the time they’re on – sometimes they sing a whole chorus, most of the time they just flash in for a quick ad-lib or two -, their names written out on the screen with gleaming letters. Deep down I know that this doesn’t really exist. The characters I mention are audio files on a grid, meticulously captured and tinkered with. But it speaks to DJ Sabrina’s talent that she makes me believe in it.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Sees DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, clicks the score dropdown menu, chooses [10] from the options, checks runtime, smiles, starts reading a book instead.
[10]

Ian Mathers: DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, I am begging you to make some single edits or something. When I say this didn’t need to be nearly nine minutes I swear I don’t mean it in a “this meeting could have been an email” sense, but if you ever refine your craft down to making albums that are closer to 40 minutes than 40 tracks that would genuinely be great.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: You’ve just discovered unheard Go! Team and Bangalter recordings from the peak of their powers. It’s so exciting that you can’t decide which to play first. Well, why not both? This is why. At least turn off the Haim demos first.
[5]

Iain Mew: If her song we covered last year was like “standing in a courtyard between several different parties, blissing out as the drifting winds change the mix to and fro”, the added layers of inert gauze mean that this one is like standing between several people talking about their half-remembered reminisces of drifting between parties past. There’s not a lot left to latch on to. Something tells me that I might be persuaded back by the addition of a few more fractal layers of abstraction still, though.
[3]

Will Adams: I used to enjoy fiddling with the radio tuner in my mom’s station wagon. If you clicked 0.2 MHz between stations, you would mostly hear static, but occasionally sounds from the adjacent stations would bleed through. It created an interesting, almost disorienting effect. Not sure I want a full song of it.
[5]

Claire Davidson: The first minute and a half of “All These Years” is the song’s most distinctive segment, and as such its most frustrating. The track opens with a leisurely pairing of piano licks and saxophone whines, a note-perfect evocation of the kind of ersatz heartstring-tugging you’d hear in the likes of an ’80s soap opera — which is to say, in DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s hands, it’s oddly quite poignant, plush with just enough earnest sentiment to trigger some genuine euphoria. Why, then, does DJ Sabrina stifle the intimacy of this moment, piling it with garbled rapping and idle chatter that wholly overshadows the instrumentation? From there, it’s just more of the same from this artist, a thumping house beat soundtracking the whirs of hazy vocal fragments that ebb and flow across the track’s lengthy runtime. I get that I’ve struggled with DJ Sabrina more than most, but nonetheless, why this was chosen as a single for the artist’s latest project remains a mystery to me.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Jive Bunny was less mushy.
[4]

Al Varela: This is DJ Sabrina’s bread and butter. Nostalgic sounds and samples built around some pretty synths and a feeling of pure, unfiltered joy that spreads throughout every melody. I love the distant, wailing saxophone that plays while the bounce of the music keeps the song moving, with scattered vocals and rap verses are sprinkled throughout the song. It doesn’t feel like just one pop song, it feels like many embodied in one, singular anthem. Has she done this song before? Many times. Does it get old? I hope it never does.
[9]