Defeated Swedish Eurovision contender, but still pretty popular over there anyhow…
[Video][Website]
[4.86]
Iain Mew: I never really got behind the standard boyband pop model of the late nineties at the time. So an inferior and barely updated version (check out the paper thin electro wrapping!) complete with obligatory painful key change is really not my idea of a good thing.
[2]
Jessica Popper: It’s amazing that Sweden never had a boyband until E.M.D., and still they’re not a particularly great one, considering all of the fantastic boyband songs written and produced by Swedes in the ’90s. E.M.D. have had some OK songs, nothing incredible, but they’ve done very well anyway, because all 3 members were popular contestants on Idol before the band. Perhaps their success means their next album will be better. This is more poptastic and less wimpy, almost *N Sync-ish, so I hope it’s a sign of what’s to come.
[8]
Martin Skidmore: Slick teen boy-band fare, with a brightly lively production and okay singing. The whistling is a welcome flourish on what is otherwise solidly professional and skilled, but uninspired.
[5]
Martin Kavka: Sweden, a nation of popbloggers turns its lonely eyes to you. Why do you excuse crap like this, perhaps the worst Swedish pop since ABBA’s “Rock Me”? It makes us wonder why we ever loved you.
[2]
Hillary Brown: While this harks back to the mid-1990s boy band era, it doesn’t have the snap and quirk of the best of those songs, and its content explicitly calls to mind a much stronger version of the same, “Bye Bye Bye.” Where are the harmonies? Where’s the step beyond aerobic dance? Not here.
[5]
Ian Mathers: Maybe it’s because they’re Swedish instead of American or British, but “Baby Goodbye” has two traits that set it apart and above from the boy band fare I’m used to: The massively stomping production which actually gives the chorus vocals some major support, and the blessedly brief running time. The lyrics are either gibberish or pabulum, the sentiment nonsense, the vocal harmonies anodyne. But however much I want to dislike it, “Baby Goodbye” is a ruthlessly effective piece of pop machinery – you try listening to it 3-4 times and not humming that chorus to yourself. If we have to have boy bands running around, we could do any awful lot worse than this.
[7]
Joseph McCombs: The dial-tone beat and circa-2000 vocal arrangement are fun enough to bounce along to as background music, and I’m a sucker for a modulation to the final chorus. But it’s kind of mean, after that chipper whistling, to tell someone who was presumably once loved that “you’re not even on because you’re gone, gone, gone” without even hinting at why. Baby didn’t do anything wrong, as far as I can tell, to deserve the most flippant kiss-off possible.
[5]