Not pictured: the girl…
[Video][Website]
[7.25]
Michaelangelo Matos: It builds so gradually, so patiently. The first time I played it, it was only when the Ciara sample resolves with a sharply gasped breath as the beat falls out that I realized I was holding mine. “You got me feelin’ like a”: a what? A new person, or newly alone? Excited for possibility or exhausted by the work involved in trying to connect with someone? A new beginning or a dead end? The beat’s return brings us back down the hill, to earth, lets us absorb the peak. “Another Girl” became my anthem of the unknown, the song I turned to most often to conjure the ineffable my life sometimes felt like it had become in 2011. I became single after five years, I grew serious about some ideas I’d long rattled around, and I never knew which end was up. This reminded me that could still be sweet occasionally.
[10]
Jonathan Bogart: At some point my fear of not getting it has to be overriden by a sheer love of beauty.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Pitchfork’s writeup of this managed, astonishingly yet unsurprisingly, never to mention Ciara’s name, despite her heavy contributions here. She’s a “coo,” a “sigh,” a “voice,” a “clipped, heady sample,” something to thesaurus away while the cool kids do their bibble. If that isn’t appropriation, I no longer know what the fuck is. Sadly, it’s also representative of the song.
[4]
Alex Ostroff: Easily my most anticipated release of 2011, ‘Another Girl’ first surfaced on an URB mix late last year, and kept cropping up in bits and pieces in the middle of sets over the next four months. Utterly entrancing, it swiftly displaced Nguzunguzu’s remix as my favourite take on Ciara’s ‘Deuces (Remix)‘. Two samples, no more than three seconds apiece, and Jacques Greene inverts and explains his source. An endless blissful tease of Ciara’s “You got me feelin’ like a -“s is the most we get until the midway point, when “fool” gets contorted into a wordless sigh and twisted in every which way. Ooooohs pushed forward by snare rolls and staccato synth figures through the woozy atmosphere. The titular phrase was once a warning about what he’ll never find, but here it finishes Ciara’s spliced sentence. The wistfulness and anger at being played are transformed into fluttery apprehensive giddiness. How did it get as far as ‘Deuces’? Why did our girl CiCi look past his flaws in the first place? Why do fools fall in love? Simple: “You got me feelin’ like another girl.”
[10]
Jer Fairall: Is this a remix of something I don’t know about? The lack of context provided for its sole lyric suggests that it may be, but I prefer to work out the knotty implications of the precious few words we’re provided instead, anyway. Has he got her feeling like another girl in the fresh relationship/new love sense, or is she speaking to some sort of hallucinogenic property providing her with an out-of-body (and into another) experience? The blissful softness of this warm pillow of a track tantalizingly suggests either.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Fantastic, the first minute or so is the perfect soundtrack to the aimless, semi-drunken and mostly broken dancing I might do after getting home after being out late. It then settles down and merely becomes warm and lovely. I don’t mind.
[7]
Brad Shoup: I kind of feel like R&B has been denatured enough within its natural playspace: why are all these dubstep/house/2-step kids doing the same? In Greene’s hands, Ciara’s take on Chris Brown’s “Deuces” becomes slow-burning fuel for yet another existential headtrip. The modest climax arrives halfway through, chasing the chosen phrase (“you got me feeling like,” tweaked into “she got me feeling like”) with cuckooing. I’m just not feeling the reverie, and I hope there’s not a joke I’m supposed to get.
[5]
Iain Mew: The singing of its title mantra, withdrawn and a little mysterious, holds it in a fixed mood and place. The million little whooshes and whirs give it a sense of momentum nonetheless. Eventually the two come together enjoyably as the beats step up a gear and the singing turns into urgent moaning. Also, I like it because it reminded me of “Wolf Mngo.”
[7]