Oh hey, it’s the guy who jumped out of a plane with a bunch of stolen money in the 70s.
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[3.71]
Iain Mew: If “September Song” is to be believed, JP Cooper (born 1983) has been listening to the same mixtape, the one that makes him reminisce over his teenage girlfriend, every weekend for eighteen years. That’s: 1) a little creepy; 2) a possible explanation for why there’s so little in the way of new musical ideas here.
[3]
Megan Harrington: I didn’t expect this to be such an adept updating of the jazz standard, nor did I expect it to twist the May/December romance from the unpalatable (the couple’s mismatched ages) to the tender (the lifetime of a single love) but Cooper delivered, impressively.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: Fifteen! It’s easy to forget when listening to pop music that there are ages other than sixteen, but what a reminder this is. You could posit that the shift from /i/ to /f/ being smoother than /i/ to /s/ may be JP Cooper’s real reasoning for plumping for the lower number (and maybe that the /ft/ cluster is shorter than the /kst/ one — although you’re right, those are more like /d/s than /t/s), but that would be cynical and a taint on his heartfelt heartfeelings. The only problem is that while you’re typically on to a winner with adolescence reminiscence, this doesn’t fully mine that well. It’s very, very vague. There’s no need for unending detail, just a line or two that really stand out and touch a nerve. Simply saying the word “mixtape” does nothing but set the QI klaxon off.
[6]
Hannah Jocelyn: A melange of different melodies from every song in the last year, sounding as though it was awkwardly comped together to make an aural uncanny valley of a topline. The titular self-referential gimmick is cute, as is the bouncy instrumental, but there’s not much worth recommending. (Maybe I’m just being harsh because Heavy Meta music like “Potential Breakup Song”, “Best Song Ever”, “Pop” and even Da Vinci Notebook’s “Title of The Song” have all set the bar quite high.)
[4]
Alfred Soto: Brecht-Weill might laugh at the painful joke told at their expense. The rest of us mourn the existence of Englishmen with tropical presents and tapioca vocals.
[1]
Crystal Leww: Everytime I think tropical house as a pop movement is dying, Ed Sheeran releases another song. I am a little embarrassed to admit that “Perfect Strangers” ended up growing on me more than I thought, so while I don’t like “September Song” right now, I am wondering if it will grow on me as well. Still, where “Perfect Strangers” had a cute little bounce as a drop, this grooves along for about twenty seconds with background chanting before it goes back to the verse.
[4]
Thomas Inskeep: Christ, now we have singers who are trying to fucking sound like Bieber.
[0]