Justin Bieber – Daisies

Not a Katy Perry cover…

[Video]
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Al Varela: Bieber tried a lot of things on his surprise album, SWAG, but the song that worked best for me was arguably the most simple: a jam session with guitar prodigy mk.gee where Bieber murmurs about a wishy-washy relationship. The yearning is palpable, but the actual connection is flimsy: the kind of relationship that feels better in your head than in your bed. But God, that yearning still hits, and mk.gee’s guitar chords and the marching percussion drive that odd middle ground between melancholy and infatuation. It’s legit great, exactly in Bieber’s wheelhouse; the R&B experiments were cool, but there’s a lot you can get out of a damn good guitar groove.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Celebs: they’re just like us! Much like Biebz, I found Absolutely and Two Star & the Dream Police to be two of the more endearing pop albums of the decade, two intensely LA collections of baubles and precociously good sketches. Unlike Biebz, I do not have the creative-financial blank check to just hire the Mk.Gee/Dijon brain trust responsible for those records for my own comeback album. “Daisies” is a hilarious song; Bieber is, as always, a competent if not particular interesting vocalist, but there’s a dissonance between Mk.Gee-Dijon Inc’s funhouse mirror version of pop-R&B and Bieber & Carter Lang’s actual product, and the industry tension is audible in the mix. On their own work, the producers typically mask their vocalists deep in the mix or muddy their performances with filters and effects, but here Bieber must be front and center. He’s the show, and for most of his fans, who were likely not rocking with “Many Times” or “Alesis” no matter how big those records got in our sheltered shore of music criticism, this is just another Bieber record with a different, hard-to-place set of tones at work. 
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Katherine St. Asaph: Authentic-sounding sounds.
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Ian Mathers: This is a trifle, but at least it’s an interesting one. I assume it sounds kind of poorly produced and rough deliberately, and honestly I really like that? As a singer, Bieber continues to be someone whom I can recognize has talent but who basically never works for me. But when those slightly clipping drums are pounding away, the contrast does kind of do something.
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Nortey Dowuona: Wild that the guy who got into a fight with G-Eazy’s entourage and got bashed over the head has a writing/producing credit here. I’m not knocking it tho. Concussions are expensive.
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Alfred Soto: The assurance with which Bieber has withdrawn behind mk.gee’s guitar curlicues would be more impressive if SWAG had songwriting that coaxed out the post-adolescent priapic yearning in his voice. “Daisies,” one of the successes, positions Bieber as a post-adolescent horndog lapping at all the water under the bridge. Cute.
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Will Adams: Bieber’s light voice over jaunty, fuzzy rock is a good contrast. The soft declarations of devotion follow suit.
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Taylor Alatorre: “I was a player when I was little… a heartbreaker when I was little, but I’m bigger.” It matters that Justin Bieber was precisely 15 years old when he recorded those words. Any younger and they would have seemed comically and not charmingly implausible; any older and it just would have been sad. “Daisies,” like its parent album, is best enjoyed by hearing it as the work of that 15-year-old frozen in an amber block, not trying to escape so much as find the most comfortable long-term resting position. It’s part of his clearest-ever foray into artistic and not just sexual maturity, yet it’s built on the kinds of middle school metaphors that populated the My World era: plucking flower petals, catching blown kisses. Other adult R&B stars will dabble in that stuff, but with Bieber it feels even more like his natural register now than it did in ’09. If this is age regression, it’s an especially cozy form of it, backed by aqueous guitar tones from Mk.gee and Dijon which, from a certain distance, evoke a desire to return to an “oceanic” pre-birth state, with a fully occupied king-size taking the place of the mother’s womb. And before you dismiss that as a ludicrous Freudian reach (it is), consider first why “U Smile 800% Slower” caught on the way that it did.
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Andrew Karpan: Being in a marriage is work, for sure. I like the way mk.gee’s chugging guitar hammers along, evocative of the tough travails awaiting Bieber as he contemplates the suffering of getting left on read. Conversely, the overall rustling production, which moves like a cool, tense, summer breeze, is one of the most calming sounds I’ve heard on the charts in months. This is evocative also, I suppose, of marriage.
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Claire Davidson: I sympathize with Justin Bieber’s plight: Biebermania at its peak would’ve surely been difficult for anyone to endure, let alone during adolescence, and this year’s Diddy trial seems to have viscerally disturbed him in ways I wouldn’t wish on anyone. (Well, save for Diddy himself.) That said, my understanding of Bieber’s struggles as a person hasn’t engendered any affection for him as a performer: in terms of vocal presence, he’s always struck me as a total non-entity, a vacuum of charisma who is frequently the worst part of his own songs. “Daisies” does have problems beyond his vocals. For a song that sees Bieber quietly waiting for a love interest to reciprocate his feelings, the lumbering walls of guitar that fill the chorus spell more doom than infatuation. Yet Bieber’s delivery leaves the song without a credible anchor. On the reserved verses, he’s quiet to the point of shrinking into himself; on the more direct chorus, his attempts at more expressive sincerity come across as nasal and preening (“I’m counting the days, how many days“), not helped by his narrow vocal range. To say that the song’s central guitar rollick, relaxed but genuinely muscular, is wasted on “Daisies” would be an understatement. That kind of suggestive groove demands an artist with actual magnetism, and no artist with a modicum of the “swag” Bieber evokes in his album title would miss that opportunity.
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Julian Axelrod: The funny thing about SWAG isn’t that Justin Bieber called an album SWAG. The funny thing about SWAG is that Justin Bieber could have called any of his previous albums SWAG, but he saved the title for his least swaggy album yet. (Honestly, Changes or Purpose would have been perfect names for his wife guy manifesto.) Even by SWAG standards, “Daisies” is one of the least SWAG singles he could have pushed (after the Dijon duet and the Mario Winans tribute), which makes it the swaggiest thing he could have done. But its loping shuffle and quiet vulnerability makes it, in its own way, extremely SWAG.
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