Kygo & Ellie Goulding – First Time

It’s “European EDM DJs Featuring Other People” Friday! 10 points to whoever can come up with a snappier title.

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[4.00]Hannah Jocelyn: It’s hard to hear Ellie warble about cigarettes after hearing the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of party music on Melodrama. It’s even harder considering the great music that Ellie’s capable of making. Ellie’s too good of a singer to go through the motions with Kygo like this. “It Ain’t Me” worked because of how it used its emotional-trop-pop trappings to its advantage, but this is weightless in a bad way. Those lines about debauchery sound like every writer involved is following a straight edge lifestyle. The melody, nostalgic references, and drum kits sound rejected from Memories… Do Not Open, even if the production is much better. “First Time” is just so hard to hear that it’s difficult to pay attention for a full single listen — normally I use comparisons to make a point about how it does or doesn’t transcend the names dropped, but I’m pulling them up here because there’s just not much that stands out otherwise, even the hyper-specific details sounding passé. Except for that “middle finger was a peace sign”, which suggests that someone on the 6-person writing team (Ellie’s not credited) watches Rick and Morty.
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Alfred Soto: These memories recollected in tranquility have the logic of an addled mind. “We were sipping on emotions” isn’t the first “huh?” moment. Ten dollars hasn’t been a stack since Chester Arthur was president. No teen has ever confused a Honda with a Maybach. Musically “First Time” is unwieldy too. The main riff — a pretty restatement of Toto’s “Africa” — evokes a pleasant haze, but Kygo adds the bloops and bleeps that are de rigeur in an EDM-drenched pop scene. If this be wisdom, give me madness.
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Anthony Easton: The blankness comes from Kygo’s affectless delivery; the flat, Lorde inspired electronics, that meanders but never quite commits to a beat…the worst of this was how badly written it is, a Frankenstein’s monster of cliches, stopped from the very first line.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: “First Time” strives to capture the nostalgia of adolescent love, but somehow manages to make the same exact mistake “Closer” did by including a clunky, forced rhyme scheme. That partially worked in the latter’s favor, though, as the song had the spirit of a wide-eyed teenager. This, however, wants to be pensive, so it’s hard to justify that issue amidst the song’s air of seriousness. Call me grouchy, but everything in this song sounds like a teenager who claims they’re wise beyond their years. From the specific mention of Bon Iver’s “re: stacks” to the laughably ineffective kick drum two-thirds of the way in, this is just all way too humorless.
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Crystal Leww: I hate to be dramatic, but Ellie Goulding singing ‘ten dollars was a fat stack’ seems mildly racist.
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Will Adams: Kygo steps outside his box to create something that sounds like it could fit in with the dreamy pop of the overlooked Halcyon, but without the strength of Goulding’s writing, it fails. Here, subtlety’s drained in favor of metaphor dump and meaningless imagery (“the middle finger was our peace sign”). And that’s not even getting to the chorus, whose string of “fat stack-Maybach” rhymes continues the awful trend of white artists shoehorning hip hop tropes where they do not belong (though it was at that point I became relieved that Goulding isn’t a writer on this).
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Alex Clifton: I wish that Kygo had picked someone other than Ellie Goulding for the vocals. It’s not that she sounds bad–I’d actually say this is the strongest song she’s been featured on since “I Need Your Love,” and this is certainly miles better than anything on Delirium. But I don’t buy the idea that Ellie ever had a time when “ten dollars was a fat stack”–she sounds too glossy for that. Nor do I ever get the sense from this song that this affair was a “wildfire” when the music is so laid-back. Kygo should have gone with Halsey. She’d oversing the whole thing, but there’d be some actual emotion in it.
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Ryo Miyauchi: For all of its vanilla feel, the vastness of “Love Me Like You Do” suited post-EDM Ellie Goulding. So Kygo was on somewhat of a right direction tweaking his beach-side shtick to fit the tone of 50 Shades Darker. The songwriters didn’t get the memo, though, leaving Goulding to draw history out of a collection of someone else’s mementos. Or at least, she doesn’t interact them like they’re hers. With fake-deep memories like a drag of her first cigarette or Bon Iver’s “Re: Stacks,” can you blame her for not claiming that they are?
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Thomas Inskeep: Con: I don’t get what people hear in Goulding’s voice, which always reads very empty to me. Con: The silly “remember when” lyrics, which seem to be directed towards those in their 20s; I’m 46, so that’s not gonna work for me. Pro: That Kygo has severely dropped the BPMs on this and essentially made a pop single that just happens to have the same old EDM tricks in its chorus. But I’m happy that it’s not only not uptempo, but it’s not even really midtempo; this is basically an EDM ballad. And it stands out and works. Not exceptionally well, but enough.
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Scott Mildenhall: Quite why Herefordshire’s Ellie Goulding ever thought it a good idea to cement the carpet-scraping cringeworthiness of these lyrics with her voice might seem a mystery, but when considered with 2015’s “On My Mind” it’s clear she very much has form. Counting the clangers is a task in itself, such is the difficulty of listening to her utter the words “ten dollars was a fat stack” without an ounce of misplaced irony. Perhaps Selena Gomez did love The Libertines when she was 17, but this desperate grab for American currency is in no way legal tender.
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