Laufey – Lover Girl

Not a Teena Marie cover…

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Julian Axelrod: I always thought Laufey was an austere classical theorist, like Björk for people who went to Berklee. But “Lover Girl” is a goofy, flirty bossa nova shuffle that’s simple but emotionally direct like an old jazz standard. I can already picture Laufey struggling under the weight of her many Grammys.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Laufey comes from traditional jazz, but I suspect outside listeners are more likely to hear this as either the successor to Norah Jones-style AC crossover, to Regina Spektor-style tweepop (to which a successor is sorely needed), or to any of the hundreds of landfill alt-pop artists that contribute to my 2,100-plus inbox backlog. Inevitably, the “no swearing, no sex, just some CLEAN music” commentary is coming in, and besides the prescriptive dog-whistling, they’re not exactly wrong. Everything is quirked up and pleasantly competent; Ann Powers points out the studied “utmost care” of her vocal delivery. All this means that undoubtedly a long, winsome, Grammy-full career awaits Laufey, though it does amuse me to imagine her following the trajectory of Sofi Tukker — the last bossa-nova pop crossover, though you wouldn’t know it nowadays — and putting a donk on Drowning Pool.
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Ian Mathers: I kind of hated this! But it’s like when I tried a tiny piece of my friend’s homemade pumpkin pie, knowing I don’t like pumpkin pie (it’s good to check every so often); I suspect this is actually a perfectly good representation of some flavours that I just happen to dislike.
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Nortey Dowuona: I love this so much. Laufey is my queen. Will be a weird balding middle-aged man nagging random women about whether they listen to Laufey.
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Joshua Lu: There’s a certain anachronistic charm in hearing genuine bossa nova, but “Lover Girl” is played too straight to stir any emotion beyond generic pleasantness. The bridge in particular, which swells and grows before getting extinguished by the final chorus rushing in, feels like a lost opportunity for any kind of climax in this otherwise staid song.
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Claire Davidson: Pop music lends itself so naturally to lyrics about crushes because the form itself mirrors the experience of infatuation: after all, what is pop music if not a few brief, pummeling moments of passion that eventually fizzle into thin air? Laufey, on the other hand, is a jazz vocalist, and as such is more professional by trade. It comes as no surprise, then, that in “Lover Girl,” the song where she most directly wears her heart on her sleeve in confessing to a crush, sees her admit on the hook that she’d make fun of another girl as giddy as herself from a different vantage point. Yet even Laufey, in her reluctance to admit to such ephemeral pleasures, can’t help but embrace the joy in waking up with a lighter step thanks to the object of her affection, a winsomeness mirrored by the song’s spry bossa nova rhythm and silken flute refrain. The track’s more tongue-in-cheek touches, too, only add to the fullness of its dizzy euphoria, from the handclaps that punctuate the chorus to the swooning vocal harmonies that accompany Laufey on the bridge, where her half-mocking reference to all that’s seen as feminine and “frivolous” only becomes more romantic through her telling. That Laufey is typically so guarded, so subtly commanding in her delivery, makes her surrender to pure feeling that much more infectious by proxy.
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Al Varela: The chorus melody leans a little too close to “From The Start” to not be distracting, but I’m such a sucker for this kind of upbeat, elegant traditional pop that I’m still left smiling anyway.
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