Up with the trumpets, down with the porn name…
[Video][Website]
[5.50]
Brad Shoup: Great, now I have to pick a new stripper name. Anyway, it points to my laziness that I thought a track this hot must surely feature a rapper. The horn blasts are vintage Just Blaze, and despite the gotta-run theme, the track lends itself well to high-stepping. I suppose it’s time “Ike’s Rap II” got another workout; in this case, it drags out the tension before tossing Sabre – whose pinched tenor is eerily similar to Mark Morrison — into the chorus. Dunno who the backing singer is; for all I know, she got chipmunked.
[8]
Ian Mathers: Man, that opening groove is just massive. And then he samples Portishead by sampling Isaac Hayes, which is a pretty good two-for-one sale. He’s not bad on the chorus, but let’s be honest, I’m listening to the horns. The end result is that I have no idea how much I actually like Maverick Sabre and his weird little voice, but who cares? This kind of bullshit play is exactly what makes pop music great.
[8]
Jer Fairall: A mixture of a crackly horn sample and Portishead’s noir atmosphere that I could happily leave on repeat for hours were it not for the mewling vocalist. Sadly, this appears to be his party, and its hard to enjoy even the most well-catered and impressively guest-listed event when the host is stumbling around with a lampshade on his head.
[5]
Iain Mew: I basically can’t stand the stupid wobbly way he croaks out the words, which would be enough to render all the sumptious samples and brass in the world futile.
[2]
Michaela Drapes: This feels like a bellwether of something, not sure what, though: Sampling Portishead’s “Glory Box”, which itself sampled Issac Hayes’ “Ike’s Rap II”? (I can’t even imagine the nightmare of figuring out the royalties, ugh.) Once you get past that weirdness, though, and Maverick’s Billie Holliday-via-David Sedaris (or Jeff Buckley on quaaludes) impersonation, this is actually … good? Ok, it’s interesting at least, even if all this musical sleight-of-hand is uncomfortably stitched together on top of some Ronson-lite faux soul. No, I take it back. This is just too weird, sorry.
[3]
Alfred Soto: A lot of elements on this track are unexpected. Until I checked the credits, I thought Just Blaze deserved credit for those horns. Maverick Sabre, which is almost as deserving a porn star name as Dirk Diggler, affects the right kind of drawl: Cee-Lo Green meets Cameo. Then there’s the Portishead sample over the fadeout.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: Of course I’m going to respond to a sample also used effectively by Portishead, and young master Sabre has a winning voice — but for all the Jaxxy riot stuffed into this single, it doesn’t actually build to anything.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Of course the Portishead/Isaac Hayes sample sounds fabulous; it’s designed to slink all over itself and tease atmosphere into its surroundings. But that’s not why the Portishead song worked. Beth Gibbons had two vocal modes on “Glory Box”: the smirk and the look on the verses that I couldn’t help but sing to, settling my voice below its timbre to match it; and the chorus, where she wrung more desperation out of the words “I just wanna be” than anything else and more resignation into the concluding “a woman” than even that. “Glory Box” came out when I was 16 with certain reasons to just want to be a woman. To me, it was perfect. To Maverick Sabre, however, it needed a new skin-schlock video and two new vocalists: Tweety Bird, who just wants to be non-avian, and Mike Posner. This is the beginning of the end; it drags on forever and ever.
[6]