Brush my dentures with a bottle of Jack…
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[5.43]
Katherine St Asaph: Sunlight hurts his eyes. It’s also hurt his vocal cords, frying them so badly they can only flinch and let through whatever desiccated sounds haven’t fainted lifeless from the heat. Sunlight’s also apparently driven the track into convulsions and contractions, but there’s too much poor singing and poorer conceit to notice.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Dubstep as Big Beat, in which the text is compressed and distressed until comedy results. Ah, but it’s a real live band doing the deed. I don’t dare imagine we’re heading for a renaissance of the Chitlin Circuit, or the nights when half the Super K stable was honing chops in New York bars. Certainly not with one verse and a tempo dial. Some time outside may not be a bad thing in this case.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Dubstep as club music, and club music as antithetical to the antiseptic of clean light, is an interesting idea. This is made even better by how punishing good dubstep is, how much it is like being beaten with a cudgel. This doesn’t have quite enough cudgel action.
[6]
Pete Baran: The sound of people conceived to “Voodoo People.” The more dubstep gets closer to a messier grandchild to toytown techno, the happier I get. And live reputation notwithstanding, Modestep do seem to understand how to take a pretty basic sample and do about as much to it as possible, understanding less is more for the first couple of minutes and then accepting the power of +24. Whether it ever bends its form into the shape of a pop song I am not sure, but it’s pretty banging nonetheless.
[8]
Jer Fairall: Between dance beats so assaultive that I could never imagine anyone actually dancing to them and a vocal hook so facile it ends up doing nothing more than expressing an uninteresting sentiment uninterestingly, this sure is bizarrely non-functional for a song where so much seems to be going on.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: For some reason, I’ll take so-big-they’re-clumsy dubstep beats sustained throughout a track over so-obviously-inserted-at-last-minute dubstep breaks in the middle of contemporary dance pop. What I won’t take is the stoned slacker yawping the same pointless lines over and over again. Get off the stage and/or stop staring at the Sun, you damned fool.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: If you’re going to express joy, or any emotional shift whatever — and the tempo shift suggests you’re trying — you’re going to have to write more than one line of lyrics.
[5]