The word “cruel” starts flashing…
[Video][Website]
[4.60]
Frank Kogan: This single was actually produced in secret by Focus On The Family to convince young people that recreational sex is dreary.
[3]
Martin Skidmore: I wonder why she has the backing of will.i.am and Akon — there’s not a lot here to explain it. Synthy pop with reasonably competent singing and an uninteresting tune, all rather derivative. A shoulder-shrug of a record.
[4]
Josh Love: Should’ve come out about three or four months ago, when our Gaga-less lull was at its deepest. Now she’s releasing lyrics for her new album and this imitator is just going to get kicked to the wayside. A bit girlier in the chorus than Ms. Germanotta, but the stalking synths and mannish, sexually charged, Autotuned declarations in the verses are dead ringers for Lady G.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: Oh, there the Gaga-wannabes are, draped in just the same pseudo-pretentiousness, the same air-blast synths, and even the same chord changes. How darling of them.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Ubiquitous enough to inspire vocal imitators, Gaga still didn’t come up with an intro hook as fetching as this self-professed “silent film” aficionado (imagine Annie Lennox covering Corey Hart in 1984). The results: tuneful crypto-goth with the sex foregrounded.
[7]
David Moore: The verse suggests a universe in which Lady Gaga was cryogenically frozen after her early Miss Universe appearance and released three years later. Neither the songwriters nor the singer know what to do in the chorus, but it needed a real belly-belt and Natalia’s throat closes up on the high notes. If she sang the first half of the chorus in her lower register, when she sings “burning the candles” she’d hit the highest, loudest notes in her range instead of falling anticlimactically off of the overreach in the previous phrase. Then the thing becomes an anthem, Natalia compelling everyone to light their own candles, i.e. their cell phones. And when she sings “tighten the handcuffs” there’s a wacky hand gesture for everyone to do. Audience participation!
[5]
Anthony Easton: Tying the hands above the bed is not kinky. It will not make your lover explode.
[3]
Kat Stevens: Now Rihanna’s ditched the vamp-horror rock of Rated R for something cheerier, Natalia has taken up the slack. I much prefer the one she did last year about being in love with a zombie (“do you love me for my body… or for my BRAINS?”). That one didn’t have the awful sad chugging guitar noise smeared all over it, drowning out the “Sweet Dreams Are Made of These” soundalike synth riff. I wonder if the glut of landfill indie guitarists are now killing time doing session work for ‘edgy’ popstars?
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: “Mirrors” should be awful. There’s the premise of S&M as an exciting new form of sex, with all the obvious signifiers — handcuffs, cages, tied hands — that suggest everyone involved in the writing learned about it entirely through bottom-shelf porn. Then there’s the parallel premise that all of this is totally shocking, a grab at the cheap danger that mentioning sex on the radio can’t get you anymore. There’s also the attempt to gussy it all up with intellect — the “sex, love, control, vanity” bridge in particular is the exact pretentious bullshit that Gaga had to drop to lose her hecklers. And this desperately wants to be Gaga, from the brash synths to, especially, the video, a montage of coquette-goth costumes, CGI dysmorphia and singing at skulls. But somehow it succeeds, and not simply as a song but at everything above. It’s as if Natalia’s producers (including Cherry Cherry Boom Boom of Gaga’s camp) took all the dark-dance singles from the past decade and boiled out impurities nobody even knew were there. The result is a song from a near dystopian future where knives line the dance floors, coupling feels like a boot to the face and nobody wants it any other way.
[7]
Alex Ostroff: Sex, RedOne presets, Love, a Madonna-jacking spoken word bridge, Control, faux-titillating references to S&M, Vanity. Natalia opened for Robyn earlier this month and down to the outfits and back-up dancers, she’s nigh indistinguishable from The Fame. But the chorus is catchy and her voice was strong enough live to nimbly belt it mid-choreography. She may have a Monster in her yet.
[4]