Daft Punk, ATC, Cooler Kids, or this? Discuss.
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[4.29]
Katherine St Asaph: The pillowy processing on the intro is nice and new, and Fetty is a welcome if incongruous presence. But the song is the same dance of “global” sexualized exoticism every non-Anglo pop star is given sooner or later (usually sooner) in lieu of material with personality. It’s listenable, but I almost don’t want to listen, for fear that the lack of imagination is contagious.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Regard “Around the World” as the girl in “Trap Queen”‘s response and you’ll feel disappointed, unworthy of the detail and attention that Fetty lavished on her. La Rose wants to feel the heat with somebody, but he ain’t Jeremih.
[4]
Iain Mew: My first response on hearing “Around the World” was to try to work out why the “ra rara ra rara ra rara” hook was so familiar. “Spice Up Your Life” was the eventual answer. Then I figured out that the lovely floating sigh of an intro is melodically close to the best bit in David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” and that the whole song has a less concrete feel of Tove Lo’s “Talking Body”. So being the kind of person who makes these links definitely affects my reaction, but rather than over-familiarity, there’s an unusual ghostly quality to the results. The extravagant but meaningless chorus contributes, and it’s as if the song was produced by the pop song equivalent of those Google neural network painters — fed a bunch of songs and putting them together in logical patterns that nonetheless aren’t quite right. Those pictures gave me the creeps.
[3]
Thomas Inskeep: Stale EDM/Europop-by-numbers about how much La Rose wants to have sex with you, with the added “bonus” of a rap by the overly-Autotuned Fetty Wap. Actively, aggressively terrible.
[0]
Will Adams: Far from perfect — the rah-rah hook makes even less sense than the admittedly silly central metaphor — but this production is way more detailed and delicate than radio deserves right now. Maybe a big dumb trance remix is in order, though I certainly wouldn’t mind that, either.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: A song of faith and devotion that’s vaguely apocalyptic, but Natalie’s having a lovely time. She ain’t stopping till the world ends, and when it does, she’ll just wax lyrical about how beautiful it is that you get to spend such a special moment together. That or laugh in your face, anyway; it really is hard to tell. Such darkness is a great move after the effervescence of “Somebody”. The only drawback is that as a foil, Fetty is no match for Jeremih. In fact, he’s pretty useless.
[7]
Micha Cavaseno: It’s pretty cheeky to go for roller rather than overkilled bangeur on that drop, slinking rather than thrusting its way through time (pretty good, as the more I get used to Natalie’s vox, I don’t think she’d be able to deliver a lot of volume at the moment). Meanwhile, Fetty unfortunately sounds tendon-level strained in this mix, thus leaving a dampened feeling on what could’ve been a decent minor hit.
[5]