Comeback singles you’ve been waiting for, part 1…
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[4.86]
Iain Mew: Reminds me of Björk’s “Crystalline”. Not in the sense of actually sounding like it, but of a return to form which sounds like an off-cut from her last great album, only for a last-minute reveal that it was to lull you into the right place to shocked by sped-up rhythmic chaos. In both cases the trick is worth it.
[7]
Anthony Easton: I have both seen and heard “something like that” done bigger and better than this brassy disaster.
[3]
Brad Shoup: Is she auditioning for Cover Drive?
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: It doesn’t matter how Nelly’s sung before; the current landscape of urban pop means I only hear her schwas and patois as Rihanna’s. But Rihanna stopped being eligible for a lyric like “don’t wanna talk about sex / wanna express myself tonight” sometimes around 2007, and Darkchild’s moody churn of a track is far from generic even before getting tapped and reversed. The last minute, meanwhile, doesn’t even deserve to be in the same paragraph as “generic.”
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: Namechecking “Scenario”, “No Diggity”, No Doubt, “Let’s Talk About Sex”, “Express Yourself”, “Poison”, “Rump Shaker”, and Another Bad Creation — plus a gabba finale? Sounds like someone misses the 1990s.
[7]
Alfred Soto: She’s promiscuous about elongating vowels, isn’t she?
[1]
Edward Okulicz: The sound of a potentially decent song recorded on a cassette tape, and the tape then submerged in water, then played back. Or a succession of wobbling noises and cliches followed by a desultory dubstep bit. Where, say, “Maneater” was a bunch of heaving, commanding noises that worked together to create unstoppable movement, this merely twitches.
[4]