Nico & Vinz – Am I Wrong

Don’t answer that.

[Video][Website]
[5.30]Thomas Inskeep: I can certainly see why this is catching on in the U.S.: it’s like the likes of Tiesto actually wrote a pure pop song. And that looped guitar figure is insanely earwormy. That said, the singer (Nico? Vinz?) sounds waaaaay too much like the dude from the Outfield at a karaoke bar. We sure this isn’t just the Outfield with an EDM makeover pulling a fast one on us?
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Brad Shoup: If they were afraid of not sounding uncommitted, then no worries: that brass is flat like month-old soda, and I can’t remember the last I heard such grim handclaps. Yet another fretful guitar-figure/existentialism combo… what an odd trend.
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Alfred Soto: That rubberband of a riff would have made the song a winner by itself, and those swelling “Sledgehammer”/Al Green horns sound like someone knows how to mix them. The vocal’s too open-throaty sincere. Imagine Ryan Tedder singing over the arrangement of his life. Which explains why it’s in the American top twenty.
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Stephen Thomas Erlewine: I dig this. It’s a shameless copy of Bruno Mars’ shameless copying of The Police, but Nico & Vinz get everything right: a shimmering, arpeggiated guitar line decidedly simpler than anything Andy Summers would play, balanced by a keening vocal somewhat simpler than Sting. What matters is the chorus and the feel, both of which are so appealing they make the verse seem stronger than it is, but the shakiness of that verse dissipates because of the vibe. This is a summer song through and through, a record that creates the impression that magic hour–the moment when the sun threatens to sink into horizon–will never end.
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Anthony Easton: I like the doubling of “wrong” here, and how the middle sounds fractured, so the doubling becomes a mirror.
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Scott Mildenhall: It isn’t really either, but “Am I Wrong” falls on the hitmaking convergence of Mumford stomp and deep house. The line you can draw from this to “Waves” splits off to “Sonnentanz” as much as “Counting Stars”. They all fit on a diagram of hits – alongside songs like “Look Right Through”, “What I Might Do”, “One Day/Reckoning Song” and “Somebody That I Used To Know” – that all on some level trade on a kind of “earthiness”. Sparse solemnity from sad men strumming/on a saxophone, the main variable being level of danceability. On that front this falls closer to “Changes” than “Brutal Hearts”, but that still doesn’t make it quite as interesting as wildly theorising about it. Tenner bet Mumford & Sons record a haunting Colonel Abrams cover before Christmas.
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Will Adams: Pleasant worldbeat featuring two emotive but nondescript, plaintive men, that unfortunately suffers from a bridge that invokes that old, “…then I don’t wanna be right” cliché. Never have I been so confident that a song is destined to be a one-hit wonder.
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Katherine St Asaph: “Am I tripping for having a vision?” “Am I wrong for thinking out the box from where I stay?” Yes. You’re wrong. You’re wrong, for thinking this Bruno Mars / fun. / Stargate puree, these A&R ChickieNobs, this supposedly inspirational text that when it starts being about a girl (“that we could be something for real”) veers disconcertingly close to the Elliot Rodgers manifesto, is thinking outside any box. For one, can we get a chart-underdog-makes-good that actually makes good?
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Andy Hutchins: “Am I Wrong” is one of my favorite songs of 2014, but it wasn’t until seeing the gorgeous, warm-toned, sub-Saharan-set video — something I will guess lots of kids who Shazam it (like I did) do for their second listen — that I got it: It’s no less than a perfect summer song. On first listen, it felt like be a pretty simple song about the girl just beyond the singer(s)’s reach; it’s really a semi-biographical song about two African-Norwegians reaching to the great wide something for stardom, and being absolutely sure that their arms are long enough to do so. It’s also suffused with a different kind of warmth than I feel from even the hotter signals from DJ Mustard’s increasingly massive orbit: The drums, claps, and the “Oh ya ya ya ye” in the second hook are familiarly African, and flesh out what would otherwise be pretty generic guitar-and-horns production, while the vocals sound like, as this guy noted, Sting crossed with Akon — something I couldn’t find on another song in rotation with a week to search. Warm, hopeful songs about going somewhere and doing something are my summer songs, and this will be one of many for me in the hot months of 2014. It may be late-coming over here in the States, given that it simmered in the summer of 2013 for the rest of the world, but it still arrived on time.
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David Lee: Reminiscent of 2007 in its Akon vox and its Ryan Tedder songwriting. Luckily, the production is many more generations removed from “Take Me Home Tonight;” anything closer to the original would have sentenced this to total, deadening self-seriousness.
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