And so does Caron Wheeler…
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[7.60]
Alfred Soto: It’s 1991 again: house-y piano runs and a vocal as cool as any by Caron Wheeler. They mitigate the sanctimony of some of the lyrics. So do the guitar fills.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: You can’t really criticize the lyrics’ flailing millennialisms when they make this much musical sense. Santigold rummages through ideas current and past — synths from the Knife drawer, twitchy guitars from college rock via LoneLady, house piano from the ’90s via their still-too-few revivalists — but can only make them coast instead of crest, groove instead of get somewhere. But have you found an arrangement more worth fighting for?
[8]
Edward Okulicz: As stuffed as “Big Mouth,” only it doesn’t overwhelm with distracting noises, and she’s chosen to sing it as a human being rather than sounding like a pitch-shifted moan. Touches of dub, irresistible skronks of guitar in the choruses, an air of pensiveness; this is as intelligently arranged as it is performed.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Nice reggae/downtempo fusion. Shame about the scratch vocal.
[5]
Andrew Ryce: Artist that has spent her entire career struggling to establish her own identity is still struggling to establish her own identity. The knotty indie rock groove here is catchy enough, especially in the pre-chorus when Ricky Blaze’s lush production really lights up. There’s a good song in here somewhere, but it’s buried underneath bloat and Interpol guitar stabs.
[5]
John Seroff: Three years were long enough for me to forget how much I enjoyed Santigold’s o-not-i eponymous first album, and as dope as “Big Mouth” is, I still wasn’t totally fired up for the new album until I fully digested “Disparate Youth”. The pizzicato strings, ratatat percussion, lightning guitar riffs and trampoline bass are more exciting than Santi’s flatly delivered vocals, but the whole package is galvanizing, effortless and genuinely fun.
[8]
Kat Stevens: Dubby skank! Much better!
[7]
Iain Mew: Between the rolling beats and house piano, splashes of guitar cutting across them and especially the “ah ah aaah!” vocals, “Disparate Youth” really reminds me of Klaxons’ “Golden Skans”. Which is fine, because that was the moment when their sci-fi indie rave sound actually coalesced into something impressive, and because Santigold makes two key improvements on the template. First, her voice is much better, especially when she reaches down to the lower end of her range. More importantly, she de-emphases a big chorus in favour of seamlessly riding a sublime groove off into the distance.
[9]
Anthony Easton: One of the aches of diaspora (and one of the ironies of queer culture, which was born in a kind of eternal diaspora) is the dual tension between finding a comfort in otherness, in bricolaged culture that is not one’s own, and finding nostalgia for a homeland that may never exist. In second or third generations, the homeland is farther away, and the tension of finding a culture of that which is mixed together becomes more vital. You can see this in the emergence of an urban trans-global culture that makes ironic wealth — sometimes this wealth is a metaphor, and sometimes this wealth is cultural, and sometimes this is wealth is cash — out of the gleaner’s straw. Santigold at her best (and this might be her best) discusses this issue with fewer parentheses and pretentious theory words than I am capable of. Like M.I.A, her education and her class make working through cultural layers much easier; she is a producer and not a consumer. But the instinct is still there.
[9]
Sally O’Rourke: The chorus of Santigold’s previous high water mark, “L.E.S. Artistes,” hinged on an expression of guarded optimism: “I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up.” “Disparate Youth,” then, is a sequel of sorts, the story of what happens when she makes that sacrifice but doesn’t get the life she was promised in exchange. The song opens with percolating synths, carrying over the showy confidence from “L.E.S. Artistes.” The first warning sign comes in the form of a bassline pulled from XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel,” a song about a young man losing control of his life before it’s hardly begun. Santi makes this bleakness explicit in her first line — “Don’t look ahead, there’s stormy weather” –- and “Disparate Youth” settles into a murky, repetitive dub rhythm, punctuated by a wordless vocal wail and bursts of guitar skronk, the thunderclouds and naysayers blocking her way. The synths are suppressed to a gentle wash and pushed down in the mix, but they never vanish completely. Likewise, Santi hasn’t given up despite the setbacks: better to fight for a life worth fighting for than settle for an existence steeped in apathy and forsaken hopes. She even seems to be gaining some ground by the bridge: the skronks and wails dissipate for a moment, letting the synths burble back to the forefront as Santi asserts “the odds all stand beneath me.” By the song’s close, all the instrumental signifiers of tedium and despair have been stripped away, leaving only the synths and a chanted mantra (“can’t throw nothing in our way, ay oh”). The Santigold of “L.E.S. Artistes” has had some of the brashness and carefree spirit kicked out of her, but she survived the struggle without backing down. Even if she didn’t get everything she hoped for, she can say it was worth it.
[10]