Not featuring Chris Brown!…
[Video][Website]
[3.78]
Mallory O’Donnell: Once one of the most promising lights on the pop horizon, the retrenched 2012 Scissor Sisters tackle the apocalypse with an oddly specific lyric that quickly tangents into poptimistic platitudes. All of which might read as being interesting, but “Only the Horses” quickly retreats from the mind in the same way as the late-period disco one-off novelty forget-me-soons that it musically mines. There may once have been gold in them thar hills, but in the eight years since the Sisters emerged, their once unique recycling of unfashionable pop and dance also-rans has itself become a hoary cliche. Shears and company are ignoring this at their own peril, and to our loss.
[3]
Iain Mew: When I was searching for the video for this I found myself mistakenly typing in “scissor sisters all the lovers”. Sadly the resemblance doesn’t extend to its quality.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: First we get Lana Del Rey and then this bland, featureless Scissor Sisters single with a baffling horse metaphor. I’m beginning to wonder if I should just ignore 2012-era pop and put on Belinda Carlisle’s Runaway Horses LP instead — it may or may not predict the future of the rest of the next few months, but it’ll surely sound a damn sight better.
[1]
Pete Baran: It’s quite possible that on repeated listens (and I mean way above twenty) this could join the Scissor Sisters canon of infectious hands in the air all ages crowd pleasers. But I don’t think it will. It’s a perfectly serviceable pop tune, which lacks a Jake falsetto or a Ana Matronic growl and thus feels a touch anonymous. And I cannot begin to parse the Horse metaphor at the centre of the track.
[5]
Anthony Easton: This song doesn’t sound dangerous or isolated or lonely, or in danger — just that “o” sound pulled to the most ludicrous direction it can possibly go. The twinkly piano and a chorus stolen from The Hidden Cameras, in the midst of the horse-pulled double vowels, don’t make anything better.
[4]
Brad Shoup: The kind of gleaming mall-speaker filler I will never tire of hearing from about 40 feet overhead.
[7]
Zach Lyon: The type of song that gets released twenty years after the artist was ever relevant, like every time I’ve ever scanned a discography on Allmusic and thought to myself, “Oh, they released an album in 2003? Weird.” You’d think the Sisters would know better, right?
[3]
Jer Fairall: Once picking their way through pop’s past with the zeal of loving archivists and the wit of cheeky post-modernists, it is more than a bit depressing to hear the Scissor Sisters supported by fashionably rave-y synths on a track whose sense of history reaches no further back than the latest Rihanna record. A nod to the fact that the band’s fabulously queer sound, once so anomalous, has reached something like critical mass in recent years? Maybe, but context aside, the only thing that really rescues this is Jake’s aching, plaintive vocal melody, singlehandedly elevating the entire thing by locating an actual heartbeat within a flurry of mechanical throbs.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Six years ago they sought Elton John and the Pet Shop Boys. Now Enrique Iglesias and art like this serve as inspirations. The only fun gay is a fun gay.
[2]