Tuesday Mediocre…
[Video]
[3.62]
Nina Lea: Two t(w)een Tik Tok mainstays on TSJ in one week? How blessed are we? Unfortunately, this whole song is so inane that the seconds-long sound bite on Tik Tok might be all it’s good for; listen longer than that and their voices start to grate on you. One of the comments on YouTube says, “When the high school quarterback quits the team to make music,” which is such a good and accurate encapsulation of this track that I really wish I’d thought of it first.
[3]
Kylo Nocom: Even if the vocals are a sure-sign of the lazy bedroom mutter being reaped for mainstream hits and everyone having to suffer for it, this is surely cute, right? And listen to that organ!
[4]
Scott Mildenhall: Drowsiness is a difficult quality for a vocalist. Unless you’re Afroman, there’s every chance it will sound affected, and moderate risk that it will undermine you. It raises the question: is this extremely concerted effort to record a particular kind of happiness hollow, or does it encapsulate a core truth? Either way, it sounds too smug, and taken as a whole, it sounds like that smugness is derived from a certainty that this has been successfully missile-targeted towards a demographic that will probably have established The Handlebars Challenge before the end of the year.
[5]
Tim de Reuse: The half-drawled, off-key delivery is obnoxiously overtuned; it sounds desperately focus-grouped to be as corporately carefree as possible, in a cynical rebranding of relaxation as consumer product. I mean, just look at these smug blonde assholes! God, I hate that it works.
[8]
Alfred Soto: I can’t fault’em for remembering happy times, but the drawl and the piano bespeak a desperation for pleasure instead of a celebration of hard-won pleasure. “Positivity” bleh.
[3]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “Our music exists to spread love and positivity across the world,” reads a statement on Surfaces’ website, followed by a long explanation about how their group name is about perceiving the world through a multi-layered, non-judgemental lens. It’s in this context that it’s hard to disagree with “Sunday Best” — who dislikes love and positivity? — but also hard to see the song as anything but a contrived schtick. Maybe I’m being too cynical, but watching the music video feels like a marketing ploy: office workers having a terrible day, but then magically smiling and having a party as soon as the song starts to play. Sure, it’s warm and cheery, but it also sounds like members Forrest Frank and Colin Padalecki sat around crowd-sourcing ideas for what would be as agreeable and nondescript as possible. The best art that communicates joy and complexity and humanity does so organically; it doesn’t sound like it was manufactured by IKEA.
[3]
Michael Hong: Beneath the performative veneer is an empty sort of sadness. Above it is bland joyless monotony.
[1]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: My brother used to listen to a lot of music that he got from FIFA games. “Sunday Best” sounds like the worst of those tracks, an almost-passable facsimile of actual funk rock that is so brittle and ersatz that it shatters immediately upon close consideration. It’s not even good elevator music — Surfaces’ vocal tics are not enough to be charming but too much to go down smooth. I cannot imagine a situation in which someone would listen to “Sunday Best” intentionally.
[2]