Somehow her lowest scoring track to date…
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[7.40]
Gin Hart: This is my new favorite jazzy retro throwback girl power self-love anthem. Its vocal and instrumental modesty serves as a droll underline for “I’m not one to toot my horn, but…” Temi believes in Temi, and it ain’t even a thing. “When I’m bad I’m very good, and I still maintain my halo” isn’t even clever, it’s just perfect. A lot of folks would like to channel the classic, but Miss Dollface has it down.
[8]
Jonathan Bradley: “Beep Beep” is a chaotic crumpling: musique concrete filtered through nightclub sass and Gilded Age vibes. Temi Dollface is compère as well as starring attraction, purring patter as she brings the background chatter to silence. The punchline to the hook — “I’m not one to toot my horn” — hits like an expletive: “but beep beep.” This is an updated “Bootylicious,” and confirmed: Temi can handle this.
[8]
Alfred Soto: “I’m not one to toot my horn,” she sings, but no one with ears believes her. The predictable comparison is to Janelle Monáe, another artist who pledges her troth to Transcending Genre and Awkward Segues. The last minute’s ooh-ooh wipe the horse sweat from the track.
[6]
Mo Kim: My favorite part of this is the way the vocals stack up on the “do-do-do-do” part, building into a chorus of harmonizing Temis before some of them begin breaking into Sunday School solos: each voice on “Beep Beep,” though, belongs to her, whether she’s citing her favorite scene from Some Like It Hot or asking you to play her trumpet in three-part harmony. “Beep Beep” gets both the immediate satisfaction of its brash chorus (with its onomatopoeic hook) and the longer burn of a performer slowly unfurling “it’s me” like a promise of multitudes contained.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: Is there a musical artist more committed to teasing out the complexities of colonialism and historical nostalgia than Temi Dollface? She makes Janelle Monáe look almost unambitious by comparison. The Joy Division namecheck here is fearless on two fronts (though engaging the specter of the Holocaust is far more important than engaging the specter of post-punk), and the Busby Berkeley choreography serves as a pitiless reminder of Hollywood’s continued global imperialism. But just as impressively as her playing with the signifiers of whiteness is her deep engagement with Black culture: the braggadocio of the verses is in deep conversation with the blues and the dozens, and the rhythmic underpinning goes back to early jazz, when Duke Ellington embraced the term “jungle music” as an advertising slogan, selling faux-Africa to whites, and eventually, to Africa itself.
[9]
Lauren Gilbert: Temi, what do I have to convince you to release an entire album? Really, that’s my major reaction; that this is good, that “School Your Face” and “Pata Pata” were also good, and that I would like more. Temi Dollface is able to completely inhabit her character, to sell lines like “what I do with grapenuts is pure poetry.” The chorus is a bit weak; it doesn’t showcase the same ingenuity that the verses do (“my pecan pie’s among the eulogized”), and I feel like the jazz club music video has been done before — albeit perhaps not with dancing reminiscent of synchronized swimming. These only are nitpicks, though; would that all other musicians had half her style and panache.
[9]
Jessica Doyle: The transitions don’t work for me as well as they did in “School Your Face,” and I wish the instrumention hadn’t retreated so thoroughly during the second verse. But if it were possible to wipe any previous connotations from the phrase “joy division” and declare it hers alone, I’d do it. Bonus: the return of Truth Juice!
[6]
Josh Langhoff: Temi Dollface raids Fela’s “Swegbe and Pako” for one useful measure and repurposes Joy Division’s name for actual joy, so she’s hard to dislike, but I’ll try. In the song’s first half, all those carefully choreographed Temi voices add up to an offputting forced cheer; she’s like an overaggressive youth leader yelling at me to smile more, when I just want to study how she built the little humming madrigal at the end.
[5]
Brad Shoup: She’s spread clingwrap on the jazzy drums: clicks become crackling, like they kept a constant small fire on. And with her resurrecting a specific strain of cabaret, maybe there’s something to burn. She riffs on “Technologic” and anticipates any fake-deep accusations. This one’s a treasure chest of omniscient asides.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: The morning after dozens of celebrities tried to convince me, stridently and pinkly, that their meme soufflé to the face was FUN!, it’s a relief to hear something that is.
[8]