What kind of sisterly love is this?
[Video][Website]
[4.44]
Jonathan Bogart: It’s not even the best song called “Lolita” released by a woman in 2012.
[4]
Will Adams: Only the second halves of the verses, where a syncopated bass pulse rumbles below, provide the mystery and danger that The Veronicas want so desperately from this failed metaphor. The rest is shoddy GarageBand-level production whose sole noteworthy feature is melodically flipping the synthbell melody from “Lights”.
[3]
Anthony Easton: “Lolita” and “Femme Nikita” make an excellent rhyme. It is not really close to the plots of the novel or the film/tv shows — but it is closer than other name-checks (see Sting). Also, the mess of electronic sounds near the end are slightly more interesting than the verses.
[5]
Iain Mew: I’m generally neutral on brostep itself, but when it’s merged with pop songwriting I keep finding it irresistible. Not in the sense of your brief dubstep break, though I can go for them too sometimes, but in the way that whole songs by Cher Lloyd, Gabrielle and Wonder Girls have been built around crushing bass and electro impacts (none of whom are bros, I notice, but I don’t think that’s the reason). I realise that I love it as a sound, the less subtle the better, and just need something a bit more conventional melodically too to make it work over a song length. “Lolita” doesn’t come on quite as strong, but the influence is definitely there in the smashing of the song into electronic shards and piecing together again after each chorus, and it’s fantastic. Together with their distorted voices a good match for the frantic contradictions of the chorus. “You’re my possession/I’m your obsession”, but they flip at one point to “I’ll love you forever” and neither of the referenced characters were in control. It verges on incoherent but they carry it off.
[8]
Alfred Soto: Fighting with some success the urge to sing “a mosquito/a libido” over the chorus, I listened to the rest of the goodies on display. There’s a good reason why these Australian twins haven’t crossed over to the American market: the electronic whoops and beeps and Katy Perry earnestness don’t fool anyone.
[4]
Brad Shoup: The title implies a Del Reyesque trip around smooth-worn symbols, but there’s another time warp at play. The Veronicas delivered one of the last decade’s best singles in “Untouched”, a heavy-edit-quartet number that maps eerily onto the genome of “Call Me Maybe”. Five years later, they’re adrift in the kind of Eurodance that was fossilized when Cascada first plugged in. It’s grim, it’s lonely, and it’s oddly comforting, at least until the legislated dubstep bit.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: The good news: it’s no more ridiculous, no more a teenage angstfest, than Lana Del Rey’s song. The bad news: it’s no less.
[5]
Jer Fairall: “I’m your Lolita,” you say, sounding more like some particularly unimaginative club producer’s vision of what he might do with Avril Lavigne or Hayley Williams and a cultural archetype that none involved is any closer to understanding by the time they’re done exploiting it.
[3]
Zach Lyon: Yikes. How long I’ve waited to hear their frictionful voices harmonize again; I’d started to doubt they’d ever come back. I would’ve paid money to wait longer — perhaps long enough for the current pop production terrain to cycle back to the level of vibrancy it had only five years ago.
[3]