“Your Party (My Body Is)”…
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[5.64]
Jonathan Bogart: Were we talking bodies? Can we not?
[4]
Will Adams: Where’s Robyn when you need her?
[3]
Alfred Soto: Ellie Goulding, Robyn, and a half dozen Max Martin productions came to mind listening to this pleasant amalgam. I can’t deny its craft: when her body talks she wants her audience to listen, and if my attention drifted the chorus helps.
[6]
Micha Cavaseno: Tove Lo has definitely figured out the balance. She has the perfect synthesis in her songwriting of Lana, Charli, and Ellie (through an American filter). She’s got Urban Outfitter world in the palm of her hands, and I can imagine her sticking around for more than a minute. Does this make her any more interesting? No, because I’ve heard every trick here used a billion times, from the Lumineers rips in those “HEY!” adlibs, those Lorde album-esque Fruity Loops Electronica-circa-’06 303 gurgles, and her lyrics are the most paper-thin “I’m getting hot for you” regurgitation necessary to hit the broadest target range. Tove Lo is a weapon, and I can respect the impact but I’m not into that relationship.
[2]
Iain Mew: Tove Lo’s unfiltered frankness could be getting tired, but the slow-building electro of “Talking Body” is a better than usual match and “we fuck for life” is easily the best iteration yet. Even with procreation probably ruled out by the bridge, that still leaves statement of lasting devotion or of life affirmation, and so much feeling and possibility in one phrase.
[7]
Anthony Easton: How she sings “we fuck for life” sounds pretty much exactly how I would imagine a David Attenborough nature documentary would talk about some kind of rare goose species, but in the argot of Scando-pop.
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: Tove Lo has a lot of exciting things to say, but whether they concern day-drinking or a pick-up line that comes across as if she’s half-remembering something Britney once told her, she doesn’t sound very excited to say them. I would have hoped a proposed literally eternal tryst would be more erotic.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: “Habits,” which I still hate, hangs over Tove Lo’s career like a drug cloud, and as a result every one of her singles, even the happy ones, sounds bleak. Maybe it’s how “Talking Body” sounds like “Teenage Dream” after a heavy dose of benzos and a decade’s worth of romantic dream-dashing. Maybe it’s how “we fuck for life” is way too optimistic when propositioning a generation of guys whose modus operandi is more “we fuck once or twice and then he marches his perfect body to the next taker.” Tove Lo is a smart enough songwriter that I think this might be on purpose; I just don’t want to listen to it.
[5]
Luisa Lopez: Please God, don’t let “Habits” be her only hit. It’s interesting to note that happiness is less affecting, and perhaps less marketable, than the terror of consuming despair with a beat. Love songs run the risk of being nondescript if they’re not leveled by something extraordinary: joy or rage or jealousy. If you’re going to have a lyric like “We fuck for life, on and on and on,” you’ve got to have a sound that recreates those furtive afternoons or erases them altogether with shame and longing, the banality of the morning. Here, nothing happens and it’s not the kind of absence that turns into poetry.
[5]
Alex Ostroff: If you love me right, we fuck for life? That’s a mighty big if when dealing with perfect bodies and delicious fingertips. There’s something dark under the synths and the strut of “Talking Body”: “Swear it won’t take you long,” isn’t something I say to someone who I think is down for life, even if I’m down for whatever. It’s a phrase borne of my fear that once the night’s spell breaks, he’ll realize he’s out of my league and evaporate. I might bravely declare “Bodies: let’s use ’em up ’til every little piece is gone,” but once I’m all used up, your perfect body is usually on to the next one. The vague melancholy here suggests Tove knows this deep down. Even so, dancing to self-delusion doesn’t have the appeal it once did.
[6]
Mo Kim: “Habits (Stay High)” acknowledged the sadness rumbling beneath Tove Lo’s party-girl act; “Talking Body” feels sharper in comparison, more put-together. There are still hints of vulnerability here and there — the ascending three-note pattern in the chorus cuts through the haze around it like a scalpel — but the overall sound is one of somebody sobered up, preying on the same bodies that once preyed on her. Quietly determined, quietly moving.
[7]
Brad Shoup: What I find neat about this is the reference to crying, which would seem to imply palliative sex, but instead, she’s a believer in the redemptive eternal fuck. Drying one’s tears has, in pop, traditionally been a male promise. And here she is, shaking things off with a longstepping beat and the synths’ gloomy grandeur. Oh, and she gets to provide the “hey”s.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: The verses are fine, but this song is all about the chorus, which impacts like when Olivia Newton-John or Sheena Easton went all sexy. Even the phrase “now, if we’re talking body” smacks hard of 1983 (which is an awesome thing), and I love the twist of “if you love me right/we fuck for life” instead of the usual, which would have “love” and “fuck” switched, roughly. If this had been in Perfect it would’ve been a huge hit; it still might. Best thing Tove Lo’s done yet, by furlongs.
[7]
Andy Hutchins: There’s a point in “Talking Body” when Tove Lo sounds as if she is doing bad karaoke — the skyward rush of the last two lines of the hook, when the song really departs from the patience of the verses to spin up into the climax of “love me RI-I-IGHT/fuck for LI-I-IFE” is a bad mix of the worst of Robyn and Charli XCX (Would “We‘ll fuck for LI-I-IFE” have been worse than the weirdly pidgin-ish “We fuck for life”? I submit no!) and she’s undone by the chiming, tinny synths. With a voice already squarely in Miley Cyrus’s range, the effect is a little uncanny. But she’s still got a pen with a knack for melody and soft-loud-soft dynamics, and knows how to write short verses that lead into killer pre-hooks. And when the song ends, and the synth mess disappears, the hook is there and bare and stuck in my head. Given how American radio has been dominated by Meghan Trainor’s unbearable cute act, Sam Smith’s droning torch songs, and Taylor Comes To New York! for months, it’s a welcome intrusion.
[8]