Let’s see if she’s still Huge in France after this one, eh?
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[3.88]
Iain Mew: The children keep on singing and so does VV, leaving barely a gap in the song aside from for Chiddy’s, er, contribution. That’s not a good thing when the song forces her into being so squawky and lacking in the charm and poise of her previous singles.
[3]
Pete Baran: More use could have been made of the Ice Cream Truck. In an alternate world it’s a better track called “Stop, Children!”
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: This, o my fledglings, is why you must listen to songs multiple times before assigning scores. Had I rated this on first listen, I’d be doing jumping jacks. That MIDI-twee intro would set my skin a-tingle with nostalgia, the children’s chorus would charm and the relentless noise would match my relentless joy. I’d use the word “exuberance,” and when you read the blurb, you’d think I was still grinning myself silly. Many listens later, I am not grinning. I’m wondering how VV Brown and instrumentalists so perfectly captured the sensation of scooping out brains from your forehead with an awl, how Chiddy gets away with bellyaching about the kids and their fame and why I suddenly feel like a pissier Shari Lewis after the kids tug out her limbs and just before she throttles Charlie Horse.
[1]
Hazel Robinson: This has plenty of bombast but sounds too much like the hated (by me) “Hard Knock Life” to be worth more than a nod of acknowledgement. When are (any of) Chiddy Bang going to release a song not about how great childhood is?
[5]
Brad Shoup: There are few pleasures rarer than a determinedly gauche choon for the kids. Pandering, amusing, sure: but total undercut? That’s rare. That’s special. Battling more voices than Jeff Dunham on shrooms, Brown finally surrenders to an ice cream truck and a shouty choir that insists they’re actually singing. Chiddy shows up to pull up the fame ladder and tear up your referenda. If you wanted to take the piss out of the next generation — like, really scorch that young earth — you couldn’t cook up a better disinformation campaign than this. I always thought Jukeboxers who said “I don’t know whether to give this a 0 or 10” were full of shit, but.
[5]
Jer Fairall: Somewhere between one of The Go! Team’s skip-rope jams and the gleeful silliness of “Swagger Jagger,” this is so infectious that its only on repeat listens that I noticed the lack of a strong hook. It could have been a new national anthem, or at least a new “Tubthumping,” but it’ll have to settle for being merely charming and marvelous instead.
[7]
Alfred Soto: In honor of the late Pauline Kael, whose work many journals are celebrating this week, this excerpt: “This is a tribute to freshness that is so mechanically engineered and so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theatre…Wasn’t there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn’t want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn’t act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa’s party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage?”
[4]
Edward Okulicz: I don’t like the cut of her Jibbs.
[1]