We also heard you like piano…
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[10]
Thomas Inskeep: MK’s remix is fairly lovely, classy piano house. Unfortunately it’s of a song that’s nearly nonexistent, sung by a very annoying singer. So split the difference.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Somebody find a better setting for this house piano run.
[3]
Kat Stevens: I left work early today and thought I’d spend my extra hour browsing for shoes in London’s bustling Oxford Street. I don’t enjoy shopping, least of all in Pickpocket Central, but my smart-ish trainers are wearing through the sole and I have weird-shaped feet so can’t buy this shit off the internet. (I can’t technically get away with wearing trainers at work in the first place but they are definitely now too scruffy to avoid notice, and it’s still too warm to revert to winter boots.) Could I find anything without bows, flowers, bling or heels? Could I bollocks. I cast my eye over hundreds of shoes, none of which were worth risking putting my rucksack down in the bag-snatch zone in order to try any of them on for size. It didn’t help that I couldn’t decide if I wanted to buy Proper Smart Shoes or Replacement Smart Trainers, meaning I wandered round twice as many shops and lost all focus. What a waste of my precious hour! The only half-promising shoe discovery was in too-expensive-anyway Aldo, where there weren’t any staff around to find me a size 7. I gave them 30 seconds to materialise, during which I heard an odd remix of Slave To The Vibe by Aftershock, with extra piano on it. Reader, I am sure you will sympathise when I say the arbitrary time limit expired and I impatiently flung the shoe to the floor in disgust and marched out in a huff (NB I put the shoe back on the shelf politely). Naturally now I’ve got home it’s clear that the soundtrack to my shopping disaster wasn’t Slave To The Vibe by Aftershock at all, but this. I’m still cross, so I’m afraid I’ve marked it down two points.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: During a veritable “Waves”wave wave it’s ironic to have this shift from grainy groove to quick cuts and piano jabs, but a trend is a trend. Maybe next year when Rock Is Finally Back it’ll get another spin toward the discord Emma Louise describes, but until then neither her or it convince. There’s no panic or distress, just piano front and centre, which — update your spreadsheets — is still fine.
[7]
Crystal Leww: This is perfectly pleasant throughout, up until the point where the “my head is a jungle” kicks in all fluttery and with repetition. It’s at that point this track hits a point where you want to hear it on a dance floor filled with anonymous bodies.
[6]
Will Adams: My main gripe with throwback house is that producers insist on using the same cardboard samples from twenty years ago. But when they’re arranged as immaculately as they are on “My Head Is a Jungle,” I can turn a blind eye.
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Katherine St Asaph: My browser tells me I’d heard Emma Louise’s original “Jungle” before, researching some writeup or other: an emotive enough cut of low-pitched Ladyhawke shyness but in the head-as-jungle reckoning no “Big Stripey Lie.” Wankelmut submerged it in a swamp, rhythm guitar burbling up from nighttime muck, and that was also nice enough; but here is MK taking the best part of Louise’s original — the twitterpated percussion speed-up — and applying an obsessive piano thud and a juicer to make delirous ambivalent stream-of-consciousness crushing of her words: I’m complicated hearts beat moving you won’t get me out of trouble hearts complicated beat moving you won’t get me out of our hearts trouble beat moving, our hearts beat moving, our hearts beat moving. The bridge, in songwriting where complications and reservations go, is sloughed off; what’s left are flashes of words of a fantasy. Humans pour their feelings into the most rudimentary vessels; the other night I was thinking too hard again of a person who doesn’t bode well and casting around my library for the precise song for the precise feeling of “everyone else has flung herself down your cliff and crashed; seems fun, can I try?” — turned out to be that Ester Dean song whose ersatz writing was infamously dissected in The New Yorker, something no one could’ve been expected to imprint on, and yet. Similarly, as dance-construction, “Jungle”‘s tactics are banal IKEA steps; any emotional resonance is stuff I put there, and yet. I never know how these tracks play out on dance floors, but I know how they play out at 2 a.m. somewhere else, when your head’s fully reforested and tangled.
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