The Singles Jukebox

Jakwob, if you’re reading… is this really you?

[Video][Website]
[4.29]

Will Adams: I can’t help thinking that someone infiltrated the Jukebox’s system and is using Jakwob’s name to promote his own set of half-baked dubstep monstrosities available for free download on his Soundcloud profile. It won’t work for several reasons. For one, Jakwob is much better than this.
[2]

Brad Shoup: Our robot overlords at Billboard have declared “Too Close” a “dubstep-inflected power ballad,” which is clearly insane. (Technically, it’s a Diplo-infected psychographic.) This is the real deal, a wubbing little music box loaded with ponderous pronouncements that begin “these are”.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The solo is gorgeous, pure liquid accompaniment for this mild stomper. 
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: The moody beat, with its high-definition separation of elements, begs for an equally dynamic vocal and lyric, but all it gets is more moping.
[4]

Iain Mew: The vocals add nothing, but the wobbles are wobbles as sad wobbles should be, and they combine with the piano and the music box chipsets to graceful effect.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: The opening is lush and dramatic, and the chorus wears its obvious sonic tricks (big multi-tracked moping, mild wobbling) with beaming pride and it’s weirdly uplifting. Between that, you’ve got the biggest dead air verses imaginable; not dramatic, just whiny. An instrumental of this would be worth at least another 2 points.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Depth of emotion or ambition is is often coded with a piano carving out space in the landscape, like a glacier through a valley if it works, of like a pebble in the bathtub when it doesn’t. This is the latter. 
[3]

no blergs » Monday, November 19th, 2012 7:02 pm

“Indie rock, math rock, dance-punk.” How inauspicious.

[Video][Website]
[5.57]

Anthony Easton: The percussion on this is better than it has any right to be, and the vocals glide through some pretty competent guitar playing. It is also almost ambitious — not in the sense of novelty, but in the sense of being loud and bombastic in a way that suggests they know both their instruments and history. Plus, I love how they say “space.”
[9]

Alfred Soto: If neither their name nor song title inspire confidence, the boogie-metal churn does. 
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Sometimes I wish that modern interlocking-parts-and-whiny-singer indie bands would go for the punch and roar of the alt-rock of my youth. Then I hear them try.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: Things looked bleak when the first line on “Inhaler” was the cliché-tastic “sticks and stones/may break my bones,” but even I didn’t expect Foals to define “creating tension” – something they’ve done very well in the past – as “sorta sway back and forth until the chorus, and then scream a little.”
[3]

Brad Shoup: They’ve got a playful, echoing groove going. Lead singer Yannis Philippakis’ vocals have the same thin languor as Poor Old Lu’s Scott Hunter. Combine those and you’ve got something between Muse (eh) and AWOLNATION (yay). I’d be surprised if it’s not soundtracking first-person shooter advertisements by the end of the year.
[6]

Will Adams: Wish it went off on a tangent from the post-chorus. The verses don’t have enough bump to make it danceable, and the lyrics are clunky — they throw sticks and stones in the first line, for God’s sake — but that post-chorus! Crunchy guitar stabs overlaid with vocals knowingly echoing on “space.” It’s a wonderful moment, as if the song is finally coming unhinged, but self-consciousness creeps in and the energy is reined in.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: If it wants to funk, the bass and guitars are more than halfway there, the guitars are trying hard and the vocals are nowhere near it. That is not to say that even the vocals don’t have their own appeal, it’s just that they don’t have the same inventiveness and propulsion that the rest has. But their gruff growling is effective lashing at the word “space” and harmless elsewhere, and the math-rock chug of the pre-chorus is plenty compelling. It’s schlocky but efficient.
[7]

no blergs » Monday, November 19th, 2012 10:04 am

At the Jukebox, we keep celebrating Hallowe’en all the way up to Thanksgiving…

[Video][Website]
[5.83]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s not that you’re forbidden from using that ticking-clock intro. It’s just that I’ll be cross whenever “Hung Up” doesn’t follow.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: AKB48 are the most popular music group in Japan right now, and that makes them inescapable. They are all over TV, on all the magazine covers at 7-11, who they have a Christmas tie-in with, and in many ads on the trains. Most importantly, their music seems to always be playing somewhere, and I used to not like this because I wasn’t a fan of their hyper-chipper, vocally overwhelming pop. Then Halloween single “Uza” dropped, and suddenly I’m excited to hear AKB on my morning commute They’ve shifted away from unrelenting pep in favor of something darker, “Uza” opening with a wall of witch-house-aping synths before blasting off into something that’s uptempo but unsettling. A few vocal samples flash by, and in the song’s best touch the singing gets glazed with a little Auto-Tune, which gives the two-dozen voices a creepy feel that’s never been present in their singles before.  Even the lyrics seem self-aware for once — “uza” translates to “how annoying,” and that seems aimed at all the people here in Japan who heap hate on AKB48 like they are a terrorist organization. This is the best song AKB48 have released to date, and I am thrilled to hear it in public, which happens a lot.  
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: After what seems like months of reading about its creepiness and effectiveness, I can’t help feeling let down that it just sounds like AKB48.
[4]

Will Adams: This is the first AKB48 song I’ve listened to, and I must admit that the concept behind the group has flown far over my head. My classically trained pop mind has trouble accepting a pop figure that doesn’t — or, in AKB48′s case, can’t – have a defined persona. But perhaps I need more time to discover how the megagroup structure informs a song like “Uza.” As for the song itself, it’s just trance. Really ugly and really noisy trance. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
[7]

Brad Shoup: Overwhelming, but in a different way. The giant, gloomy synth streaks beg — from where I sit, at least — for a more gauche vocal attack. I dig the baroque programming touches, the out-of-place hip-house interjections. The mood is insistent, the text is desperately single-minded; God help you if you’re in the wrong club in the wrong state.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The aural overkill is a mixing board problem: vocals pitched at the same key, with synths to match.
[3]

1 blerg » Saturday, November 17th, 2012 1:21 am

And same old shit…

[Video][Website]
[3.29]

Will Adams: Two months would have been too late for a “Stereo Love” rewrite, but two years? The music mimics the original well, but the lyrics are a downgrade; replacing Vika Jigulina’s emo nonsense for Massari’s insipid reawakening bullshit. Inessential.
[3]

Ramzi Awn: I’d like to be able to rep for my Lebanese heritage, but Massari’s voice does about as much for the genre as auto-tune could do for Heidi Montag. “Brand New Day” is a veritable cutting room floor for all mediocre dance tracks from the last decade of sound.    
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: That’s definitely a prechorus with “habibi,” which is Arabic, but this definitely sounds like a worse “Danza Kuduro,” which is not Arabic, or like a worse “Stereo Love,” which is not kuduro. I blame Thomas Friedman.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Sure, the little post-chorus snippets of what I assume are supposed to be gestures to his Lebanese heritage are worth two points.
[2]

Anthony Easton: The last minute of this, especially the surf-breaking-on-shore ending, is sunbaked and lurid like the best of Miami, but the rest of it is sort of not present – almost in a superficial way, like he is saving all his energy. 
[5]

Alfred Soto: The tenor voices in the chorus have the right yearning quality; the rest projects the benign anonymity that one expects from Marriott pool bar bands.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Tremulous vocals trying to sell me… an accordion, I think.
[3]

2 blergs » Friday, November 16th, 2012 8:44 pm

A better question, Misha: What do we think of you?

[Video][Website]
[4.57]

Katherine St Asaph: Oh, honey. Leona’s producers aren’t gonna return your calls. They barely return hers.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Schmaltz with a strong voice, although she doesn’t get to do anything with it until a discernible rhythm comes in on the “somebody, anybody” bridge.
[5]

Alfred Soto: She can’t wait to drop all that simmering and get to the belting, and, as if on cue, we notice there’s no song.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: “Home Run” worked because it was anything but the sort of look-at-me-belt songs one typically associated with reality singing contests. That song packed in great details both sonic and vocally. “Do You Think Of Me” doesn’t do either, opting instead for uninspired music that serves just as a backdrop for Misha B to show off her singing. Which sounds nice, but doesn’t make up for the lack of anything else of interest.
[4]

Anthony Easton: This is the great Taylor Swift song that Swift does not have the technical skills to complete, though Misha lacks the talent for small biographical details. Working together, they would be unstoppable. 
[6]

Will Adams: The club thump and trance pianos lack imagination, but Misha B’s performance is really impressive. Her delivery of the title, in particular, nails the vulnerable narcissism implied by the question, powering through the chorus chants behind ot.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The sentence “you’re my somebody” is quite resistant to injections of inspiration. Punchy percussion and high-range piano make this a good driving song, I’m sure. Just keep your eyes open.
[5]

no blergs » Friday, November 16th, 2012 9:26 am

From Venezuela, it’s a guy who probably wouldn’t mind comparisons to Anglophone indie rock…

[Video][Website]
[6.17]

Iain Forrester: Reminds me of “Sex on Fire”, without the sex, or the fire. Or Stereophonics’ “Dakota”, which that is basically a description of, but this is even more so. I don’t mean that as a negative! Hajis builds the new-wavey riffs up and ties them into intricate patterns with synths, and lets his voice just glide over the top of them. The results are very pretty and quite cheering.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: This reminds me quite a bit of Stereophonic’s “Dakota,” except where that Welsh group blew the chorus up to cinematic size, Ulises Hadjis always holds something back during “Donde Va.” Instead of wasting the big moment right away, this song lets it bubble under the entire time. It makes “Donde Va” a good listen for nearly four minutes instead of just one.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: The oscillator and the lock-groove rhythms are lovely; too bad he’s such a drip.
[4]

Will Adams: His voice never rises above a murmur, even in the cathartic vocalizing at the end. Even more jarring is that all of this takes place in front of such a propulsive backing (those galloping woodblock hits only quicken the pace). The stark contrast between narrator and music is surprisingly moving.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Not bad; it’s got the propulsion of a much more obvious alt-rocker with a mope-mouthed vocal approach that gets cut with jumps into higher registers. Definitely made for the closing credits rather than the title sequence.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: If “soft rock” didn’t mean “adult contemporary,” it might mean this: propulsive but gentle, every note like a sunlit mirage. Also like a mirage, it disappears from memory within seconds.
[6]

no blergs » Thursday, November 15th, 2012 7:28 pm

From Cuba, a singer-songwriter who could live down comparisons to Dave Matthews…

[Video][Myspace]
[4.50]

Jonathan Bogart: Kudos for the anti-domestic violence message, and I always appreciate hearing some memory of Andalusian vocalizing in modern Latin American music, but also, snooze.
[3]

Iain Forrester: The music is boringly pleasant, but his voice is just too piercing to ever relax and let it wash over, so listening to the combination for four minutes becomes a test of barely engaged endurance. 
[2]

Patrick St. Michel: For such a sparse song, this is compelling beyond the heavy theme. Elain boasts a powerful voice, while “Sin Pasaje de Regreso”‘s percussion sounds just slightly off, a touch that makes it all the more intriguing.
[6]

Zach Lyon: The verses sound like the boring parts of every acoustic nu-metal anthem, but his high register promenading achieves a brightness of its own, perhaps only made special in contrast to the rest of it.
[5]

Brad Shoup: The acoustic chording had me in “Don’t Cry” mind; the fretless bass put this over. I hear something childlike in his upper register, something at once mournful and non-comprehending. It’s all a bit of a hash — I can’t tell if the extra beat halfway through is intentional or intentionally allowed — but weird things can cause good cries.
[7]

Ramzi Awn: Elain’s voice helps illuminate a tough sound to pull off, and the simplicity of the arrangement is welcome enough. Overall, “Sin Pasaje de Regreso” achieves a level of production that is admittedly corny but mixed well.  
[4]

no blergs » Thursday, November 15th, 2012 2:06 pm

From Argentina (yes, again!), a former model and ex of Gustavo Cerati, who might be best described as Argentina’s Bono…

[Video][Myspace]
[4.29]

Anthony Easton: As innocuous, efficient, and competent as a TV sitcom theme. Extra point for the hand-claps.
[6]

Brad Shoup: It sounds all like capturing a flaccid feeling — specifically, the feeling of wanting to upgrade to slightly out-of-date Apple smartphones — but those po-faced guitar slides are neat enough to demand some kind of showcase.
[4]

Will Adams: My mind has linked this sort of lilting folk-pop – glockenspiel, there must be glockenspiel! – to commercials for home improvement products so much that listening to “Irreal” makes me smell Febreze. Deborah’s more expressive than Colbie Callait, though, so there’s that!
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: If I had actually managed to retain more vocabulary from my high school Spanish classes, “Irreal” might have been a bit more exciting to me. Just listening to the audio, I heard a bouncy song lacking any real hook, a too-relaxed track similar to Rosario Ortega’s “El Pozo” from earlier this week. Then I watched the video and, as Deborah De Corral smashed stuff up, realized I should check the lyrics out. Putting my faith in Google Translate, I found out “Irreal” pulls the old happy-music-not-so-happy-words trick, featuring lines like “I hope you can not sleep or think” and “I would kill you, I would erase you.” Had I heard this naturally, I probably would have reacted more positively to the song. Instead, this revelation was more like a pleasant surprise after I’d grown bored of the music itself.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: I wish there was more of the gleeful destructiveness of the video in the music, rather than (or in addition to) those comfortable bassoon burps. I guess that’s what the run-on-sentence rush of the chorus was supposed to achieve?
[5]

Iain Forrester: I am never going to like something which reminds me this much, in its lazy bloodless swing, of Olly Murs.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Her sob doesn’t sit well against those handclaps and horn swells.
[4]

no blergs » Thursday, November 15th, 2012 10:05 am

And from Pará, in the north of Brazil, she’s the voice of tecnobrega!

[Video][Website]
[6.86]

Jonathan Bogart: Like a “C30, C60, C90 Go!” for 3G-enabled Lusophone downloaders, it rocks the chorus “I’m sampling you, I’m stealing from you.” The hyperactive music agrees, hustling through everything from one-drop Kingston skank to countrified Colombian cumbia, with synths juddering and pinging all around and Gaby at the center winking and declaiming and striking mocking poses. The whole thing is a self-parodic burlesque — Xirley Xarque (pronounced Shirley Shark) is Amarantos’ Sasha Fierce-like alter ego, with the outrageous behavior (“coffee strained through panties, to seduce him” goes one repeated line) and the scuzzy, cobbled-together music that make for the kind of superb camp that can cross all cultural boundaries. She’s as much comedian as she is musician, though: the last joke of the video is that it ends with an over-the-top anti-piracy announcement featuring a disapproving Jesus Christ.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Tell No Doubt that this is the way to record cyberskank.
[6]

Iain Forrester: We haven’t had computer noise this bracing since Invy Da Truth. Oof. Bolting it onto creaky synths and almost skiffle beats is a move of bold genius, as Amarantos seems well aware from her confidently outsized performance. She’s practically laughing with pleasure at her own audacity by the end of it, and I’m going right along with her. 
[9]

Patrick St. Michel: During this Latin Grammy week, my favorite artists have been the ones finding a happy median between traditional sounds and futuristic bursts. “Xirley” is my favorite song from this special installment of the Jukebox, because the music swings between old and new, all while Gaby Amarantos refuses to flinch over these changes. A little Internet research tells me she’s been doing this since 1995, her flair over this type of hybrid song well earned. It seems unfair to throw this up against all the other songs nominated in this category — they all sound like young artists trying to carve out an identity. Amarantos sounds like she has hers locked down on “Xirley.”
[9]

Anthony Easton: I know nothing about this, but the horns are some of the most skilled and most gorgeous things in recent memory, and the chorus is just as exciting.
[8]

Will Adams: It’s impressive when a track can properly balance authentic instruments with synthetic ones. It’s even more impressive when they can trade places without missing a beat.
[6]

Brad Shoup: There’s something grating about this. As soon as the chopped accordion approximation quits, the bassy fartflowers bloom. The whole experience is not unlike listening to the credits of a fourth-rate spy caper.
[2]

1 blerg » Thursday, November 15th, 2012 7:00 am

From Buenos Aires, it’s the baby of the singing, acting, composing, and directing Ortega family…

[Video][Website]
[4.71]

Jonathan Bogart: Neither the plinky-plonk instrumentation, the breathy delivery, nor the tweegasm video does anything to disabuse the unsympathetic listener of the certainty that she’s essentially a Southern Cone version of Zooey Deschanel’s character from New Girl. Lucky I’m sympathetic, this once.
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: This is a little too easy-going and twee overall, pleasant but nothing more.  It does feature one great sound, though, in those tiny bits of percussion that go off right before the chorus.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Substituting cadence for catchiness makes a tasteless sonic dessert.
[2]

Will Adams: Adding marimbas to a Regina Spektor song won’t hurt, but it won’t help.
[5]

Sabina Tang: Pleasantly unremarkable exercise in International Tweecore. Grammies-wise, expect this to split a voting bloc with the Deborah de Corral track. (If I’m dismissive out of proportion to the numerical score, it’s because I once loved this stuff enough to ove