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thesinglesjukebox · 1 year ago

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PINKPANTHERESS FT. ICE SPICE - BOY'S A LIAR PT. 2

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That's a wrap on Day 1! And we're just getting started...

[7.09]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The last time we talked about PinkPantheress I called her music "aural wallpaper" -- and I stand by that! It's just that "Boy's a liar" is exquisite aural wallpaper, the kind of endlessly loopable pop hit that has just enough variation to sound fresh even after most of a year's worth of overplay. Part of that comes from her guests. Ice Spice's verse is the most genuinely affecting she's ever been, and Mura Masa's assist on production varies the UK Garage-nostalgia formula just enough for it to work, bringing in faux-8-bit synth lines to cut through PinkPantheress' still-simple melodies. Yet the PinkPantheress of "Boy's a liar" is herself an artist evolved, one more driven towards actual sing-along hooks rather than just moods to ruminate in. The change works -- that chorus will be embedded in my head for the rest of my life, which I have to assume was the goal. [9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: PinkPantheress riffs on UK dance music in a way that's antithetical to why I was drawn to it -- her diaristic lyrics and hushed vocalizing subtly position the music as a singer-songwriter's work, steering any breakbeat or 2-step jitter away from maximalist dancefloor pleasures. Her latest album Heaven knows assuaged some of my skepticism: "True romance" is tasteful in its momentary adoption of jungle, "Feel complete" brings her work in conversation with turn-of-the-millennium Shibuya-kei, and "Ophelia" is a hefty conceptual gambit that could only work with a sound so diaphanous. Before all this, though, was "Boy's a liar Pt. 2." It was the first track that made me appreciate the sketch-like nature of her craft. The song hinges on Ice Spice's nimble maneuvering of the beat, whose harpsichord-like melody and chiptune blips place this sorrowful recounting of a shitty ex as a truly timeless phenomenon. Ice Spice arrives mid-confession to act as the supportive friend -- if it's not completely felt in the lyrics, then it's there in her playful yet acerbic tone. She provides necessary relief; PinkPantheress' "good enough" chants feel slightly more hopeful by the time the song ends, like she knows she'll come out the other end soon. [6]

Jonathan Bradley: Ice Spice lays down 16 frothy bars that feel like eight, yet everything about this track feels twice as insubstantial as it really is. PinkPantheress contributes a burble-chirrup that in pixelated patterns of toy piano and ringtone synth and a back-and-forth loop that sounds most like a digital fish blowing bubbles. Suitably, Ice Spice's vocabulary abstracts into a "duh-duh-duh" that she still manages to rhyme with "shouldn't have." [8]

Oliver Maier: Big year for these two. The "good enough/duhduhduh/should'nt've" three-piece is amazingly silly, the axis around which the song (and most of the memes it has produced) spins and a great distillation of what is appealing about Ice Spice as a rapper. Not much else jumps out, though. PinkPantheress has a good ear for feathery beats, but this one feels paper-thin, and the chiptune flourishes get grating quick. [4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: In which the value propositions of two emerging stars are perfectly merged. Effortlessly flexing and trashtalking, Ice Spice plays the foil to the cutesy but wounded and contemplative PinkPantheress. This is what shit talking a boy with a friend should sound like. [8]

Katherine St Asaph: Mura Masa called this single "borderline misandrist"; if so, that border is the size of a moat. The song isn't about boys as a group but one particular boy, whose crime isn't being a liar necessarily but being hypercritical. And "Boy's a Liar" isn't a breakup song so much as an epiphany: a celebration of the first tentative tendrils of renewed self-confidence. "You only want to hold me when I'm looking good enough" should not feel quietly radical, but after hearing "actually, beauty standards are primarily enforced by other women!" horseshit for seemingly decades, it does. Maybe that's why this diaphanous little single has gravitas beyond its weight. Or maybe it's just because I'm job hunting right now, and "Boy's a Liar" has been a great soundtrack for my (at time of writing) 194 autorejections. (damn) [9]

Michelle Myers: The original "Boy's a Liar" is two minutes of vibey perfection, but calling it a song feels like a reach. The addition of an ill-fitting verse from Ice Spice is a step in the wrong direction. [7]

Jackie Powell: Ice Spice's feature not only helps the song's flow, but it establishes the track as a feminist call to action. The verse that Ice Spice replaced on the original "Boy's a Liar" sounded out of place and it slowed down the tempo that PinkPantheress established in the hook and opening verse. Lyrically that verse was also weaker. Without Ice Spice, PinkPantheress continues to plead with her lover to stay. She asks what she should do without him. Ice Spice's verse in Pt. 2 specifically calls out the liar in question and places accountability. Pt. 2 transforms the song from more of a woe as me track into a song telling a story about someone who should just buzz off after lying. He's clearly not good eno-o-ough, good eno-o-ough. [7]

Alfred Soto: Rounded up a notch for Ice Spice's rap and the insidiousness of the tiny, tinny synth hook. As much as I appreciate a 2:15 pop single, "Boy's a Liar" needs ballast. [6]

Will Adams: The original was carbonated and pleasant, like the first sip of a seltzer whose flavor turns out to be quite nice. With Ice Spice, there's added dimension; she lets slip a hint of vulnerability ("I don't sleep enough without you") and a hell of a lot of charisma. The brief run-time will probably bother me less and less as time goes on. [6]

Crystal Leww: I heard every kind of edit of this on the dancefloor, this year and it didn't matter if it was a UK garage version, Jersey Club, or baile funk -- you could hear the girls of New York City rap along to every single bar in the Ice Spice verse. I think my favorite part is the moment of quiet, pleading pause in Ice Spice's "But I don't sleep enough without you." She's seemingly all New York bad bitch, I'm-Tougher-Than-You big balls energy up until this point but yeah, bad bitches need a little love, too. [8]

Aaron Bergstrom: Reads like someone spent a long time trying to explain the concept of self-doubt to Ice Spice and she didn't quite get it, but the ideological odd couple bit actually works pretty well. [6]

Brad Shoup: The remix rap feature is a delightful gamble. Maybe you're just getting the name you paid for: the personality, the ad-lib. If it's a collab, maybe you get a couple bars that nod at your theme. Ice Spice's feature is precisely designed to complement the track: smash-cutting between bravado and insecurity. At the very end -- where those contractual wrap-up bars tend to go -- PinkPantheress and Mura Masa drop the skittering dialtone so she can plead in second-person. It's pretty devastating! [7]

Nortey Dowuona: It's always a delight to hear the taunting song title out of PinkPantheress's honeycomb soprano cuz it comes after a deeply anguished and frustrated first verse in which she feels the wrenching despair of not being good enough for her to be loved, cared for, trusted. It stacks depressed and tired line after depressed and tired line until she throws up her hands, deciding to wash her hands of him, letting go of his stated feelings to tend to her own coalescing into a stone, which Ice Spice hurls at another unnamed him, until she briefly considers her spite, then admitting to herself she does still care, worse, consider his presence important to her life. But "don't like sneaky shit that you do." [10]

Alex Ostroff: I'm still a little lukewarm on the concept of PinkPantheress as a pop star. The idea of the UK Garage revival actually topping the US charts this time around is something I'm 300% in favour of happening, but when niche scenes have their crossover moment I usually want the artists to really make a serious play for taking over the centre of culture and release songs that give us their unique take on Pop Music. (To be fair, this is likely because I am now An Old who missing the TRL era when all charting music seemed to exist in the same universe, whereas the charts in 2023 seem more like a way of ranking the relative popularity of different niche music scenes that remain hermetically sealed off from one another.) Too often for me, PinkPantheress' songs -- even after Boy's a liar" -- don't push beyond the slight UK garage-influenced TikTok bops she started out making. Ironically, this Pt. 2 with Ice Spice (which now feels like an early success from a previous era of her career) is one of the few times when her promise feels entirely fulfilled -- dragging Ice Spice in from the parallel universe of New York drill and putting her in a new context of chiptune bleep-bloops and PinkPantheress' vocals pivoting from wistful to joyous. That said, if the UK Garage revival crossover actually takes over the charts in 2024, I humbly request that we get more songs with gloss and big choruses and big emotions. [8]

Taylor Alatorre: Perfect timing aside, a key reason why "Pt. 2" took off the way it did is that Ice Spice displays an intuitive grasp of what this extended dance mix of a ringtone is really about: not middle-fingers-up misandry, but the torments of an ongoing fixation. PinkPantheress flits between the present and past tenses like she's reading from a jumbled diary entry, but amidst all her self-protective cooing, the line that lands the hardest is "you're not looking at me, boy," which is really more of a suggestion for improvement than a burning of bridges. So it's entirely fitting that Ice Spice end her characteristically efficient verse with an uncharacteristic airing of regret: "I don't sleep enough without you, and I don't eat enough without you." Nothing groundbreaking for the top 40, but it's these seamless transitions between expressions of superiority and vulnerability that have kept "Boy's a liar" from a lifetime sentence in the social media buzz bin. [6]

Tara Hillegeist: It's not that I'm against a song being useful as a TikTok soundbite, much less predisposed to think an artist who has primarily existed in that format cannot be interesting outside it, but... damn. If you set this against the original, to say nothing of "Mosquito" or even Ice Spice's own "Deli"... it's tempting to condescend in all good faith and write off the rehashtagged gestures as some attempt at a victory lap, maybe, but if this is the sound of #winning, it's awful perfunctory against either of their best, if not outright insulting to both. Preemptively remixing a perfectly good piece of Carly Rae-&B like "Boy's a liar" into nothing more than a half-rasped TikTok-ready clip reel, to say nothing of a guest verse that tries for above-it-all styling and lands on slumming-it-all tiresome -- from Ice Spice, an artist with more personality than panache to begin with -- is a gesture beneath the ability of any performer and flattering to none. But yesterday's leftovers will suit tomorrow's fancams just fine, won't they, so it hardly matters if there's hardly any marrow left on these bones, does it? [4]

Andrew Karpan: One wonders what the future holds for the seminal record of 2023, a charismatic bounce of emotional longing that was seemingly heard everywhere but that I can't imagine ever wanting to hear again. [7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Pillowy, lightweight, more notable for Ice Spice's continued ascendance than PinkPantheress. One of these artists gets their lines coloured in and it's not the British gal. [7]

Ian Mathers: This is great, but I'm still holding out for us to review Pt. 3 where it's just the "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" mashup, which has pretty much replaced this one in my earworms' songbook. [8]

Leah Isobel: A fax machine beeps incessantly in the American Embassy in London. A horde of 22-year old secretaries, outfitted in earth-toned Juicy Couture, jewel-bright nails click-clacking on the cracked screens of their iPhones, wait with bated breath as the message comes through. Urgent meeting with the Ambassador requested, it reads. Serious matter: the boy's a liar. Before the fax is even finished, Ice Spice is in the car, her driver careening through the city on the wrong side of the road. She mutters a few tentative thoughts into her voice memos: "He never drops his location, like..." Ambassador Spice arrives at Prime Minister Pantheress' office to find that news crews are already present, ready to capture a meeting of historic import, with implications international. The duo's regal bearing -- shaped by a lifetime of political service -- never falters, and their smiles never seem false. They are each truly beloved of their people. But they can never undo what has already been done: they cannot make the boy tell the truth. The flow of information has sped up over time, hastened by shimmering tentacles of fiber optics snaking under the Atlantic, heralded by jingly ringtones and text alert sounds, but it's never fast enough. Regret and grief attend every belated realization, every decision made, every path not taken. In the US and UK, millions of citizens watch their representatives come to an unprecedented agreement, one that future generations will look back on and think, "That could have been worse." The relieved masses, content to know that the truth has finally been revealed, hum and sway in agreement: "Good enough-ough-ough." [8]

Rachel Saywitz: sorry can't properly blurb this one, too busy shaking ass [7]

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#pinkpantheress #ice spice #music #music reviews #music writing #pop music #writing #the singles jukebox #Youtube

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thesinglesjukebox · 3 months ago

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SHAWN MENDES - "WHY WHY WHY"

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First Sabrina, now Shawn... we just need one more a triple-repeated title song to get a trend piece going...

[4.40]

Iain Mew: Shawn aims soft and tries to bring out the anguish and cyclical hopelessness in small moments. The musical stomp has other ideas, stomping out subtlety without bringing anything worth replacing it with. The resultant sense of aimless momentum leaves it sounding like a festival EDM track with all of its drops missing. [3]

Jeffrey Brister: On the one hand, it is a dated stomp-clap folk single with gang vocals and a hefty dollop reverb in the chorus; with nary a strummed guitar figure or slide flourish or mandolin accent out of place. On the other hand, this sounds really REALLY good. The worst thing I could say about this song is that it’s unmemorable, and it will fade into the swirling morass of competent-if-not-incredible folk songs that sit at the bottom of my mind, and will eventually get it confused with something else years later. But in this moment? Hey, pretty good. [6]

Nortey Dowuona: Mike Sabath can apparently work magic. I mean, he can lay down some firm, surprisingly sturdy but unambitious drums that allow Chris Thile on mandolin, Kevin Barry on lap steel guitar, Eddie Barry on guitar, Shawn himself on guitar with Scott Harris on background vocals to fill up the mix with all the angst and unalloyed joy that come with finding one's footing after years of grasping around in the dark for your parents to protect you, for your lover to return to you, for the small, imaginary bundle who you're convinced is crying out for you to hold them. Then you remember they're not imaginary. You wonder why you thought that. Then you get up and hold your infant son until you fall asleep instead. Mike then has to worry about maybe lowering the bass to let the lap steel sound better but makes sure to not disturb you or the baby. [8]

Michael Hong: The comparisons to Man of the Woods have been unavoidable, but "Isn't That Enough" sounds closer to the alt-country of Waxahatchee than anything by Justin Timberlake. Pleasant enough if a bit repetitive, but as "Why Why Why" attempts to kick up the dust into something anthemic, it sounds more like a deflated version of Avicii's "Wake Me Up." [3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A perfect choice for listeners who found Benson Boone and Noah Kahan to be too aggressive. [2]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Sexless Ed Sheeran-ass Zoloft-ass fake deep pop music. [2]

Ian Mathers: Is it weird that this feels post-Iron & Wine to me? Something to do with the guitar tone and how it and the vocals are layered. It's pleasant enough, and the idea of post-teen pop Sam Beam makes me smile. Congratulations, you've justified your existence for another day! [6]

Taylor Alatorre: An emulsified soup of folky signifiers, "Why Why Why" achieves pathos of a sort -- not from the feelings described within it, but from the singer's need to transmute those feelings into rustic coffeehouse wallpaper. The once and future teen idol is mandated after a certain age to reveal more of himself, his true self, but only within well-defined limits: no to Big Star's Third, yes to "Garden Party." Or "Story of My Life," if we're being realistic here. The big reveal of "Why Why Why," that of deferred fatherhood, is given its requisite four bars in the limelight, then is quickly blotted out by the oncoming rush of billowy acoustic chords and twangy guitar stabs. This may be for the better, given Mendes's earnest belief in the mind-blowing lyrical power of the father-mother juxtaposition. Best to let the sound engineers do the real talking here; that coiled spring of rapid-fire strumming that sews up the aforementioned verse has replay value of its own. [5]

Jonathan Bradley: The best thing about this fibrous Shawn Mendes strum is how it inadvertently demonstrates the talent someone like Ed Sheeran or Noah Kahan has. They could make "Why Why Why," and a lot of time they functionally do. And that would sell, and people who want earnest and modestly rousing folk songs, which are a perfectly reasonable thing to want -- 12 years later, I'm still willing to defend "Ho Hey" -- would be pleased to cue it up on their playlists. But it takes skill to create an "A Team" or a "Stick Season," the versions of this sound that involve more craft and finesse than necessary. I don't think Mendes is capable of elevating his compositions to that level but, hey, at least he's capable of not sinking them to Lewis Capaldi depths. [4]

Katherine St. Asaph: Javiera Mena isn't supposed to sound like the Lumineers, but Shawn Mendes isn't not. The sound of basking blissfully in low expectations. [5]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#shawn mendes #music #writing #music writing #music reviews #music criticism #the singles jukebox #Youtube

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