Hot & Not, Mid & Meh: Iona’s Weekly Tracks (16th Feb ‘24)
HOT
‘mr useless’ — Shygirl feat. SG Lewis: One of those club tracks that comes along now and again to remind you that a banger doesn’t need a big-name DJ to overproduce it into noisy oblivion — sometimes the simple fundamentals can take you all the way. This is so good, so silky, so sharp, so lean and perfectly calibrated, and so fun that I want to dance to it wherever and whenever I hear it.
‘Mood Swings’ — Little Simz: Fuck yes. Little Simz has been killing it for most of this decade and if this cut is any indication, ‘Drop 7’ will be her continuing to kill it all the harder. There’s a real debt to Faithless (shades of ‘Mass Destruction’) in the spoken word sections, a coiled intensity riding those filtered beats in the repeating lines and inthose “bubbly” (in the sense of building pressure) sound effects, until it all busts out into the explosive, aggro, and fantastic choruses. Black London to the core and brilliant for it.
‘Yeah Glo!’ — GloRilla: I love it. I love the call and response chorus (“YEAH GLO!”), I love the thick beat, I love the way she rhymes “parachute” with “embarrass you” and pulls it off it, I just fucking love it.
‘Sunday Service’ — Latto: This isn’t great, and that’s kinda why I love it; Latto’s flow is shaky at times and the boasts are a little dumb (“Jesus walked on water / I got ice boilin’ tho” — good for you, Latto?), but the beat’s strong and the energy’s high and you can hear delight in every line, so what’s not to love? Sometimes even the stuff that might be about to fly apart at the seams can still be great.
NOT
‘Dance Alone’ — Sia feat. Kylie Minogue: Dance-pop so dry it couldn’t fill a thimble, let alone a floor. Kylie fares a little better on a so-so guest spot, but Sia is so completely checked out she barely registers on her own track.
‘Talking / Once Again’ — ¥$ feat. North West: To be fair, ‘Once Again’ isn’t half bad — solid verses by Ty Dolla $ign and a good, almost touching sung outro by Kanye. Unfortunately, it’s been stapled to ‘Talking’, a badly-produced nothing of a track that sounds like a weak variant of Kids See Ghosts’ ‘Feel The Love’, with an awful, mega-distorted repeating sample choice and a (sad to say) not terribly gripping performance by North West. And hey, guess which half of the song made it on to the absolute disaster that is ‘VULTURES I’?
‘Revival’ — Brenn!: I was digging this at first — instrumentally it’s really solid pop-country that builds emotion carefully, gradually and effectively — but once I had all the lyrics laid out the mood curdled. Nominally, it’s trying for an ‘I miss you now we’ve broken up’ vibe, but the specificity in lines like “unlike you not everyone here holds an exit’ and ‘you’re northern, i’m southern and that’s how it’ll be / ’cause you left your home when you up and left me” paints a picture I don’t think Brenn! intended; of a bitter ex who gets maddeningly close to, but still falls short of, understanding that the other party in the relationship had a reason to leave. It’s not wrong to write lines like that — not every song can, or should, be purely positive self-reflection about oneself — but that doesn’t make them any less ugly and spiteful to listen to.
MIDS & MEHS
‘Deeper Well’ — Kacey Musgraves: A sweet little folk-country ditty with a gentle but insistent pep in its step, let down somewhat by the heavy and (to my ears) unnecessary layering on Musgraves’ otherwise lovely voice.
‘BLACK OPS’ — Kid Cudi feat. Denzel Curry: Better than a lot of the material on ‘INSANO’, that’s for sure, but still not even close to prime Cudi.
‘You Never Know’ — Iron & Wine: A lovely, gentle little tune with a pensive, breathy vocal performance, mostly carried off by a lot of delightful little details (“talkin’ to a wind chime”) in the lyrics.
‘Dreaming’ — T-Pain: I kinda adore this? It’s not exactly good — way too much of a throwback to the late 2000s chintz era of, as the man himself once put it, rappers ternt sangas (read: Usher wannabes), and the instrumentation is far too thin (that awful snare!) to help him reach the mood he’s going for. And yet, T-Pain is just straight-up loveable on one of the corniest love ballads I’ve heard since those days; so smooth, lotion itself would slide right off.
‘I LOOK GOOD!’ — JELEEL!: Not exactly bad, and a braggadocious asshole kinda vibe doesn’t not fit a rapper like JELEEL! given that he’s built like a mountain, but I prefer him when he’s full of joy (see last year’s ‘WHOA!’) and there’s just not a lot of joy to be found on this cut.
‘This Is Me… Now’ — Jennifer Lopez: First thought; did André 3000 produce this, perhaps in the same studio as he recorded ‘New Blue Sun’? Those lovely pan-pipes opening the track sound practically lifted from André’s 2023 curveball of a record. Sadly, despite some really strong lyrics on themes of self-worth and self-discovery, the song is pulling up, and then immediately dropping, too many ideas too quickly to really come together.
‘Bloodstream’ — Zolita: 90’s to the bone; this could’ve been a solid cut from one of the better Hole albums — not her best, but pretty sweet.
‘Forever’ — Noah Kahan: See, this is taking the piss. I’ve largely missed out on the Noah Kahan phenomenon even with those impressive numbers, but I won’t pretend my impressions weren’t coloured by realising this was the third release of his album ‘Stick Season’ in as many years. One wonders how much more deluxe an edition the same record can get, or how many more bites at the same apple Kahan can get away with. Elsewise, this is fine, I suppose; nothing Ed Sheeran wasn’t doing in the folk-pop-ballad realm with more passion decade ago, with even his cringey qualities being more interesting than this.
© Sam Iona Burgess, 2024
