Page 1 of 8

ariana grande - singles club

Each week on the FACT Singles Club, a selection of our writers work their way through the new music of the week gone by.

With the way individual tracks are now consumed, the idea of what constitutes a single has shifted dramatically in the last half a decade, and its for this reason that the songs reviewed across the next pages are a combination of 12″ vinyl releases, mixtape cuts, Soundcloud uploads and more. All are treated equally – well, most of the time. On the chopping block this week: Ariana Grande, Tessela, Diddy and Gerber, Lumidee and more.

Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 1/8)

Ariana Grande & Zedd – ‘Break Free’ 


John Twells:
I don’t care what anyone thinks, Zedd’s ‘Clarity’ was one of the best tracks of 2013, and ‘Break Free’ is a belter of a follow-up. Ariana Grande was already on my radar in a big way, and this is probably her best tune yet. Say what you like about poptimism, sometimes it’s just nice to hear a massive, chest puncher of an anthem – screw anyone who says different. (8)

Joe Muggs: This is no ‘Clarity’ but it’s still fun. It never fails to make me laugh that the world’s mainstream has been taken over by music that you’d expect to see radioactive-tanned Scousers shaking their extensions to 15 years ago. I’m at a massive loss, though, as to what it is that makes this bearable, pleasurable even, while e.g. the Tiësto album is such a hateful endurance test – I guess maybe it just boils down to the fact that this sounds like it was made by people who like dancing and like pop. (5)

Angus Finlayson: Ariana Grande has yet to ping my sonar and Zedd is just a dim seabeast-like shape lurking on the outer periphery, but this is great. There’s a doctoral thesis to be written on instances of  “this is the part when” – an expression by which life is drolly contrasted with the tidier narratives of popular culture – being re-inserted into mass cultural objects. It’s sort of like Carly Simon’s ‘Vain’ conceit for the Netflix generation. In any case, I look forward to this track brightening up my next biannual jaunt to H&M. Hopefully iTunes DJ will fade it out before the grotesque EDM coda. (8)

Chris Kelly: I’ll be honest: much of my Ariana Grande fandom is built upon the anticipation of another Disney/Nickelodeon starlet Breaking Bad (that, and she’s from my hometown). But even if she still can’t/won’t enunciate, this is pure pop summer anthem material — and I’d don’t even need to edit out Iggy Azealea or Big Sean! The ending is a bit abrupt, though. (7)

Joe Moynihan: Ha! The fuck is this bollocks. You know GFOTY had a new single out this week? This is the part where I ignore the tune you’ve given us to review and tell the readers to go listen to that instead. It’s unpredictable, vodka red bull-soaked, bonkers fun (9), while this tune is pony, come on have a word. (2)

Alex Macpherson: I’ve long made my peace with EDM’s place in the pop landscape, and Ariana ‘Lil Baby Mariah’ Grande will imminently make a fine superstar. Lyrically, she gets applause for leading the album intended to launch her into that stratosphere with two singles about the thrilling emancipation of dumping that motherfucker now (liberté, égalité, misandré forever). But sonically, Grande’s entered into a marriage of unsuitable opposites in which both parties have diluted themselves by misunderstanding what made them great before.

Grande’s giddiness worked in tandem with the breathlessness of Babyface’s ’90s throwbacks on her brilliant debut album, Yours Truly. Meanwhile, EDM is inherently trash, and is best when it embraces that: with Nicki Minaj declaiming about fucking whoever you want and fucking whoever you like, say, or Pitbull exhorting you to grab somebody sexy tell ’em HEY! I’d like to think that IRL, Ariana’s as capable of being a foul-mouthed party girl as any of us, but artistically, this kind of PG EDM doesn’t cut it in either direction; leave this shit to basics like Ellie Goulding. And who forgot to finish writing the hook? It starts off promisingly and ends up flailing around in search of somewhere to land. I still believe in Grande, but let that not be a metaphor for her career, please. (5)

5.8

11 11 (Diddy and Guy Gerber) – ‘My Heart’


John Twells:
Dreadfully dated and dull. Gerber’s balearic backdrop is forgettable (wasn’t it on the soundtrack to The Beach though, for real?), and Diddy’s “rap” is not only totally phoned in, but sounds as if it was recorded for something totally different and then de-boned and hacked up, awkwardly, to fit. Someone call Dirty Money, ASAP. (3)

Joe Muggs: Really, really like this track. It’s Slugrave! But then Diddy. Oh dear. (4)

Joe Moynihan: Backing this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this is the kind of tune that winds up the RA forum to the point where they reveal their true form as The League of Fuming Defenders against Andrew Ryce and the Illuminati’s Campaign Against Real Underground Techno™, and unleash their standard limit break of shouting frustrated nothings into the void that exists below the line. Secondly, it’s quite good. (7)

Chris Kelly: Just invert the press blurb for this one — “Haunting, ethereal” … “darker, richer, deeper soundscapes” … “not a project aimed at main-stages and masses, but outliers and after-hours” — and you’ve got my review. Last Train to Paris this is not. And oh, can anyone confirm/deny that it’s Diddy on vocals? (0)

Angus Finlayson: Proof that, even in this age of endless recombinance, it’s still possible to awkwardly crossbreed two things to form a third, exponentially stranger thing. Sadly, even a JBlakegone-V-neck vocoder pileup can’t elevate this from weird-weird to weird-good. (5)

Alex Macpherson: Diddy Dirty Money’s Last Train To Paris era may have run its course – a prelude mixtape, an impossibly brilliant concept album, a Valentine’s Day R&B rework of the same – but the trio, in continuing to use that aesthetic as a springboard, have demonstrated exactly why their axis was the finest in rap, dance, pop and R&B this decade. Dawn Richard struck off into the wilderness to fight medieval battles; Kalenna downed drinks and blasted Wu-Tang just to bare her heart; and Diddy? He’s still lost on the dancefloor. Yup, turns out Last Train To Paris‘s cornily perfect resolution, ‘Coming Home’, was a fake-out. ‘My Heart’ finds him embedded so deeply in club culture that he’s bringing minimal techno back.

Sonically, it’s Diddy’s straightest dance record since Lectro Black, his cavernous 2009 mix with Felix Da Housecat that trailed Last Train To Paris, though a hell of a lot more restrained than that flash, brash exercise in confidence; vocally, his rap verse (once again, a more compelling take on the emptiness of luxury than Kanye has ever done) is mixed down and increasingly fragmented before it gives way to a beseeching prayer: “I’m scared, I’m scared of my heart…” In turn, having run out of words, Diddy hands his soul over to the softest, saddest techno to carry on the narrative. (10)

4.8

Velour – ‘The Tower’


Angus Finlayson:
There is way too much Bashmore in this. By which I mean any Bashmore at all. (5)

Joe Moynihan: Putting out a single and calling it “erotically charged” is a bit dangerous when it’s entirely possible, probably likely, that the tune won’t be as erotic as the simply saying the word ‘velour’ out loud. This is great fun though. Could do without the vocal personally but the carbonated french house synths can stay. (6)

Chris Kelly: Hyetal and Julio Bashmore’s 2010 Night Slugs recedes from sight in the rearview. That’s the Velour I prefer: funky, playful, adventurous — not this soulless drivel that will have you yearning for Bashmore’s ‘Duccy’. (3)

Joe Muggs: ‘The Tower’ feels a bit fragmented, but it pushes all the right DJ Sneak-y buttons and in the hands of a DJ of sufficient skill it could quite feasibly sound like the greatest thing in the world. On its own though, it doesn’t quite stand up. The acid track on the other side is better, too. (7)

Alex Macpherson: If witch house had ever lived up to its genre name, it might have sounded a bit like this: a disembodied house diva holler recast as a distant howl, the religious possession of dance music underlined and looped. B-side ‘Plato’s Tower’ might be even better, though, kinetic and juddering and aimed straight at your hips. It’s strange to think that Velour started life four years ago as a mere side project; The Velvet Collection remains an untouchable high point for Julio Bashmore, Hyetal and Night Slugs, but the two producers are channelling their rawest energy into it these days. (8)

John Twells: Velour’s debut is still one of my favorite Night Slugs 12”s, but everything since then has failed to grab me in the same way. ‘The Tower’ sounds fantastic, but there’s something about it that just doesn’t excite me in any way whatsoever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (6)

5.8

Khotin – ‘Ghost Story’


John Twells:
It’s not the best track on office fave Hello World (that would be ‘Infinity Jam’) but ‘Ghost Story’ still a cracking slice of mushroom-munching house that thankfully stays an arm’s length away from usual ‘outsider’ tropes at all times. Who doesn’t love children’s voices, 909 rhythms and chiming tape-recorded synth melodies? (7)

Joe Moynihan: The album that this stems from is brilliant. Loads of subdued grooves from our inevitable future dystopia where, contrary to all my favourite cyberpunk movies, life is actually not all that different from the world we currently inhabit, except we’ve all by this point clocked that putting up with things is easier if you’re surrounded by loads of kawaii shit. House music for the Hello Kitty-branded microwave meal generation. Khotin saw me coming. (8)

Alex Macpherson: Inconsequential pootling, in a lovely, dazed, Sunday morning with the sun dappling through half-closed curtains kind of way. (7)

Joe Muggs: The rest of the album is too much self-consciously overdriven drum machine and clunky Larry Heard impersonations but this is just looooooovely. Sounds like Susumu Yokota when he’s on top of his game, which is always a nice thing to hear. (8)

Angus Finlayson: Subtract the straight-2-tape drum machine action from this track and it’s a perfectly nice bit of noodly synth pastoralism a la, I don’t know, Lucky Dragons. Add it back in and you’ve got a rather staid bedroom techno number, too muzzy for club use but seemingly content with the plodding foursquare forms of DJ tool convention. The no-man’s-land between dancefloor discipline and function-free experiment has, for the last couple of years, offered a pretty rich yield, but it needs to be approached with thought. It’s not that there’s anything bad about ‘Ghost Story’ per se, it just seems suited to zero existing contexts. And not in a good way. (6)

7.2

Tessela – ‘Rough 2’


Joe Muggs:
KABLAMMMMMM. (9)

Chris Kelly: Maybe now I can finally get my Rave In A Laser Tag Arena club night off the ground. (8)

Alex Macpherson: Squaring the circle of current UK bass with ’90s drum’n’bass (please god, let there be no revival) to wearying effect. Yeah, Untold’s ‘Anaconda’ was legitimately mind-opening back in 2009, but since then that snake’s mostly been eating its own tail for the subset of British dance based around various permutations of sparse percussion. Intricate snare patterns and interlocking rhythms are probably pretty clever if you can be arsed to parse them but it just sounds pointlessly fussy and extremely dry to me. Slapping that ~moody synth preset over the top just makes me roll my eyes. (3)

Joe Moynihan: Haha, this is the tune that has soundtracked me spilling next man’s bevvy and not apologising a few times. Sorry. Listening at home I think what I respect most about this tune is Tessela completely discarding the usual lighter-arousing signifiers that sidemen like to hear slapped on this sort of break. Instead he’s drawn for these sinister synths that sound like they were nabbed from a cursed copy of A Link To The Past that turns anyone who plays it into a rabbit. This year’s best example at sounding fresh whilst inducing just the right amount of nostalgia for past (or imagined) rushes. (9)

John Twells: This has been around for a while, and it still kicks you square in the nutsack months later. It sounds like a room full of gear having a booze and puke-smeared fistfight then fucking the pain away afterwards… I can support that. (9)

7.6

Lumidee feat. Bodega Bamz – ‘Mars’


John Twells:
This is an absolute mess, and I’m not sure if I love it or hate it. (5)

Alex Macpherson: 2014’s second brilliant summer jam, after Danity Kane’s ‘Lemonade’, to sample ‘Grindin’: one more makes a trend? And how appropriate that it’s the vehicle of resurrection for ’00s acts who never got the shine they deserved, both punching their way out of the r’n’b elephants’ graveyard to state: WE AIN’T DONE. Where Danity Kane wielded the crunching rhythm like weaponry on their foes, in Lumidee’s hands it becomes her heart beating too loudly and out of time in the presence of a crush. The bits of the beat that aren’t ‘Grindin’ sound like DJ Mustard remaking ‘On The Floor’, and indeed the way Lumidee employs imperiousness to cover her vulnerability is more J-Lo than the cooing innocent of ‘Never Leave You’. (9)

Joe Moynihan: Going in on this, I was expecting ‘Mars’ to be either a succinct, sweet Vine-spawning tribute to the Summer sounds of 2003 or the exact moment when I think “you know, maybe the ‘Grindin” crash doesn’t sound good on everything”. It’s neither of those things. It’s quite shit, yeah, but I’d totally fuck with it if it came on in like a leisure centre or something. Lumidee’s voice still got the 14-year-old me wanting to mix vodka with Capri Sun in parks and you know, maybe the ‘Grindin” crash just does sound good on anything. (5)

Joe Muggs: Want to love it, and it IS nice to listen to, but the moment it stops it’s like it was never there. (6)

Chris Kelly: Leave the ‘Grindin’ drums alone! This is the second song this year that has tried to turn that iconic beat into a DJ Mustard rip-off, and I’d rather listen to Danity Kane and Tyga than Lumidee and Bodega Bamz (which is saying something). (0)

5

Final scores:

Tessela – ‘Rough 2’ (7.6)
Khotin – ‘Ghost Story’ (7.2)
Velour – ‘The Tower’ (5.8)
Ariana Grande & Zedd ‘Break Free’ (5.8)
Lumidee feat. Bodega Bangz – ‘Mars’ (5)
11 11 (Diddy and Guy Gerber) – ‘My Heart’ (4.8)

Page 1 of 8
Latest

Latest



		
	
Share Tweet