Peaches is back, bursting with all the aggressive swagger we’ve come to expect from underground electro pop’s reigning renegade queen. Produced by Boyz Noize and XXXchange, “BURST!” is an adrenaline-fueled track that balances Peaches’ tough vocals—“I kill, I kill, I kill the other bitches / I’m the first one hit / I’m the burst it hit”—with a more melodious chorus. Wound up tight at some points with a minimal rhythmic pulse and some handclaps for good measure, it explodes into grinding, whining electro. Peaches remains a lady you don’t wanna fuck with!
So. Let’s talk about Christina Aguilera’s new single. First, some context: the public at large may have been too hard on Ms. Aguilera. As far as gay dance floor anthems go, “Not Myself Tonight” pretty much seemed like a homerun—but maybe that says more about the difference between what works in a gay club vs. what works everywhere else. Still, Bionic is pretty much considered a flop, right?
So here’s Christina, two years later, riding high on the success of The Voice. And yet, there’s this vague feeling in the cultural atmosphere that “Your Body” is kind of a target. It’s either stratospheric comeback or precipitous decline at this point, and whether or not it’s genuinely
more entertaining, a slippery slope always seems to be the people’s choice.
All that, then, is the baggage with which “Your Body” is saddled. And it seems particularly unfair, because while the song isn’t revolutionary or even particularly special, as pop songs go it’s fine! Hell, it’s fun. It’s as good as anything Rihanna or Katy Perry have been doing for the past few years, and it’s definitely more palatable than most of what Madonna’s trotted out from MDNA. But we fear that simply because “Your Body” doesn’t have whatever magic bullet it needs to propel it into the pop music stratosphere, it runs the risk of being at best ignored, and at
worst ridiculed. Which is a shame.
The Pet Shop Boys’ new single, “Leaving” is silky smooth, with all those piercing electronic and vocal edges worn away. Yet it still feels like it belongs to Pet Shop Boys’ 80s, that particularly gay, English, electronic sphere that they brought to the world at large.
Holy shit, there’s a lotta acid washed denim and white sneaks in Dragonette’s new video! It’s a deserved nod to the 80s; “Live in this City” is the kind of song that could have won over Jesse’s girl 25 years ago. In the video, the band wanders the streets of a seemingly normal town, magically turning their schlubby neighbors into…well, sluts. Somewhere, Beavis and Butthead are watching this video on their filthy animated couch and laughing. “Huhh-huh-huh! Thluths!”
Lefil
I don’t like Christina. She has that cocky bad bitch vibe.