Chromeo’s Juice: bringing the heat of summer to the grimmest of months

TRACK OF THE WEEK

Chromeo
Juice

It makes no sense to release a jaunty, electro-funk mega-banger with a weirdly erotic range-and-shaved-legs-themed video in this, the most miserable winter month, but then why try to make sense of Chromeo? Dave 1 and P-Thugg, the big-man-little-man combo of most English football manager’s dreams, have spent 15 years carving out a niche as the premier “What if the 80s were still a thing?” act in the world. After Juice, the fifth album promises to be their best.

Keith Urban
Female

A bit torn on this, because it’s objectively bad in every possible way and sung by a sort of a-wizard-cursed-this-Ken-doll-to-live-for-ever-in-the-year-2000 person in the shape of Keith Urban, but also the song has very good intentions (a Weinstein-inspired missive about respecting women) and, if you don’t listen to the lyrics at all, sounds quite nice, I suppose. But then, ah, the chorus: “Sister, shoulder, daughter, lover.” There are four types of women, it says here. One of them is “shoulder”.

Harry Styles
Kiwi

Harry Styles could have gone a lot of ways, post-boyband, but I don’t think anyone quite anticipated “reviving the long-lost genre of circa-2003 Scuzz TV crossover hits”, which is what Kiwi is. There’s no way this song wasn’t originally recorded by a band called, like, Pink Dicks, who disbanded after a five-date tour to all take their deferred places at Nottingham Trent uni. Sorry, but there isn’t.

Miguel
Told You So

Miguel is very determined to be everyone alive’s sex music for the next 10 or 20 years, and, fair play, he’s doing a wonderful job of it so far. I figure this is Miguel’s fetish: knowing that at any given minute, a minimum of two people (maximum 10) are absolutely slamming to the honeyed sound of his voice. Imagine how much 2-in-1 massage lube is going to get rubbed into people’s thighs to the sound of this. Horrible.

Eminem ft Beyoncé
Walk on Water

Eminem’s done a song about not feeling good enough and living under the constant and intense pressure of his own success and how he fears he might fail and make a really bad song. So he’s hamstrung me here, because Walk on Water is appalling but I have to laud it and say it’s “brave” and “good” and “doesn’t waste the Beyoncé hook at all” because otherwise I’m part of the problem. You win this round, Eminem.