Each week, ipromiseyoumedia’s Songs of the Week column seems at nice new tunes from the final seven days and analyzes notable releases. Discover our new favorites and extra on our Spotify Prime Songs playlist, and for different nice songs from rising artists, take a look at our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, we attempt to parse out if Woman Gaga and Bruno Mars’ new collaborative monitor “Die with a Smile” is definitely good.
Is Woman Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die with a Smile” Good?
Truthfully, It’s Fairly Good!
Bruno Mars has at all times been the throwback showman, and he actually reached the apex of his nostalgia-core soul alter-ego with Silk Sonic, his collaborative undertaking with Anderson. Paak. His final three albums, An Night with Silk Sonic, 24K Magic, and Unorthodox Jukebox, have been so intent on residing prior to now that it genuinely appears too late for Mars to reverse course and make one thing that feels modern — to not point out “Uptown Funk,” the seismic hit that confirmed his standing as the final word nostalgia crooner.
On “Die with a Smile,” Mars’ first single for the reason that Silk Sonic days three years in the past, he doesn’t commerce his basic, natural Smeezingtons pop for dance beats and a Chromatica-esque sheen. He’s additionally not belting just like the cocaine-addled, funkadelic sideman he performed on An Night with Silk Sonic. As an alternative, Mars reveals up and does what he does finest: easy, satisfying love ballads.
For a lot of (like my colleague Mary), this merely isn’t adequate — particularly in comparison with Woman Gaga’s wildly ranging catalog and chameleonic persona. However he sounds emphatic and towering on “Die with a Smile.” It’s onerous to not imagine him when he croons, “I’m gonna love you each night time prefer it’s the final night time,” over the drums pounding and a reverb-ridden electrical guitar washing about.
Woman Gaga, predictably, blends gorgeously with Mars’ crystal clear topline, and her vocal charisma is on par together with her duet accomplice by way of and thru. In spite of everything, Gaga isn’t any stranger to a throwback sound, and might seamlessly shift roles and eras like she’s flipping by way of a vogue catalog. As we noticed in Silk Sonic, Mars thrives when he has somebody to work off of in real-time — whereas Gaga doesn’t convey the identical sort of cheeky perspective that .Paak supplied, she does have powerhouse belts and delectable harmonies.
However the query stays: Is that this a step ahead for each artists? Or is it yet one more pointless retreading of the previous, a mining of the bygone period of energy duets a la “Infinite Love,” offending nobody however satisfying solely a choose few? I’m hesitant to say the latter, if just for the crisp, anthemic manufacturing of “Die with a Smile,” which is immaculately blended and simply plain fairly. Whereas not a leap, it’s a collaboration that lives as much as its star-studded bundle. — Paolo Ragusa