Send "JJ " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 In the parade of 2010 holiday releases, jj's was among the most anticipated. In late November, the pop polymaths gave away single "Let Go" and promised to leave a free, new mixtape beneath the tree on Christmas Eve. And there it was, glistening on the Sincerely Yours website when the 24th came: A download link, well worth the wait. Kills is a true mixtape in both senses of the word. First, like the American rap tapes they seem to love (they've toyed with a lot of non-mixtape material as well as R&B covers in the past), much of this outing finds Elin Kastlander laying her vaporous vocals over other people's samples. It's all very tongue-and-cheek but at its core, Kills also plays like the kind of tape one fan/nerd might give as a gift, but with a twist. These are songs and samples and scraps of melody they clearly loved enough to share.jj boast a peerless melodic sensibility, and on this tape they're at once disorienting and exhilarating. You may even LOL every now and then. Because there's a lot of fun to be found in hearing, say, the hydraulicized pluck of Dr. Dre's "Still D.R.E." slice through Kastlander's goofy, weed-heavy, Weezy-saluting whispers on opener "Still". Or in "Die Tonight", a Frankenstein of a track that opens with Kastlander lifting lines from Robyn's "Hang With Me" before vaulting into a dance-pop floor banger sewn together with a sample from Taio Cruz's "Dynamite". Though underrated, stretches of n° 3 did sound as though they had been left incomplete or drained of all the color that made its predecessor so vibrant. Even when smoked out or slowed down, Kills still teems with energy and both Kastlander and Joakim Benon, chameleons that they are, blend into snippets of song just as well as they shift gears between genres....full text |
| Sputnikmusic |
| Has anybody exemplified the failure of hype quite like jj? Just a few months after their debut LP dropped, making considerable waves and igniting a great deal of buzz, Joakim Benon and Elin Kastlander revealed their identities and released their sophomore album, a dreary affair that took everything that made jj no. 2 so charming and replaced it with solipsistic navel-gazing. The backlash that ensued was severe, with many dubbing no. 3 a total failure, and it acutely displayed the ruthless ephemerality of Internet-driven music discovery. In retrospect, it seems almost as if the band was fully aware of the impending criticism, with "My Life" repeating, over and over, "What the hell am I doing right?" With Kills, jj's new mixtape, it seems as if the duo's despondency has been abandoned in favor of a much more buoyant disposition; the record opens with Kastlander harmonizing with herself before singing, "I got summer on my mind." That's more like it. A straightforward hip-hop beat drops in, and Kastlander continues to sweetly sing "we go and get buzzed, get drunk, get crunk, get fucked up". There's a playfulness to the way jj take the conventions of pop music and flip them on their heads - "Still" is ostensibly a hip-hop track, but Kastlander's aforementioned delivery is too innocuous to have bluster, too knowing to be completely naïve. It's this balance, this inherent tension in such deceptively calm music, that jj's best tracks depend on. When combined with a Taio Cruz beat, Kanye West's immortal line "Know that motherfucker, well, what you gon' do now? Whatever I wanna do, gosh, it's cool now!" isn't boastful so much as uninhibitedly joyful. Such combinations are found throughout Kills, and they are mostly successful, suggesting that further experiments with sample-based music could prove fruitful for the duo. When they do falter, it's usually a result of the music feeling too obvious or easy; the prominent usage of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" in "Kill You" doesn't work as well as it should, nor does the chanting from Kanye West's "POWER" on penultimate track "Boom". But then there's a song like "New Work", which pairs a cut-up "Empire State of Mind" backing track with lines like "I gotta go to work/and hurry home" and "Oh misery a place in me" - a far cry from the chest-thumping bombast of Jay-Z's original verses. No effort is made to hide the source of the sample, yet the music sounds utterly fresh. You could argue that the title of the song is a cheap and unfunny joke - you wouldn't necessarily be wrong - but the sentiment captures the urban condition in an appealing direct way....full text |
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