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FOXING - HEARTBEATS [6.29] We go big...

Ian Mathers: I'm not sure why the rest of Nearer My God didn't really land for me, but honestly it's at least partly because I heard "Heartbeats" first. I responded so instantly and so strongly that I just can't get away from wanting the rest of Foxing's songs to sound like they're simultaneously deep under water and lost in space, I want them all to have strings and chanting and screaming, and whenever I try and get into them for what they are I just wind up playing this instead. [9]

Taylor Alatorre: Almost everything here is just teetering on the edge of greatness. The chorus drives home a simple, easily adaptable sentiment with intuitive gusto, but it doesn't point to any larger truth beyond itself, despite clearly wanting to. The orchestral bookends encourage a contemplative mindset and set the stage for the controlled demolition to follow, but there's no emotional string tying them to the oblique lyrics about the stubbornness of self-negation. The pulse-and-handclap percussion of the verses fits the title, but doesn't accentuate the vocals as well as it could. The one moment that qualifies as unmitigated greatness is the unexpected, haphazardly perfect buildup to the song's most crucial and best delivered line: "Pull that rat heart out of your chest/It doesn't mean anything to us now." [7]

Vikram Joseph: One of the most striking things about Foxing's Nearer My God is the way that moments of heart-stopping beauty or breathtaking intensity emerge from passages which at first seem murky, but with retrospect can only be seen as masterful builds of tension. On lead single "Slapstick," it's the moment when the guitars cut through like a searchlight, Conor Murphy yelps "I walk around with a head-glow!", and it genuinely feels like the ground has been ripped from under my feet and I'm plummeting through empty air. On "Heartbeats," it's that breathless, anti-gravity dream of a chorus apparating from the harrowed fog of the verses: a sweet existential escape, the moment when your flight ascends above the cloud layer after taking off on a soggy winter day. Admittedly, that chorus is "You are not in love, so stop playing along," but the word "love" is drawn out so far that it fills 90 per cent of the space; listening to Foxing, I'm suspended between a serrated nihilism and dizzy elation, and it feels vital. [8]

Edward Okulicz: How well this song works for you might depend on how you take to Conor Murphy's voice. My first impression was that I didn't like it, but that swirling hook of "you are not in loooooove" as the orchestration swells is one hell of a moment of release. There's really nowhere any song would be able to go from there, and so the song dropping to the barest bones after the second verse is a bunch of wasted seconds, but as far as half-finished dead-ends of pure emotion go, I'm impressed. [8]

Katherine St Asaph: A sumptuous, dramatic arrangement in search of a tolerable vocalist. [4]

Tim de Reuse: Halfway through my first listen, I had to check I didn't have another tab playing wind sounds or something in the background -- I then confirmed that the omnipresent whooshing noise is, in fact, a deliberate attempt at creating ambiance on the part of whoever produced this. The arrangement is so lavish that it's claustrophobic, feeding string flourishes through numbing reverb and pumping an airy drone in to smother every quiet moment. I'm so confounded by this mix that I don't have the energy to poke fun at the incomprehensibly theatrical vocals through extended metaphor. [2]

Thomas Inskeep: There's symphonic strings, there's a disco beat, there's annoyingly strained vocals, there's an actual build, there's live drums -- there's a lot of interesting parts that kind of add up to a good song. This might sound better in the context of an album? I wish there were a little more structure here, but it gets over. [6]

Alfred Soto: Foxing's album works best as an excerpted experience, where the scale of their overwroughtness turns the nearest competition into rubble. On "Heartbeats," Conor Murphy looks to Taana Gardner, Stacey Q, and the Knife in an effort to create a disco-tastic chorus, and it almost works. [7]

Iain Mew: This first time listening to Foxing properly my mind immediately went to Everything Everything. That band hasn't gone as lush with the strings or as grizzly with the vocals as "Heartbeats" does, but they've definitely used its twiddly guitar tone and the approach of stacking layers and layers and layers on to a musical Jenga tower of ungainly indie-funk is a familiar one. It's one I frequently love and Foxing achieve the same intense feeling of being buffeted by emotion and the inexplicable. [8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Musically speaking, I would've been content with Foxing making variations of "The Medic" for the rest of their career, but I appreciate how much growth they've shown since their debut. "Heartbeats" shows just that, and it's most striking for the dissonance present between Conor Murphy's whiny vocalizing and the orchestral instrumentation, the latter of which would sound less polished if employed by other emo bands of their ilk. They throw in a grooving drum beat that further disrupts the landscape, and the incongruence between these three elements creates an uneasy tension that aligns well with the lyrics. The song isn't egregious by any means, but it certainly feels less than the sum of its parts, like the band is trying to get by on the mere existence of these ideas. It's also hard to watch the music video and not view it as the overwrought emo dude's version of "Geyser." "Heartbeats" isn't dilettantish, but it comes close. [4]

Maxwell Cavaseno: No matter how densely you orchestrate your bridge, your mid-'00s indie jam of the week is nothing more and nothing less, bucko. [3]

Ryo Miyauchi: "Heartbeats" sounds like the resulting music heard while standing in the middle of echoes of different songs playing at a distance. The faint strings, synthesized drums, light scribbles of guitars: they all brush up against each other but barely materialize into anything solid. The vague sense of contact makes that chorus more punchy, for it's the most tangible and straightforward thing provided, including the contained lyrics. It strikes like a warning bell more than a light bulb going off, and its concision makes me want to hold it tight, especially because it's as slippery as any of the elusive sounds here, thanks to Conor Murphy's flailing vocals. Maybe a different emo punk band would let that chorus become the release it craves to become, but not Foxing. [6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Everything's unsteady here, from the Rachmaninoff sample that floats around the corroded rooms that Foxing builds to the threat-posed-as-anthem of the chorus. But it's a compelling unsteady, a shambling creature that draws you inexorably into its grasps. It's not the hookiest song on the record ("Gameshark" is the clear choice there), but it holds onto you with an undying energy that stays even after the song ends. [7]

Joshua Copperman: "Heartbeats," shouldn't work, and doesn't work, but that's why it works. That may sound like a backhanded, condescending compliment, but the band is fully aware that they're biting off more than they can chew (an expression Conor Murphy used first.) The members of Foxing must know that theoretically, none of this works together in the slightest; not the Rachmaninoff sample, not the muddy drum machine, not the time signature that no one can even count, the awkward transition to the chorus, not the bone-chilling histrionics of the bridge. Yet somehow, the lyrics hold this together and justify the enormous musical scope. The first verse feels like watching raw footage of someone contemplating death for the one moment of freedom between the bridge and the ground. It took me a while to understand the rest of the song because of how much that opening section haunted me, even as the first few lines use typography as depression metaphor ("The font was serif'd and tasteless/It was slanted and Latin to death") "Heartbeats" seems to depict an aftershock of a toxic relationship, and cutting someone off even when they're "begging forgiveness" from the gallows. Don't fall for it, screams Murphy: "Pull that rat heart out of your chest/it doesn't mean anything to us now." It's jarringly unsentimental, but there's plenty of senitment to counter those lines: it wouldn't be emo without a lyric like "your heart beats with us now" and a chorus like "you are not in loOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOve" to counter the intimacy. Inexplicably, the production winds up accentuating the urgency rather than taking away from the story, even during that bridge. Nearer My God is at its best when the band uses the studio to recreate their live energy instead of trying to replicate a live sound, and that's why "Heartbeats" succeeds. All the high-concept elements come together to first evoke a terror way beyond falling, then the way out. [9]

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