"Choruses This Body-Builder Grotesque"

"Choruses, of course, have always required shifts in key and tempo, have always been central moments of excitement–but it seems we're witnessing an historic shift in the nature of the chorus, and, more strangely, in the nature of pop itself. For it seems with the 'Soar' that the writers and producers believe the chorus, and its expected affect–pop's overpowering and seduction of us–can be started as if one were flicking on a switch; the sudden, vertiginous leap of the pre-chorus to something like Katy Perry's 'Teenage Dream' seems designed to elicit a purely Pavlovian response, like an electroded corpse twitching when the current's switched on."

Daniel Barrow at The Quietus listens carefully to contemporary pop music.