5ingles

"Overjoyed"

Not a Stevie Wonder cover. Here at 5ingles HQ, we've been awaiting a follow-up to this Elephant 6 crew's 2001 debut for almost a decade now. However, there's a harder-than-before, bass-heavy edge to this teaser single that's got me worried they've forsaken the gentle, woozy whorls of psychedelia that fans fell in love with. But "Overjoyed" is a piece of a conceptual puzzle, and maybe it'll all gel and swell deliciously when Signal Morning hits the streets at last.

"Sir Reginald, I Presume"

Wow, was that a slide whistle? Danger Bees are the funky jazz-bop jokesters of L.A.'s Heard of Elephants collective, I suppose. Whether they're this scene's Grateful Dead-to-be or its Tortoise-in-waiting remains to be seen; the fluid organ work suggests the former, and that's no bad thing.

"Falling"

I'm not sure which fact is more surprising: that Brooke Hogan is a few albums into a serious music career, or that her present beau is a rapper who calls himself Stack$. "Falling" recalls '90s R&B fluff but feels more analogous to Jay-Z and Beyonce's "Déjà Vu," given its songbird-'n'-MC back-and-forth. This single feels more palatable than Paris Hilton's singles, but Hogan copping street lingo and her dude referencing Kevin Federline is straight WTF. "Who'd ever thought that this could happen?" Stack$ mutters as the song winds down, but something tells me that he's more awed at the prospect of becoming Hulk Hogan's son-in-law someday than at being Brooke's boo right now.

"D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)"

By slamming a growing sub-genre but absolving its chief instigators because they're his homies, Hova's trolling for beefs. But he sounds genuinely pissed off, which is why I'm starting to get psyched for The Blueprint 3 all over again.

"Fuck Every Girl"

Young Money Entertainment's hot spring single gets the Kells treatment, and it's a perfect libidinous match—though not editing out the various rappers so Autotune-coated zingers like "I got a dick and a half/So ladies don't argue" can shine by their lonesomes struck me as laziness on DJ Drama's part.