Parachute punk'd: locals get critical beatdown

Legendary New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones brutally laid the smackdown on Red Light's high-flying major-label Charlottesville pop-rockers Parachute August 15 via Twitter. But despite the depths of his disdain (he actually coined the phrase "MIT poop wizard" in their honor), he has just been trumped here by what essentially amounts to a music review SWAT team.

The Singles Jukebox, a blog which started as a column in the now-defunct online music mag Stylus, is a sort of roundup rodeo in which several prominent critics from publications like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone review current pop singles, leaving behind one short blurb apiece and an aggregate score.

On September 25, they began wrangling Parachute, whose "She Is Love" ends up scoring 2.23 out of 10, with the similarly legendary critic Chuck Eddy giving a 4, a tie for the highest individual score bestowed on the Charlottesville-based quintet.

Choice comments from the melee:

• "It’s like a greeting card threw up bubblewrapped Gavin DeGraw everywhere."
• "John Mayer without the redeeming sense of humor or the dirty little sense of guilt"
• "There’s far more wisdom about the give-and-take of relationships in R. Kelly"
• "Scraping the absolute bottom of the post Maroon 5/Five for Fighting/Matchbox 20 barrel, and it’s not like that one was exactly full of good stuff to begin with"
• "A valentine from a reluctant junkie pimp to his steadfast trick-turning girlfriend"
• "I really hope that some boy in Michigan gets a hand job after his junior prom after agreeing to slow dance to this, because there is no other reason for this emo bullsh*t to exist."

Turn to watch the wreckage if you must, but the villain-comeuppance finale from Tarantino's spectacular 2007 kitschfest Death Proof sums it up nicely.