Single Review: Max & Bianca – ‘Love Drunk’
2 min read
Love Drunk, the debut single by upcoming Australian pop duo Max & Bianca, is apparently only the third song the two have ever written together.
For a song with the word ‘drunk’ in its title, Love Drunk has a bit more substance than expected. Instead of being about getting plastered in the club, the track is about the intoxicating effects of love. However, this duet between boy and girl isn’t so deep that it can’t be played on the radio.
The production is nevertheless disposable and generic. The opening guitar strums are reminiscent of the intro to P!nk’s Raise Your Glass, and Max & Bianca’s voices are heavily processed and sanitized.
These pitfalls don’t detract on the strength of the songwriting. Love Drunk has an actual song structure, with verses, a pre-chorus that builds to the big chorus, hooks and a bridge. It also has a big ‘oh-oh, whoa, oh-oh’ earworm that sounds even better when followed by another wordless hook in the second chorus, which is a longer version of the first (this is one trademark of great pop songs).
Max & Bianca do sound great together, whether singing individually or together (with and without harmonising). By trading verses, they have set out to distinguish themselves from pop duos like Roxette that mainly rely on the vocals of (usually) the female vocalist.
Love Drunk shows the duo’s potential and meets its goal of making music to sing along to with the car windows down. Max & Bianca meanwhile should continue to aspire to reach the heights of those great male-female, singer-songwriter-producer pop duos such as Roxette and Eurythmics.
