Everybody Have Fun Tonight (To Live and Die in L.A.)

The band's name in the title is both the most audacious and the most accurate thing about this record — this is a song about Wang Chung, by Wang Chung, that exists primarily to celebrate the act of Wang Chunging, which the song is happy to leave undefined. The synth production is classic mid-eighties sheen: clean, expensive-sounding, slightly fluorescent in its brightness, everything mixed to hit a specific frequency of euphoric surface pleasure. The hook operates as a communal instruction, a demand that whatever the listener is doing be replaced immediately with maximum enjoyment, and it delivers this instruction with such conviction that resistance feels almost rude. The vocal harmonies in the chorus create a kind of mob enthusiasm, the feeling that an entire crowd has already agreed to have a good time and you are late to the consensus. This exists at the intersection of new wave and pop-for-pop's-sake, a song with no particular ambition beyond the creation of a three-minute pleasure capsule, and it succeeds on exactly those terms. It belongs at the start of a night out, in the first hour of a party before anything complicated has happened, in any moment where the correct response to life is simply to go faster.