I find music criticism to be some of the best criticism I’ve ever read. When done well, it never sounded like somebody explaining how something sounded, but how something was; how it felt, tasted, looked, smelled. Any sense can be described and not easily understood, so I figured why not rank soda flavors instead. Energy drinks do not count as soda, I do not acknowledge them on this list, get out of here with that shit. There will be no Kickstart, Game Fuel, Rise Energy, or Amp in this article so go elsewhere if you need your fix.
S Tier:
A teardrop of space-surf, shot from Neptune and disappeared behind the Taco Bell where the syrupy River Arno once crawled. Baja Blast had the heavens on their side; it is nectar from the gods of Olympus, perfection in a bottle. Poseidon himself created the oceans and seas on planet earth only to be made into the waves of Baja, only to blast them into the machines of the world thereafter. Comparing this to other sodas is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper. It is self-spun neon cyan, erupting like a seafoam volcano, quixotic in its nature. The periwinkle butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight see-through cup bled upward into the cobalt sky, only stopped by the cap on the bottle.
How this escaped the ethereal plane, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard’s cap, is beyond human comprehension. It tastes like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction. It’s the pure concept of a soda being destroyed and subsequently rebuilt as a perfect entity for our consumption and enjoyment. A spectral essence, a primal, brooding, stomping beverage that is somehow both slithery and springy at the same time. There is no questioning its flavor, tropical lime, because there it somehow doesn’t exist but is simultaneously effervescent, enthralling, and entrancing. Bubbling, vivacious, merry, lively, sparkling magnificence, Baja Blast is a marvelous masterpiece.
Pitch Black has had several different iterations, names, twists, turns, and even a sequel. But the similarities of all those Pitch Black versions contain the same fundamental truths: it’s a cauldron of riffs, dueling senses, doomy skittish dreams, aggression spilling into caveman mixtures, spiraling up through the sky, galloping madly to gain monk-like wisdom. Black grape, citrus, dark fruit, and a sense of what the French call “alerte noire”.
As the first drop touches your tongue, you’ll experience the following: panic rising in ludicrously fiddly spirits, breakneck pleasures, fretting moshpits, metal, underground, gnawing at fatuous fingers, the cusp of unrelenting upsized posture, an earthy crew, doubled up ingredients, a complex assault on the senses, rich polyrhythmic waves, and an unsurpassable bridge of stunning syrupy goodness.
Orange is both a color and a fruit, a flavor that can be distilled down to one simple word that rhymes with nothing. Evincing a maturity gained by bombastic interpretations of divine justice, Live Wire is a ghost out in the wilderness; it can be found, but only by those looking for it and those lucky enough to get it. The tangerine grooves, evoking lava and magma, a heavy prelude, furious exploding, cosmic atmosphere and foreboding phantasmagoria, psychedelic, fractured skull oozing the brains of funk and fusion.
It begins with steely citrus and ominous swirling pulp, then explodes into a rapid march with wildly eddying Dew pizazz and — for these Godzilla growlers — some startlingly melodic aftertastes. And it keeps exploding: a twin–guitar firestorm, dub tsunamis, and rapid-fire, on–a–dime rhythmic shifts, all churning beneath undertones that suggest a soul watching the apocalypse.
A Tier:
Code Red sounds like an alarming endeavor, but as the first major departure from classic Dew, this wound-up spring box of cherries, and has a distinct locked-in groove of refreshing fruit flavor. It skips and dives and wanders and chops around your mouth, but always has the same impact no matter how long its duration is. Code Red isn’t soft, or an easy sip, it’s the opposite; always in midtempo churn mode, lingering to rip the rug out from underneath you. It doesn’t delay the gratification, and instead uses a gigantic sunward-screaming rocket launch to gargle and fume and lurch its way to your stomach like a steamroller.
It’s not indulgent, it’s unleashing and blistering; there are no valleys, only peaks to Code Red, which does it best to maximize its cherry to leave a lasting impression. The name couldn’t be more apt, as its spinning arsenal of soupy quasi-jazz distortion and quick bursts, whips, juddering and soaring breathlessly to burn bright intensely for the entire day. The color and flavor of red couldn’t be more perfect for such a passionate, blistering, suffusing grime. It’s vein-popping, gurgly, almost nauseous in its whining, but harmonizes eerily deep within your soul and leaves a lasting impression.
If you decide to track down and ride this sweet lightning at a local KFC, prepare to have your expectations exceeded. Its peach and smooth honey flavor is actually a delight, as it erodes its uneasy conceit into a tractor beam of happiness, being vacuumed into the nothingness of your sad miserable existence. It clicks and thuds, revving and humming and pulsing and stuttering like a thunderstorm but with none of the negatives that come with such destruction in the skies. The flavors accumulate and stick in your mouth like morning eye crust. It flutters and sparks like a paradox, Dew is usually so cacophonous yet Sweet Lightning is tranquil.
The intrinsic dichotomy between the usually hard Dew variants and this version doesn’t stop then; it’s foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike. It’s an impossible, infinite oxymoron. But it will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior sodas clinging inside the fold of your gray matter at the end of the day.
Do the dew. Either with the first iteration, throwback, and full of real sugar, it matters not. The thunderous crunch, the lung-busting and bellowing demonic liquid remains a king among peons and philistines. Old school dew was once the mascot of an old prospect miner on the gold rush, his demonic vocodered screeching traveling across the astral plane. The green goo is an opus, conjuring alternative universes, punching above its weight class and progging heights unseen before. The harrowing sounds of its competitors hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis.
Dew fanatics are a bunch of doom–haunted, myth–obsessed, meat–and–potatoes badasses who have become the most joked about and memed people on the internet. They awed the underground with the classic, then grabbed the crown with the brutally psychedelic, ogre–hunting Code Red. It established them as a rare beast: a drink respected by diehards for its technical bonafides but also by the mainstream for its jump-cutting conceptualism and wild spin-offs. When you try it for the first time, white pearls of arena light will swim over your face, as a lazy disco light spills artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift cup. The metal skeleton of the sludge eats at your bones and the cobblestone laid beneath like acid ripping through particles at a molecular level.
If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain, you’ll embark on a mythical journey with Baja Flash. It might start out as a lark, but it quickly turns serious to become a delicate, whimsical melancholy sequel to its predecessor, Baja Blast. This summer’s spin-offs are a cameo-crammed blueprint of the original’s success; take tropical fruits and a refreshingly light hint of magic. The crash of the waves of coconut and pineapple create a painstaking pancultural pop junk-mining surprise, that is the Pina Colada taste you expect but more gravitational in its pull.
As the puppet master pulls the individual strings to this orchestra, his silent hand guides the taste buds to hallucinate and suddenly your mouth is on a beach. Its hidden strengths reveal themselves, in this sunny yellow concoction, as the elastic coaxing power takes center stage. Its laconic drawl lets the air out of the balloon, unspooling its climax and moody texture over its Hawaiian hooks. Baja Flash is a master of subtly shifting moods, intricately threaded allusions, often creating richly detailed collages that are miniature marvels. It’s not convoluted or strained, not forced or a copycat of the real thing, but a transitional effort that points towards a sunny day you once had long ago.
Voltage is exactly what it portends to be: electroshock, maya blue raspberry, ginseng and a dizzying energy to boot. It’s transcendence, ditching a vision of a fabled peak of more concocted conceptual worlds, envisions and fantasizes about a blizzard-condition soul searching quest upon a mountain. And on that peak, there’s a cannibalistic trial of sasquatch, elemental winds, rapid-fire jabs interweaved with elegantly gloomy streaks. It fills its taut, free-flowing triads with mathy gliding and whip-smart crescendos, thrashing bleak birdcalls, scale-riding dragon fire, dense fun-house mirrors, catchy hills culminating in nerves, all propped up to the ascension of a monolith.
The gnarled hyperspeed of Voltage has disorienting proportions, coffers, Hieronymous scales and canvases. It’s a terror, a vivid and slithering serpentine, as it pounds and congeals into an intrinsically harsh and offensive form of expression. It’s not pure drivel, but it’s close; swallowing sounds seldom resembling unquenchable thirst.
B Tier:
The level of fragility some sodas has it impeachable, but Major Melon is simply and purely what it says it is: watermelon soda. The layers are clear-toned, as the figures of the rines fold upon each other, and whisper in harmony above, as if singing to the fruit peering back at them from the skin of the backwood creek it once came from.
The rustic, secretive manner of its palette and the barely disturbed forest around them suggests that whatever ghosts inhabit these woods are only too happy to oblige a lullaby or two. Likewise, the epic melon gathers in faceless, mutated ghosts, oddly manipulated seeds notwithstanding, to hover over their dying fire in the visage of nothing better than the tops of trees and vines.
A blue icee turns sour, and becomes a legend in the process. This harsh winter bite, frosting over the rainy hue, is emblazed with the visage of a shark bursting through the ice. The word ‘lush’ doesn’t quite capture the fluttering whirls of cobalt blue and cool melon. It’s delicately and delightfully plucked to open a baroque wound you didn’t know enveloped its richness inside of you.
The incredibly simple melody of the flavor becomes a lump-in-the-throat meditation on man’s place in the universe through subtle pitch shifts and just the right mist of reverb. The slow fade-in on its color and its melon is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off.
What is a lemon-lime soda, but nothing more than a miserable pile of secrets? Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our purported idols and spit it back in mocking defiance. Ideally, the physics of record reviewing are as elegant as actual physics, with each piece speaking to the essence of its subject as deliberately and as appropriately as a real-world force reacting to an action. That’s what happens when lemon and lime and ice and dew collide together at full-speed, it fuses betwixt the electrons and cyber dust into a crisp splash of real citrus fruit.
I’ll admit it: this one slowly grew on me. Initially, the interesting color and concept intrigued my senses, but the conceit of a fruit punch is overdone and quite trite in 2021. For all the poking fun we do collectively, as a society, at Kool Aid and the like, there’s an inherent interest in combining fruits into one blend. It’s a flat idea externally, and internally lie some of the best crafted three-dimensional tastes this side of the rainbow. Baja Punch doesn’t pull the execution off with aplomb, but should be rewarded for its attempt at a synonymous classic.
The highlight, and lowlight, is orange: the liquid sells exactly what it shows, several fruits like cherry get overpowered by the orange in the mix. It’s a consortium of imagery that isn’t quite the sum of its parts, just a great idea in theory that comes out being a little too lopsided for me. But many others might disagree, and find the collaboration obscure and left-field enough that it carves out its own place in the canon while simultaneously honoring its better contemporaries. It’s a stab at targeting a less mature audience while knowing what true die hards are looking for.
C Tier:
In a tantalizing alternative history, this cherry pomegranate would set the world on fire. But in fact the opposite happened, it did not. For every thunderclap soda like a Baja Blast, there is a shimmering lighter B-side like Merry Mash-up. Average manifest, this Dew flavor hesitates instead of devastates, its impact is winnowed down to simply being an oddity. There’s been a quite deliberate lock and key on its potential, and years from now when they crack open the vaults of Dew history, this will not be the first picked up. It slyly underscores its own point, but can still carry along a good old hoary meal with its reputation intact.
50 fruity flavors, a carnival of tropicanics. Stars in the sky couldn’t add up to the amount of combination and collaboration in Liberty Brew. Liberty stands for so much more than this half-baked tacked on rarity, inundated with highfalutin ideas and nothing left to impact. You can’t quite place where this sits on your tongue, it’s tricky to compare it to a candy or other soda, and it ends up not being worth the mental exercise. Just mental gymnastics trying to figure this one out, where other more vivacious sodas sit readily accessible in digital eternity. The wry sort of kid-brother affection here is bog-standard sugar-filled sweet nothings. The storied history of the country, the United States, is more than a chippy logo on the label, and nothing here honors any single state in the union.
“Smooth citrus” is not what the white liquid screams. It instead whispers you’ll be in for a strange time indeed. A tepid mediocrity, encapsulated, in totality, in a bottle. How this won any contest put up against more audacious flavors is beyond me, and its reputation for positivity is more than a little confused. It’s a piece of mundane modernity, halted and trapped by any flavor next to it in a vending machine. The lilting hum here isn’t a promise to the future, nor a death sentence, it’s a one-way ticket to purgatory. A hapless soul inside, doomed to expire soundlessly in the intestines of some soulless corporate edifice. There isn’t a chiming lullaby to be found anywhere, just a line-blurring moment in time and a lost material that informs no one. This will be briefly lumped in between more daring success and more rousing failures.
2020 brought us ‘Fruit Candy Explosion’ (which is just Skittles melted down into a paste), and 2019 was ‘Candy Corn’ (which shouldn’t be white, nor sold to children/adults). The lessons learned here with these experimental misfires/mistakes is that curiosity did in fact kill the cat. The noxious fumes of a slightly spilled contaminant in a laboratory don’t inspire much confidence in 2021. The magical Mountain Dew formula can be twisted and contorted to become the sauce of “hey honey, try this, I can’t quite figure it out”, destined to be that one line of dialogue repeated endlessly for the rest of time. These two vanilla takes leer for more detective work, but aren’t the wild hits one would expect, and are plaintive reverent covers of ghosts Voo Dew cannot possibly catch. This is positionless, less than brilliant sequences in the calendar. Skip the autumnal visit to the store, and stick to more valedictory gestures.
D Tier:
It would be one thing if Diet Mountain Dew or Zero Sugar were slipped into the marketplace as a low-profile curiosity, akin to a ’90s era spoken word album by some alt-rocker screeching away in the background. Unfortunately, knowing that the majority of the classic flavor isn’t here means this mistake of a drink is not addled-as-hell but is instead disheartening. It stymies the pathos of the original, the spirit, all for the sake of being a bit better for you.
But even in that regard, diet soda disappoints. For all the hilarity that ensues when trying to remain healthier while ingesting a soft drink, diet Dew is a frustratingly noble failure. It’s exhaustingly tedious, has no interesting ideas, and its flavor is stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission without the aid of the all-important sugar. It tries like hell to excavate common ground with a real flavor, but it’s an ill-advised stylistic detour that has a habit of alienating fans.
The initial surprise of Dew-S-A is audacious to the extreme, but the small surprise of combining three separate flavors under the guise of a patriotic gimmick. The nationalist tint can’t save Dew-S-A from the much larger issue that lies directly at its core: the ‘red white and blue’ combined barely taste like they’re on the same planet, let alone from the same factory. It works neither as a powerful punch of Voltage, the impressionistic Code Red, or the monotone Whiteout.
It’s unresponsive to the mixture of the three, merely mushing them together into one full-torque thrashing of dreary nothingness. It’s frustrating that instead of creating a new flavor, they meandered past mediocrity straight to non-melodic verbosity. It’s so out of place, obtrusive to the taste buds it borders on parody. Maddening, repetitive, and the worst kind of heavy concept.
60% Code Red, 40% regular Dew, 100% unacceptable. There are stretches of time, while consuming this beverage meant for the holidays, that one asks themselves if Mountain Dew would be better off never combining flavors ever again. You question why they continue to do this charade, and the only thing that comes to mind is “too much inventory and too much curiosity for the perverse”. These icky concoctions create a wash of caustic anger over your mouth, and add to the tonal imbalance one would find mixing orange juice and toothpaste.
It’s egregious, stumbling, boilerplate, and grinds many gears quite loudly, which cannot be tolerated more than once. A sip and you’re simply done, no aspiration to scrutinize the landscape of flavors, nothing to milk from the derivative ebbs and flows of Code Red, the scores of pseudo-flavors that violate the sanctity of classic Dew. It’s a whole lot of noise, puerile, obsolete, anachronistic, flippant, deviant, lauding dubious originality, latching onto the aesthetic of too much and too little at the same time. It’s a clusterfuck of loathing, hypothetical pissing duel of two superior Dews, a murky yet forcefully apt display of aggression against soda as a concept.
The following flavors are impossible to find and try now. Some say none of these are real, they don’t exist, no one has had them ever, and they’re all a myth: Mountain Dew Spark, Distortion, Typhoon, X-Treme, Revolution, Sangrita Blast, Cyclone, the ’80s Japan-exclusive Aurora, Atomic Blue, Supernova, Goji Citrus Strawberry, Violet/Grape, Berry Monsoon, Spiked (Raspberry) Lemonade, Solar Flare, Electric Apple, Ultra Violet, Maui Blast/Burst, and Southern Shock.
F Tier:
Whatever this is, is pure confusion, if not outright despair. Remarkably, there is actually a light at the end of this dark, despairing tunnel: it’ll get you drunk and you can forget all about ordering one of these abominations! This is a complete monstrosity on every tangible and intangible level of its sad existence. From conception to the final horrifying product, execution by the Red Lobster workers, this idea should have stayed in the hapless cerebral cortex of whichever marketing executive it came from.
It’s such a glorious, mythic, supernova of a failure it’s impossible to have it happen again in this lifetime. This is essentially a piece of shock art that’s littered with vulgar uses of two good things that people should enjoy separately: Mountain Dew and alcohol.
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