Johnno’s not in the video, oddly enough…
[Video][Website]
[6.43]
Alfred Soto: A couple of weeks ago I relistened to UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction, and the combination of music box tinkle and Legend’s midnight-of-the-soul-of-the-city angst is the sort of mannerism to which British electronic artists are extracted. Dated and predictable.
[5]
Martin Skidmore: I’m not sure that futuristic drivel (“Electronic world/Supersonic girl”) by a laid-back, old-fashioned vocalist like John Legend makes a good fit for a dubstep single. Then again, it’s a slow, smooth, polished production, so perhaps it is. It isn’t very dancey, nor very exciting.
[4]
Jer Fairall: Legend has never been that interesting of a singer to me, but why go to the trouble of acquiring such expensive talent for a song that requires such an indistinct vocal performance?
[4]
Anthony Easton: Glockenspiel! Grand dramatic statements constructed with electronic beats and hyper strung glockenspiels; don’t even care what the lyrics say, sort of obsessed with the immediacy of the whole track.
[8]
Alex Ostroff: Dubstep turns out to be surprisingly accommodating to John Legend’s gospel-inflected vocals (whose subtext is made explicit by the video’s Four ASBOs of the Apocalypse). Freed from his blandly pleasant persona and aura of competent professionalism, Legend assumes the mantle of male diva vocal house à la Azari & III. “Getting Nowhere” features a performance by turns disillusioned, plaintive, and hopeful. It’s like a danceable version of Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: I will listen to basically whatever Magnetic Man produces; in this case, taking what sounds like they rigged a bunch of Windows chimes up to one of those perpetual-wind devices and setting it to a beat like the Titans shuffling out of Tartarus. I’ll listen through whatever enigmatic bullshit John Legend foists on me (although the couplet “so magnetic / turn me on, I won’t forget it” suggests the foisting originated elsewhere), and I’ll listen through the point where the sonics really do seem to be going nowhere, as if they’re propelled solely by momentum. It doesn’t matter; this machine is calibrated so well it could keep on going forever.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: Maybe I’m overrating it by association with everything else I’m listening to lately, but the frictionless, glass-bubble production is exactly the kind of soothing I need right now, and John Legend doing his usual vaguely-inspirational smoothness doesn’t hurt.
[8]