Canada: come for the socialized medicine, stay for the generic club hits.

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Anthony Easton: Indian culture in Toronto is blowing up, as it is in Vancouver, and provides some pretty amazing music. Bollywood North, Bhangra club nights, something called Desi Lesi’s which is like all of this pushed together with faggy house and what ever P!nk is doing this week. So I feel like I should personally apologise and tell you this is not the Indo-Canadian genius I know.
[4]

Alex Ostroff: Raghav intrigues me. Canada has a homegrown pop industry that exists by dint of legal requirements that all radio stations play 25% Canadian content, and it produces interesting (sometimes wonderful, and often terrible) music that usually fails to venture beyond the country’s borders. It’s odd, then, to discover a song breaking into the Canadian Top 40 in its tenth week on the charts, and THEN to discover that, in fact, its Indo-Canadian singer has had five Top 10 records in Britain nearly half a decade ago and that he’s also done a Hindi cover of Gyptian’s “Hold Yuh”. I’m not sure if his sudden native success is a result of more marketing dollars or just dumb luck, but I’d wager that “Fire”‘s deceptively simple charms have something to do with it. It starts off like any other “I Gotta Feeling” rip of the past few years, but the squiggly electronic breakdown is impossible to resist, and the first half of the chorus pulls back on the THUMPTHUMPTHUMP where other tracks would lean into mind-numbing pounding. Raghav informs us in the bridge that he’s paid his dues and done his time, pleading that we turn the heat up. Like most CanPop, this isn’t jaw-dropping, but he just seems so polite and hard-working and only half-convinced that he actually is on fire, that I’m rooting for this to keep slowly crawling up the charts and become the summer’s sleeper hit.
[6]

Doug Robertson: Just because you’ve written something that sounds like every other song in the Top 40, it doesn’t mean it actually deserves to be joining them there.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: About seven years ago, Raghav seemed to be in the UK top 20 constantly with a roster of songs with boring verses and fun choruses – still dig “Can’t Get Enough”. He’s still around plying his trade, and Jim Beanz, who produced this, has no standards, let alone subtlety or more than a couple of tricks he’ll employ on everything ever. This time the song is the same sort of generic declarations of being ON FIRE you’ve heard literally everywhere, but it comes into its own with a likable burst of energy after each chorus — the beats kick in, cheesy synths bounce into the mix and by the end the effect is rather enjoyable in bursts.
[7]

Alfred Soto: This time last year Scissor Sisters failed to set the charts alight with a similar exhortation. I thought we wanted to cool down during the summer.
[2]

Zach Lyon: “Fire” makes Raghav sound like an attempt at being the Canadian equivalent to Derulo/Cruz/Iyaz — singers who try their darnedest to mentally transport their listeners to “The Club,” and they try so hard that they’re willing to sacrifice any trace of one of those distracting “personality” things. Raghav gets the second part right but replaces “The Club” with “The Recording Studio,” wherein the listener will mentally observe some producers and engineers and mixers pressing buttons, changing levels, and mumbling notes to The Singer between takes. The mesmerizing grey walls turn out to be the most interesting part of the experience.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: You know you have a limp club song on your hands when not a single person in the world is ever going to squeal excitedly “OhmigodthisismyJAM” when it comes on at the club. It’s probably technically too early, but I’ll make that particular prophecy anyway.
[3]

Michaela Drapes: Hey, Raghav. Your single isn’t supposed to sound like a ham-fisted club remix before it’s actually been, you know, remixed. If better executed, the disco laser, auto-tuned harmonies, and random postpunk guitar thingy might’ve been charming. However, I seriously might hurt someone if I have to suffer through listening to this song ever again.
[0]

Katherine St Asaph: If you’re on fire and like being on fire, why does your track sound like you’re dancing amid a thousand sprinklers of glitter water? Why would you show off your “fire/higher” rhyme instead of tucking it into the reams of tinder that make up the rest of the track? And why does this all make “Fire” sound weirdly like a controlled burn, meant to trim the dance floor to a manageable size from the wildfire it could’ve been?
[5]

Pete Baran: Sort of the aural equivalent of reading a romance fiction, there are absolutely no surprises, but it’s transiently satisfying none the less. That said, the aural equivalent of her going weak at the knees and accepting the rugged janitor despite him being a bit of a dick is always going to be a bit disappointing.
[4]

Mallory O’Donnell: There was a time when everything didn’t sound like this. But I don’t remember it either, so here we have the first Canadindian slice of dull autotuned schlock that fits the narrow economic criteria of what constitutes a pop single in 2011. Please kill me before someone comes along and tells me that I’ve paid my dues. Because, dude, these dues… are doo-doo.
[2]

Jer Fairall: Yes, “fire” and “higher” do in fact rhyme.
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