In which one of our writers becomes a breakfast dish… now available at IHOP!
[Video][Website]
[3.75]
Anthony Easton: Natasha Bedingfield has a good to great voice, and a willingness to understand the rhetoric of whatever she is working with — I think the liquid quality of her performances makes her interesting, and it elevates this from the same fucking Rascal Flatts song that I have heard on country radio for, what, a decade now?
[5]
Kat Stevens: I will always heart TashBed as my vocally-talented-yet-still-super-awkward alter-ego; she’s as charming as ever and has put in a decent amount of hollering effort here (and luckily said hollering blends well with the other dude’s). The song itself is a bit trickier to love — the histrionics are a bit much for the stilted grown-up social awkwardness they’re singing about. The two of them are going to have to learn to keep those feelings well bottled up, otherwise their Friday night bridge club is going to quietly move to Tuesdays and not tell them.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: So much singing and so much straining, so many get!-to!-the!-punch! percussion, somehow so little drama.
[4]
Brad Shoup: Looks like Rascal Flatts found a setting on their musical blender below liquefy. It’s easy like Wednesday evening, which is fitting, as the Flatts are Nashville’s premier recording act comprised of youth pastors trying to look “relevant.” It’s a lurching 6/8 arrangement with delicate ivory-brushing, jeweler-handled guitar and those flyover harmonies, all in service of a denial-of-depression song so generic, so heavy-handed that even Lady Antebellum would blanch. In other words, it’s “Tears of a Clown,” sung by actual clowns.
[2]
Jonathan Bradley: This is some high quality goop handicapped by, well, basically the fact that it was created by Rascal Flatts. Gary LeVox’s schlubby everyman vocal isn’t rich or detailed enough to sell the central “Tracks of My Tears” conceit, but it succeeds despite itself. A whomping chorus will do that. Bedingfield, too, is out of place, and freighted with a baffling key change piled on halfway through her verse, but the American boy/English girl interplay inserts enough contrast into the delivery to make the characters seem as though they might be real people rather than figments of a factory writer’s imagination.
[7]
Alex Ostroff: TashBed was more convincing trying to pull off pop-punk. There’s something about the timbre of her voice or her pronunciation that doesn’t fit into a big pop-country ballad, even though she clearly has the pipes for it. It’s not the Britishness, as she rarely sounds British when singing. There’s just something… off.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: The song would have been one thing — ignorable fluff, a bunch of thoughtless and tiresome hollering about what could in the right hands make a great song, the ways in which our relationships are performed for one another, but just goes for thirty-second Tide commercial tropes instead — but the video, oh my God. It’s either high camp or the stupidest thing in the world, and since I don’t trust the Rascal Flatts guys to have a knowing bone in their body…
[1]
Alfred Soto: That syrup you’re pouring — you pour it on waffles, not Alfred Soto.
[2]