We might like her a tad…
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[7.14]
Brad Shoup: Unlike a specific chart-colonizing ballad you could quickly identify, “Lost & Found” isn’t craning to be heard. We’re the ones bending in. With such a skeletal arrangement, though, I can’t hear this as anything more than functional music, however masterful La Havas’ vocal control (and it’s remarkable).
[5]
Anthony Easton: All of those words that people use for late Streisand — magisterial, imperious, abstracted, plump — can be used to describe this. Though it talks about shame, and about being broken, and about the erotic power of confessional rhetoric, there is something so late-Streisand in this work; it’s so powerful and so blank that any attempt at confessional is lost and any message is delivered like Cleopatra on a Nile barge.
[8]
Iain Mew: To be honest, if it wasn’t for “Forget” being so amazing I may well have let “Lost & Found” pass me by. It’s so understated that it takes a while to show its power, much of which is in its control and in the space and silence between the barely living beats. Lianne takes something like “you broke me and taught me to truly hate myself” and makes it sound gorgeous and peaceful. Then eventually you actually think about it and realise that the song is all lost and no found and it’s devastating.
[8]
Alfred Soto: The kicker is the longing with which La Havas invests “Teach me how to be someone else.” She scrubs the masochism clean. The piano line and hi-hat hit the right levels of taste too. But I don’t want to overrate investment and taste. She runs out of tune after the first minute.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: I could pinpoint the precise word, the exact second, where “Lost & Found” should have made me tear up, but that never happened. The problem’s restraint. The piano line wants to unravel itself from the knots it’s bunched itself into, and Lianne’s voice bobs in and out of sadder registers, but neither’s permitted to, so this drifts where it should devastate.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: When they said the Emeli Sande album was full of ballads, I thought they’d mostly sound like this — delicately written, sung with the care of someone who loves their own craft and… tasteful to a fault. La Havas does them better; it’s a pretty small fault.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: Devastating and necessary.
[9]