Very quickly starting to challenge for most appearances by someone no one in the US will ever hear of…

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Katherine St Asaph: Emeli’s kind of love, it seems, is gloomy and self-lacerating, sort of a last resort; less at home at parties than shrouded in reverb, less suited to cheery songs than ones with moody pianos and crumbling percussion, with choirs and strings wailing up the minor scale. There are people who will completely go for this. Perhaps there should be more.
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Brad Shoup: Despite all the psychic damage I’ve incurred from Adele’s radio reign, I’ve culled a bit of personal cheer: her sixty-something weeks in the American consciousness may have primed us to think of the formalist R&B vocal as a normal approach. Sandé’s perspective here is a near-mirror of her partner’s in “Next to Me”: that Ben E. King love, able to withstand crumbling infrastructure. Emile “Anagram” Haynes’ kickdrip and echoing guitar monotone keeps things hushed and static, while Sandé declines to temper the chorus melody in any major way, which deposits the whole thing on a cliffside at the end. Simple, short, and wrenching. I think it could play here. 
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Alfred Soto: Until the maelstrom consumes her in the song’s last third, Sandé avoids masochism. Her voice, declamatory and certain, can’t do intimacy or introspection; it has to explain, like, all the time what makes her kind of love so unique
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Iain Mew: I’m no big fan of parties but still find Emeli’s repeated judgemental smugness on the issue really annoying. Almost as annoying as her attempts at competitive drama. Here, love only counts if you have things harder than anyone else, just like last time her man/God was great because he didn’t let her down like everyone else’s. The music is overexerted to match.
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Erick Bieritz: “Heaven” and “Daddy” had those delicious, propulsive break-heavy beats. “My Kind of Love” is on the other end of the spectrum, draped in strings that are a much more appropriate accompaniment for her voice, and counter-intuitively less interesting. It would be presumptive to sound an alarm just because she released a ballad, but it is by some measure the least interesting of her four singles.
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Kat Stevens: Aaaaaand I think we’ve found our Olympics sadface montage! Woe betide anyone who pulls a Derek Redmond this summer: miserable Emeli will soundtrack your pain.
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Alex Ostroff: Technically, it takes three times to make a trend but after Jessie Ware’s perfect Sade-esque “Running,” this track makes ‘UK dance divas do stately R&B’ a thing for me. “My Kind of Love” is more Melanie Fiona-gone-Mary J. Blige-gone-gospel, but “Heaven” made it clear that Emeli prefers to go showy when given the opportunity, and the choral support and strings give her the chance to really go for it. I’m anxious that the grandeur and majesty might render it Whitney levels of unapproachable or, worse, Celine levels of schmaltzy, but even at a distance I can’t help but be moved.  
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Edward Okulicz: Her album’s ballad-heavy and this is the best of the batch. Where the chorus to “Next to Me” felt like an afterthought or a formality, this one feels like climax and resolution; it feels as if it has purpose and meaning, and not just a meaning that could be understood by looking at the words on a denotative level. It is also beautifully sung and has impeccable atmosphere, just as you’d expect given her last few singles. It’s not quite the classic ballad that will conquer all continents, but it’ll run up enough spines to run up a lot of sales.
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