Lana Del Rey, Annie Lennox — who can say?
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Patrick St. Michel: “Running” and “110%” offered glimpses of Jessie Ware’s vocal capabilities, but those singles were triumphs of her voice being able to not get in the way of great production. Not so with “Wildest Moments” – even the little studio touches never come close to matching Ware’s all-eyes-on-me performance, those big drum beats creating even more space for her to work with. She brings confidence to a song about uncertainty. Hear the way she delivers a line like “What if we ruin it all?” or the cute way she describes whoever she’s addressing as “my wrecking ball.” This is some bold intimacy.
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Anthony Easton: Is this the mainstreaming of Lana Del Rey’s vocal tics or does the fact that she appeared on SNL mean that Lana Del Rey’s vocal tics are already mainstreamed? Also, Del Rey’s vocal tics aren’t that outside to begin with.
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Alfred Soto: Her brassy imperiousness calling to mind Annie Lennox, Shara Nelson, and Shirley Bassey, Jessie Ware inhabits the remember-when clichés like an English actress impersonating a person instead of “developing” a character. The clichés themselves though don’t transcend themselves. The drums resolutely won’t.
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Iain Mew: The drums and melody make it sound like The Joy Formidable’s “Whirring” with any wildness removed. It works in Jessie’s favour. If not as eerily weightless as “110%” her emotional remove boosts the wistfulness right up and makes for a gorgeous elegy to a fading image of something that never quite was and maybe never will be. Note that it’s always “we could be.”
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Jonathan Bogart: With every new Jessie Ware song, I’m torn between being disappointed that it’s not “Running” again (now a [10], and curses be upon the head of him who has said otherwise) and being absurdly, embarrassingly grateful that I get to swim around in the spaces around her voice for the space of a song. No dramatics, no (ugh) fireworks, everything cool and calm and temperature-controlled. I couldn’t live here, but it’s a privilege to visit.
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Will Adams: There’s something refreshing about a love song in which the narrator isn’t so sure about everything – the ebullient “we could be the greatest” tempered by the somber “we could be the worst of all.” But man, those booming drums are like Tedder’s Revenge, and Jessie’s feather-light vocals, while lovely, can’t help but get swallowed by it all.
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Katherine St Asaph: Emeli Sandé’s kind of love wastes away in a lonely studio apartment. In Jessie Ware’s wildest moments, she sounds like Ryan Tedder’s producing. No wonder there’s a new British invasion; with conditions these gloomy, who’d stay?
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Brad Shoup: If I can get hoary on your ass, “we could be the worst of all” of all recalls Lennon’s “can’t get no worse” addition to “Getting Better.” There’s not much wildness to be spotted, yeah, but as the cadences get quicker and the acoustic gets Edge-ier, the drumpound accumulates a kind of burrowing power. This one will sound best in a car, I’m sure.
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Jer Fairall: Graceful and poised, something like what Katy Perry’s previous two singles wanted to sound like and might have had they been composed and performed by actual human beings. Her mournful tone, the complete lack of the very sense of abandon suggested by the title, speaks to the “we could be the greatest”/”we could be the worst of all” duality of the lyric, sure, but I take the quiet reserve in her delivery to be more of an acknowledgement of intimacy than conflict. “From the outside everyone must be wondering why we tried,” she says not to us but to her subject, and these overheard shards of conversation are all that we on the outside are gonna get, and that is as it should be.
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