Her hair looks nice in the video.
[Video][Website]
[5.14]
Brad Shoup: Sounds kind of like the Flack/Hathaway record, but if you swapped Donny out for a roomful of ghosts. That and similar attentions paid to the corners are due to Emeli Sandé, I assume. The transformation in which this song traffics is vague, but calculatingly so, to the point that I assumed the hoary I-made-it key change was inevitable. When she lays into “you look surprised,” that’s the exact moment I steeled myself for it. But no, the strings get Russian Romantic and Keys pulls off this amazing self-actualizing haughtiness. She’s never been great at vocal abandon, but she finds a tempered approach tinged with roughness. For lack of a better word, it’s real.
[6]
Anthony Easton: The lush piano through out this comes straight out of a cocktail bar, but is lusher, richer, and more studio fed–almost too loud for the vocals, which are less strident than the lyrics suggest that they might be. It is a fantastic little bit of pop pleasure to hear her sing the title as it curves around the instrumentation though.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: The ghostly echo trailing some of Keys’ words is a nice touch, and the outburst at the end justifies the slow build preceding it. The bulk of this, though, sounds pretty much the same from her.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: Alicia Keys really is mercurial: perpetually peppering a singles discography featuring some of the best songs of the 21st century (“No One,” “Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart”) with some of the most tepid, torpid and insipid (“Like You’ll Never See Me Again,” “Doesn’t Mean Anything”). In following “Girl On Fire” with “Brand New Me” she’s done it again, moving in one stroke from the sublimely ridiculous to the ridiculously sub-limp.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: The moment when the volume goes up and the song swells showcases a kind of gritty defiance in her voice, but the slappy beats behind it suggest containment, not freedom — it’s a too-short bang surrounded by a heck of a lot of whimper. Liberation and self-discovery aren’t intrisically interesting concepts to wax lyrical about, especially not when the ornamentation is by and large just a few trills and a little breathiness. The opening section which rhymes “Brand new kind of me” with “brand new kind of free” is so banal I don’t know how someone with Keys’ pride can sing it without being embarrassed.
[4]
Will Adams: I find that I either love or hate Alicia in her hoarser upper register. I haven’t decided yet where I fall on “Brand New Me,” but I’m edging towards love, if only because the high notes are buttressed by her warm mid-range. Unfortunately, form doesn’t follow function; a lyric so liberated should not sound so shackled by muted drums and shimmering echoes.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Guess she took her own advice and “grabbed on” to her “ego” (at least we didn’t get a Dusty Springfield cover). Understated by her standards, anchored by a simple piano arpeggio, she comes closer than any performance since 2005 to coming up with, if not a brand new her, then a brand new direction…until the pyrotechnics of the last third. If she genuinely wanted a brand new her, she should hire songwriting without insisting on credit.
[4]