…and into her Jukebox debut.
[Video][Website]
[4.90]
Scott Mildenhall: Sia writing for Céline Dion (and with Del Rey embellishments) makes perfect sense. It was bound to happen some time — the only person she’s yet to try and make a hit for is Denise Welch — and while rhyming “coma” with “over” won’t go down as one of her finest moments, it’s a moment nonetheless. The lyrics aren’t all-important anyway. Most of it is just wailing. At one point the “l” is even dropped from “life” completely: “Uh-uh-uh-I.” Céline spinning, falling through a rip in the space-time continuum caused by the power of her voice alone. “Uh-uh-uh-I.” “Uh-uh-uh-I.” It’s very catchy.
[7]
Jer Fairall: You know we’ve gotten far too cool as a culture when in 2013 Céline Dion is performing a song written by David Guetta’s go-to female vocalist over what sounds like an instrumental track designed for Florence Welch. That the melody favours grace over vocal pyrotechnics is initially a problem; you can hear her boredom on the (rather nice) introductory verse, and her comfort when the chorus lets her get back to her usual vowel-mauling. Me, I’m mostly fascinated by the squiggly, almost discordant guitar solo that breaks out during the outro. It’s hardly No Age, of course, but it still might the most abrasive thing that I’ve ever heard on a Céline Dion track that isn’t her voice.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Sia will go down as the only person in history whose credits include not only the likes of David Guetta and Rihanna but Sarah Brightman and now Céline Dion. The stylistic concessions — and no, the guitar’s not one of them, this sort of thing has never been averse — are mostly toward the former. Those drums could be Timbaland, but that voice could be Rihanna imitating the demo vocal.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Let’s face it: the enthusiasm with which she blasts the chorus with vocal swoops could have been Rihanna’s, and the Rihanna-Katy Perry branch of pop sure owes a debt to Dion’s lack of inhibitions. But from the enthusiasm to the Linda Perry-worthy title this is radio fodder at its most perfunctory. The guitar crunch in the last forty seconds provides the only reconstituted moment.
[4]
Brad Shoup: Of course she sounds great, like one of Moby’s romantic voices from Play smashing the frame. There are touches of modernity — the vocalizations, that awful record-slowing effect — but they are wiped out by a classicist metal solo, suddenly triggered, smearing handprints on the production.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: Dion is as maximalist as ever, but where her ballads once gushed forth as an indiscriminate torrent, she now releases her assault in short bursts that fill the gaps between the awkwardly uncharacteristic string stabs and metal guitar gushes. It simultaneously over and underwhelms.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Not as much as a Saidian Late Style as a formalist doubling down on what made her brilliant in the first place, with enough new ornamentation to make it sound more fresh and exciting than it is.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: Sia’s very distinct writing tics sound better with her own voice than others. You can imagine the wail of this song’s chorus sounding terrific if sung like Sia’s own “Breathe Me” or “Soon We’ll Be Found,” with an uplift that’s either needed or earned. Dion’s voice doesn’t do that; perhaps it can’t, or perhaps she’s just never tried to do it before. As a fitting support, the dull verses reek of Tedder five years past their best-before date.
[4]
Will Adams: Sia’s dour songwriting has been one of the less appealing Top 40 trends in the past year. Céline goes for gold with her performance, but would you really want to be reincarnated as such a downer?
[4]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Dion is an artist with an intensely devoted fanbase, but to much of the mainstream musical world, she is so toothless that even my phone autocorrects her first name to “Celibate.” Almost as a show of awareness, “Loved Me Back to Life” drapes the balladry she found fame with in modern radio flourishes, but at its core it’s still a Dion ballad. The inevitability of “Loved Me” is something of a comfort, her musical conservatism (aforementioned flourishes aside) a pleasing constant. Her performance is equal parts unsurprising, mawkish, touching and graceful — in other words, it’s good to see she never really switched it up on us.
[6]