Rich, plummy, elegant. Pass that Merlot.
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[7.17]
Brad Shoup: I’d like more people to own up to just crushes. It’s not always love, sure, BUT. Anyway, the keys try their best to anchor MNEK, but the projection is powerful and pretty, flipping through negations so quickly that whatever situation he’s trying to depict becomes an existential fog. In a great way, mind.
[8]
Alfred Soto: MNEK’s rich, plummy tone recalls Luther Vandross, and like the greatest R&B balladeer of the last thirty years he’s got an erratic song sense. But what “Don’t Call This Love” lacks in crinkles it compensates in sound: the snaps, the full-bodied keyboard, MNEK himself.
[7]
Anthony Easton: The snaps are out of this world, and the call to false love works through the eros/agape split in ways that seem genuinely new. The novelty may come from his rich, understated elegant voice.
[9]
Megan Harrington: I deeply despise the electronic fingersnap beat — I can tell we’re not supposed to immediately identify it as synthetic but it’s basically as bad as using the Garageband metronome for percussion. Call me crazy, but this could use the Lanois touch! MNEK is more than halfway there on his own, isolating his voice so it sounds like it’s ringing out in an empty room and using only a soft, sparse, and sterile keyboard arrangement for elaboration. Lanois would add live drums.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: One of the great things about MNEK is that there’s every chance he’ll realise this shares a title with Leon Jackson’s better-than-it-seemed bid for Bublédom. He seems to have a strong interest in all kinds of pop music, reflected in an adeptness at so many sounds and styles, underpinned by a voice that might even eclipse Jackson’s. This is sadly more Voice than X Factor, but that he can make even that so compelling is emblematic of his talents.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: The song’s so clear about what this isn’t while fuzzy enough about what it is that it could be any kind of romantic entanglement, ill-advised or otherwise. But if the music reeks of Love Song Dedications, MNEK’s voice gives the song more than a hint of palpable doom that would rule it out of being something to request for your girlfriend on Valentines’. Unless you’re the sort of person who might hide a swarm of bees inside the dozen roses, of course.
[7]