We’ve been at this for over five years; the murder puns have been exhausted. Move along now…
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[6.44]
David Sheffieck: The intro’s momentarily promising, yet once the song starts the production drops those sounds, settling into a middle of the road groove that lacks any points of interest. And Kalenna isn’t about to carry the song alone — she doesn’t have the personality here to deliver the weak lyric in a way that makes it sound believable. Either aspect of the song could be salvaged, if only the other managed to rise above bland competence.
[4]
Alfred Soto: After Dawn Richard’s flight from Diddy-Dirty Money, I waited for Kalenna’s own bomb to drop. Set to an aqueous beat punctuated by “It Takes Two” squawks, “Murder” wastes no time. The syncopations in the chorus hooked my interest quicker than anything on Goldenheart.
[6]
Crystal Leww: Diddy Dirty-Money sounded like the future, but this sounds like the past.
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: Solid entry in the catalog of “R&B Songstresses Riding Grimey 90s-NYC Sounding Tracks That Demand A Vintage LL Cool J Verse Or Something To Make It An Ideal Hot 97 Back When Puffy Had Every DJ On Payroll Record.” It’s fine, but I heard a lot of these songs when I was eight, and sometimes this move can feel a little too obvious.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: A sidebar to “Matte Black Truck”: same basic idea, except without a bridge and with half the desperation swapped out for flat sangfroid — and thus with half the oomph.
[6]
Josh Love: Nicely blends Mary J.’s “Real Love” with the funky lick-copping of mid-00s Amerie or Beyoncé, but there are other collisions here that are more strange and make this song hard to pin down. The melancholic synths portend a gravity that triumphant Kalenna never really takes up, unless you count the downright odd (in this context at least) conflation of “the way he put it on me” with “murder murder murder.”
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: “Murder is a tough thing to digest,” Jay Z once rapped. “It’s a slow process.” Kalenna’s treatment of the metaphorical same takes that exacting approach; with a rubbery bassline and dead-eyed drums, the arrangement is suitably squalid. The unresolved question is who’s the victim: the sing-song hook (“once upon a time a girl met an OG/in a drop-top Bentley left his mark on me”), which unspools with fatalist resolve, hints at lost-lamb naïveté, but by verse two, Kalenna’s warning “if you’re fucking with me, promise you’ll never leave” like she’s turned the tables. When she hammers out that “murder-murder-murder” hook, the steel in her voice is gangster cold.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Kalenna peeks into the void — not that what she’s got isn’t real, more like she’s transmitting that wonderful two-against-the-darkness feeling. The sample is just a framework, it’s just a sample: artefacted and bare. The bassy chords put this over, sonically.
[7]
Sonya Nicholson: The track chugs along according to the pace set by the producer, and Kalenna probably only had a couple shots at it in the booth — it has the sound of someone being careful to nail the take — but she wrings out maximum expressiveness anyway, because it’s Kalenna. I love that this sounds like a child’s wind up toy, and that it ends just as it’s getting started. The Kalennas wailing in the background and C&C Music Factory sampling are icing. The tease accomplishes what it was probably intended to and fits the artist’s reputation as a hobbled perfectionist.
[10]