Are we having fun. yet?
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[3.46]
Alfred Soto: Nothing without Pink.
[3]
Mo Kim: Nothing without love; sadly not much more than a runny plate of eggs fronting a Lion King tribute act with it.
[2]
Anthony Easton: I am nothing without hate, and I am nothing without mild indifference, and I am nothing without the annoyance of the buzz of the falsely inspiration, negation over inspiration. All of that said, and all of the reasons to hate this aside, all of the points are for the nonsense syllables near the end.
[3]
Jer Fairall: There are fleeting hints of grace in the melody, but this guy’s vocal histrionics could make any song into a chore, particularly when he views the tiniest of sentiments as requiring inflation to “na na na hey!”-levels of bombast. He sounds less like he wants to be Freddie Mercury than he wants to ace the audition for the lead in his own band’s future We Will Rock You-style Broadway adaptation.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: At this point I am half-convinced Nate Ruess’s entire career — no, life — is one elaborate audition for the role of Seymour in some prospective Little Shop of Horrors revival. Which makes one wonder when comes the death by plant.
[3]
Thomas Inskeep: This is the dullest slice of gated-drums-adult-contemporary I’ve heard since 1986.
[0]
Jonathan Bradley: It just goes on and on, doesn’t it?
[2]
Micha Cavaseno: Yeah this is a lot of fanfare for a dude who’s just doing the fucking “Imagine” bouncing-octaves who can’t actually sing. He might be nothing without love, but his post-808s maximalismo loses all of its charm when he goes into traditional pop territory. Not that I’ve ever understood much of the love he’s gotten. This is like a dude making “Live And Let Die” without understanding that you get to pull off hammy bombast when you have a reputation to brace you. One overhyped album of success and some deadly dull career making emo does not grant you that.
[1]
Josh Winters: I don’t think there’s anyone in pop music who’s more in love with their own voice than Nate Ruess. Listening to him wail into the stratosphere oftentimes feels less like a proper aural experience and more like a test of one’s threshold of hearing. So it comes as no surprise to me that he remains as sonically overwhelming as ever, roaring in full force with his Broadway-level theatrics and unpleasant horn-assisted exuberance. I imagine this going the same way as many a failed elaborate proposal.
[3]
Scott Mildenhall: Every song Nate Ruess appears on is burdened with the challenge of not being destroyed by him. Being Jeff Bhasker must be like painting the Forth Bridge, but on this occasion, at least, the tide is held back, or near enough. Sometimes even individual syllables seem synthesised, melded on a Casio’s “yelp” preset, but overall it just sounds like a man aggrieved at Brandon Flowers’s rejection of his demo submission. At least it doesn’t hurt.
[6]
Josh Love: It’s interesting to witness Nate Ruess flying solo considering fun.’s entire MO consists of bombarding you with camaraderie, but he may actually have found his calling here. Each of fun.’s three big singles was musically as overstuffed as you’d expect a song to be when it was trying to teach the world to sing, but “Nothing Without Love” dispenses with all the pan-global, multi-choral hooey and lets a spotlit Ruess channel his bombast in a way that, while still pretty hokey, is simple and direct enough to actually make an unforced connection.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: If you are going to ham it up, ham it up. This starts off as a boring ballad, the sort of song that makes me think Nate Ruess records himself in Garageband and replays the track repeatedly. “Sounding good, me.” Simply recording a song to show how good a singer you are is boring — so why not add in a choir, and a big doofy call-and-response section, and ever-rising drama. The climax is like a cartoon’s idea of entering Heaven. This is over-the-top and I’ll probably never listen to it again by my own choosing, but Ruess going all in here makes this way more interesting than I expected.
[5]
Luisa Lopez: When I went to college in upstate New York, my roommate and I would take long drives through the mountains at night with the radio turned up as high as it could go. Small towns would flicker their lights in the distance across the river and the clouds looked like huge bats wrapped in lace with their stomachs swelling beneath the moon. Everything that happened in those years now feels absurd but it was all true: we felt like we were coming apart, like the stitches along our sides were splitting with love and swarms of beautiful bees were bursting from our bodies. “We Are Young” came out around this time and every appearance on the radio felt perfect and crafted just for us, our bodies in a sweltering car being carried home along the milky road. Nate Ruess’ voice sounds like it was made to fill the space between your heart and the dashboard at night. Each time I heard it in those days, I felt the particular sense of finality brought on by loud music in the dark: I am okay, I am in love, I am human, I am brave. Hearing “Nothing Without Love”, whose solo-ness never quite reaches the unabashed heights of fun., coming from a laptop on my kitchen table traces the shape of the sound it will make in a car at night. I’m sure I’ll hear it there soon. I can’t wait.
[7]