Plenty of grounds here, no matter what you think of the song…
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Alfred Soto: “I couldn’t think of a precedent of any out gay musicians singing a love song to one another without having to hide behind codes,” Okereke said in an interview. Is he confusing “codes” for “metaphors”? From Cole Porter, Bronski Beat, and Pet Shop Boys to Years & Years and Bloc Party themselves, the surfeit of evidence suggests otherwise. Anyway, “Grounds for Resentment” is a lovely thing, graced with a woodwind passage that gives the chiseled rhymes and singsong melodies a shade of courtly irony. “Slow down,” they sing over and over, aware that love doesn’t work like this, let alone lust. Then a viewing of Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo last weekend convinced me I didn’t know shit.
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Jibril Yassin: I’m a sucker for a tender Kele and while the jaunty, upbeat instrumentation, far more at home on a prestige advert, nearly derails this, he succeeds at inserting enough emotion to make this tragic kiss-off feel all the more affecting.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: An old married couple with signifiers of youth, meeting at Les Trois Garçons. As a quietly yet concertedly quirky vignette of middle-class domesticity, it could have been a little cloying, but it instead judges the tone well; imperative for such a thing. Olly’s mercurial voice melts into disenchantment, while Kele’s desperate attempt to find more than embers and flint is a fine imprint to leave on.
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Tim de Reuse: The lyrics are bored self-pity of a sad sap, and they’re nice; Okereke’s delivery is achy, dramatic, and vibrato-heavy, and it’s nice; the production has a satisfyingly heavy bounce to it, and it’s nice. None of these things play especially well together; the mood of the whole is pulled in too many directions to commit. It doesn’t help that the entire last minute just quietly circles in place, wondering where to go and settling on “ah, fuck it, just do the chorus again.”
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Will Rivitz: What frustrated me most about Kesha’s “Praying,” a song I felt fairly lukewarm about despite this site’s overwhelming acclaim, was that it took brilliant lyrics and stuck them behind a rote piano ballad, pinning a supernova’s worth of fire behind an instrumental with all the righteous fury of a bowl of lettuce. And sure, it generally isn’t fair to discredit a song entirely because it doesn’t sound interesting, but music is subjective, and one thing I’ve found about my own subjective appreciation of it is that I fall into love with songs that are oftentimes exactly the opposite of “Praying” – songs that, irrespective of their lyrics, are aural candy. I freely admit I don’t know the words to most of my favorite songs; I never really cared to learn them, as for me they aren’t the important part. What’s important to me is the timbre, the arrangement, the way a producer brings the instrumental to a climax and then sweeps the rug away, leaving just bass or drums or guitar behind. It’s why “Praying,” end-of-song buildup that takes all too long to arrive notwithstanding, is so disappointing; and it’s why “Grounds for Resentment,” with its also excellent lyrics stashed behind a cloyingly cheery ditty so awful and new-school Paul McCartney that even Michael Bublé would have turned it away, is a song I will never play again.
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Nortey Dowuona: Kele feels as light as a will o’ wisp and as firm as a middle aged tree in the middle of the shifting piano, gurgling Wurlitzer, bouncy bass and soft drums, while Olly Alexander lifts away as soon as he touches down. (YESS A SAX SOLO)
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Stephen Eisermann: The lyrics are striking enough, sure, but the is singing is far too reminiscent of the last iteration of the Glee Cast to really get behind. Sorry, but we gays deserve better.
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Claire Biddles: Kele Okereke has always felt like as much an enthusiastic music listener as a music maker. All of his albums — whether his continuing work with Bloc Party, or his (underrated) solo work — play around with genre, and are full of clever musical collisions that I’ve always thought of as a reflection of a genuinely idiosyncratic record collection. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when he dropped an 80s AOR relationship duet co-starring the best (yes, the best) pop vocalist of recent years — as though, on some fateful day, shuffle threw up “Sowing The Seeds of Love” followed by “Shine” and the solution was obvious. “Grounds for Resentment” is gorgeous. Soothing and summery, it lulls the listener into a false sense of security then unleashes a tense, finely drawn kitchen-sink drama told from both sides of a broken relationship. It’s dramatic in the truest sense of the word, and the only thing that would make it more perfect (for me) is if it were playing over the credits of a mopey BBC thing starring Ben Whishaw.
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Alex Clifton: A bit too twee and cutesy for my tastes, but the interplay between Kele and Olly’s voices is beautiful (and Kele’s never sounded better in general). Both sound delicate and vulnerable, which is always a difficult thing to pull off in a song without sounding too whiny. I’ll be honest–if this were a straight love song, I’d be bored as all hell. But it’s nice to have a gay duet that’s allowed to do what many of its straight counterparts do rather than having to be too edgy or alternative. Small victories, and in this hellscape of a year, I’ll take what I can get.
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