…and unsettling synths.
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[7.40]
Claire Biddles: Eighties queen Alison Moyet making sinister high-drama electronica with killer song titles has to be the most welcome surprise of 2017.
[8]
Alfred Soto: After years of adult contemporary albums with the occasional burst of guitar anarchy against which her persona was ill-suited anyway, Alison Moyet returned to electropop in 2013. Other goes further. If you keep track of such things, it’s the former Yazoo singer’s best album since 1991’s Hoodoo. The results suggest what “Venus as a Boy”-era Björk would sound like in the new millennium. What Moyet has also lost in elasticity she has gained in expressiveness. “Reassuring Pinches” has a synth organ break that Vince Clarke would go human for; it’s peak Moyet.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Alison Moyet wants to make something real. She wants to make a dubstep record. 2017: it’s weird. Good-weird. This could a little more sumptuous, a little more goth, a little more brostep even (imagine her singing on that Josh Pan track), but otherwise it’s great in the same improbable way recent Petula Clark and Maggie Reilly are.
[8]
Tim de Reuse: An exercise in Moog worship, but far from nostalgic; it’s produced uncannily clean, glossy and dramatic like a big-budget summer action flick. There’s a little too much Hanz Zimmer extravagance, but Moyet’s voice is a delight to the point that it took me several listens to notice how awkward it is that she accents the word “pinches” on the second syllable.
[6]
Ian Mathers: I am an unabashed sucker for the slightly grainy texture both of those synths and of Moyet’s rich-as-ever voice. BIG and GOTH and DRAMATIC is unsurprisingly a good look for her, and if the chorus isn’t quite as hooky as I’d really want, I’d still very much like to hear the rest of this album.
[7]
Hannah Jocelyn: There is an entire section of audio plug-ins meant to emulate the warmth of an analog mixing console, and Alison Moyet warms up this indisputably digital song just by singing into the microphone. There are so many electronic quirks and sound effects that anyone else would mix incredibly high, but they’re almost incidental details, give or take a loud synth boom or two. The sheer amount of space fits with Moyet’s sophisticated, mature performance; everyone involved is confident enough to let nothing stand in her way. The song was initially described in the Singles Jukebox mailing list as “amazingly over the top and extra,” and maybe the lyrics about “wiiiillddcats” and “thirsty beasts” are, but it sounds less extra to me than dynamic and ridiculously cool.
[9]
Katie Gill: Dark, haunting, and just on the right side of ostentatious, Moyet gives us an amazingly crafted piece of music. It’s so extra: that drop right before the chorus is a little too predictable and those lyrics verge on incomprehensible word salad at some points (and slightly incomprehensible on others: is that really how you pronounce “reassuring,” Moyet?) But the sound as a whole is just divine: it’s thick and beautifully overstuffed, arranged so perfectly that I’m willing to overlook the flaws for the deep and lush sound of the whole.
[8]
Nortey Dowuona: Grim, all-encompassing bass crushing the bubbly drums flat, and slowly yielding to the swarming synths and mellow, rumbling moans, then falling apart as little patches of synth glimmer and shine, while Moyet remains proud and resolute in the center of the mix.
[10]
Ryo Miyauchi: With a goth-pop beat that icy, it’s hard to blame Alison Moyet for taking her time wandering down its halls to admire every bit of its embellishments. Yet she approaches it a bit too slow where some tension would’ve done this sinister music some good.
[5]
Brad Shoup: The drops are so modest — and so trebly — they’re essentially lifts. Everything’s so startlingly spare – it’s only at the very end that the track draws the kind of sonic mantle I’d expect. Gorgeous imagery, though, and Moyet manages to digest it all with a smile.
[6]