Nearly double last time’s score! We must really love him now!
[Video][Website]
[2.44]
Julian Baldsing: “This is brilliant,” Calum Scott thought, placing his quill pen down for the first time in minutes. “Because it sounds like I’m too sad to even rhyme.” His eyes scanned over the lyrics, a slight smile on his face. “Hm. Could do with a piano arrangement though.”
[1]
Scott Mildenhall: If Calum Scott is going to sustain his career at the level of his first single then making a companion piece to “You Raise Me Up” seems a good way to go about it. With a video that looks intended to be the most universally understandable British cultural export since Mr. Bean, there’s something quite impressive about its unabashed desire to touch people in ways some may balk at. The lyrics are near enough bare conceptual metaphors: thought is motion, time is money, the heart is a container, life is a journey, life is a challenge, life is war… Most such songs don’t succeed on anywhere near “You Raise Me Up”‘s level, lacking the demanded astute arrangement, but clichés can be powerful when they’re put over well.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Rivers, mountains, and Sam Smiths — oh my!
[0]
Claire Biddles: This isn’t as blatantly offensive and borderline homophobic as the Robyn cover that we really really hated, but it’s still very bad, mainly because it feels so unnecessary — how many white boys pumping out these copies of diluted Sam Smith balladry do we, as a people, need?
[2]
Alex Ostroff: There was only one quietly interesting thing about Calum Scott’s mopey cover of ‘Dancing On My Own’. Like many men covering songs by women, he changed a few lyrics. Unlike most, he did so to make it more gay — he watched the man he wanted kiss “her” but wasn’t “the guy you’re taking home.” Scott explicitly did what queer folks do whenever we read ourselves into pop music, but forgot that pain aches truer and more beautifully on the dancefloor. It wasn’t much, but it was bolder than Sam Smith, who not only played the pronoun game on his entire first album, but memorably (and awkwardly) replaced “he” with “you” in a cover of “How Will I Know?”. Unfortunately, for his original material, Scott has retreated into Smith-esque anonymous yous. It’s disappointing, but appropriate for a gay man recording blandly passionate ballads entirely devoid of any real heat or sexuality.
[1]
Micha Cavaseno: You know how food and music metaphors occasionally work together? Y’know, like how people will say a song is a “jambalaya” of elements? This is as about as “condensed milk” of a ballad as you can get. Times are hard, who needs your ballads to have soulful resonance?
[2]
Stephen Eisermann: Calum Scott has a beautiful voice, but that’s about the only nice thing I can say about this dreary song. The best part is how similar the chord progression is to Little Big Town’s far superior “”Girl Crush.”
[3]
Iain Mew: A curious yawning vacuum of a song, or at least song-shaped thing. Every choice is easy and obvious. It often reaches for epic, but the cumulative effect in force is so much less than the sum of its parts that it’s surprisingly easily ignored.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: The world abhors a Jason Mraz vacuum. (The lack of Mraz, that is. The vacuum that’s the song, they love.)
[3]