Weirdly, finding interesting pictures of her is even harder than finding interesting pictures of Doves. At least they were in a lift…
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[5.44]
Jonathan Bradley: Here in Australia, we don’t like pop stars. They make us suspicious, with their glitz and their instant success. How, we ask ourselves, can you decide whether anyone’s any good or not unless you’ve watched him (it’s usually a him) lug his sorry arse around the country’s pubs for a good half decade? It’s our focus on paying dues over having a good single or two that makes Australia such a hostile place for homegrown pop stars; even Kylie had to skip off to the UK to really make it, and we only decided she was acceptable once she’d returned with ten years worth of hits under her belt. And that’s why the emergence of Jessica Mauboy is so unusual, and even sort of thrilling. With the exception of a single Kate DeAraugo single, our Idol winners have been bland talents given tepid songs; Mauboy looks and sounds like a proper pop star, the kind we usually have to import. She specialises in disco-tinged R&B, a style so genuinely contemporary that she even had a boring Flo Rida verse inserted into a previous single. “Been Waiting,” with its strobed-synths and handclaps sounds like a cut-rate Tricky Stewart/The-Dream production, which does not mean it isn’t quite enjoyable. Mauboy performs it admirably, and it’s got a satisfyingly floaty hook propelling it. It’s probably her best single to date, and even if it’s merely solid rather than fantastic, at least it’s not an embarassing triumph of local-content laws and parochialism.
[7]
Martin Skidmore: She came second on Australian Idol, and you can more or less hear why. She’s a little nasal, but her R&B voice is nimble, and while it sounds strained and occasionally thin on the high notes, those possible flaws read here like pained emotion. The song gives her space for too many pointless curlicues here and there, but it’s a decent enough tune, with a basic contemporary R&B production, complete of course with Timbalandish pulsing synths and all that.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Having those muted trance synth ripples coursing through the background of what is otherwise an extremely standard mid-tempo R’n’B song is an interesting choice; they never kick in, but it’s actually to the song’s benefit that “Been Waitng” never goes fully dance. The rest of the song is well-performed but unremarkable, but the tension between the rest of the arrangement and those synths fluttering in the background like schools of fish darting around a coral reef is genuinely compelling.
[7]
Tom Ewing: Those phased staccato keyboard runs were so gorgeous and evocative on “Flashing Lights”, weren’t they? And on “Been Waiting” they’re still really evocative… of “Flashing Lights”, which isn’t the comparison you want to be soliciting if your song is as otherwise inert as this. It’s not precisely Mauboy’s fault that one production steal is overshadowing her full-lunged efforts to assert herself, but I’m feeling nothing here.
[4]
Alex Ostroff: Standard inoffensively pleasant Idol burble. The strut of Jordin’s “One Step at a Time”, the stutter-synths we’ve heard a hundred times before courtesy of Kanye, Ne-Yo, etc. That said, the drums lend a nice kick, and the effortless transition between the upbeat verses and chorus and the languid, trancey “something”‘s is captivating. Would that they were in service of a song that was more than the sum of its production tricks.
[3]
Additional Scores
Hillary Brown: [6]
Martin Kavka: [5]
Edward Okulicz: [7]
Hazel Robinson : [4]