Does not incorporate an old song and does incorporate Charlie Puth. Scored OK in those circumstances.
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[5.43]
Scott Mildenhall: What a load of nonsense — in the most wonderful way! The film for which Disney commissioned a digitally reanimated Elton and falsetto robot Puth to create this new “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” doesn’t actually exist, but they don’t seem to have noticed. Reg has form for joyful man-to-man piano duels, yet the complete lack of archness to “After All” takes it one step further. Why are these two men singing a love song to at the same time as each other, trading off ostentatious vocal treatments in an affecting simulation of hyper-sincerity? Because they are.
[8]
Katie Gill: While I appreciate Elton John’s willingness to collaborate with everybody, that doesn’t mean he SHOULD.
[3]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Saccharine musings from two pop stars with unerring senses of melody. I’ll change my score to at [9] if Puth uses this as the first step in a queer journey.
[6]
Claire Biddles: Conflicted here because I absolutely love a neo-yacht-rock ballad but the execution of “After All” is excruciating. I know he’s emphasising that this was made in lockdown (literally wasn’t everything in the past 18 months??) so maybe we shouldn’t expect too much, but Elton sounds like he’s singing down a plastic tube and Charlie Puth sounds as computer-generated as always. For a song about a miraculous romantic match, it’s hard to imagine two singers with less vocal chemistry. I’m away to listen to “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me.”
[3]
Alex Clifton: By far the most interesting chord progression I’ve heard all year in a pop song — I like how it surprises my ear throughout the song. Elton John and Charlie Puth both seem like music theory nerds, and this song makes sense as a collaboration between them. I’m not sure if I fully like the song itself, but it deserves points for creativity.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Why the producers pitch-altered Elton ‘n’ Charlie into warbling donkeys I can’t say. The music is pretty and professional — what I’d expect from two keyboardists who’ve been writing music for years. Shoot the lyricist.
[5]
Mark Sinker: When Elton arrives, thanks to the respective age and relative repair of these two voices, and the very different ways they’re scored and processed, it sounds as if a distanced robo-ghola Elton nekrolog has been reanimated in the far future just for this duet, with half-recalled hits (not all his) tumbling through a reconstruction of his pop cortex as hazy waves of static. And then, for 15 odd seconds at the two-min mark, there’s a strange and lovely moment of in-between drift, as the two machineries scan wildly back towards more normal singer-songwriterly synch. I want more of the odd, I guess.
[7]