…something something, then you’ll see; you’ll avoid catastrophe!
[Video]
[4.50]
Patrick St. Michel: All flames, but not much heat coming off of this one.
[4]
Iain Mew: The fire triangle applies: your heat and fuel won’t amount to much if you’ve got No Air.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: The genius of some of Ryan Tedder’s power ballads is not so much in the writing, but in the women who sing them loud and clear so the lack of nuance becomes a brute-force weapon. Sia, whose natural voice as both writer and performer is strong but imbued with shyness, can’t really pull this trick off. Metaphor, meet limit.
[3]
Rebecca A. Gowns: Everywhere I’m looking now — I’m surrounded by “Halo”‘s embrace. Baby, I can hear the “Halo.” You know it’s the saving grace. It’s everything in the tune — and more — it’s written all over the place. Baby, I can hear the “Halo”… pray it will fade away… or all I’ll hear will be the: “Halo,” “Halo,” “Halo”; the chorus is all “Halo,” “Halo,” “Halo”; the chords are all “Halo,” “Halo,” “Halo”; the phrasing is all “Halo, Halo, Halo.” “Halo.”
[4]
Alfred Soto: The rote metaphors would be better served with a singer who didn’t project as if through a used towel roll and with a production that Beyoncé can’t wait to sink her teeth into.
[3]
Josh Winters: I didn’t think the first Simlish-language song we’d review would be a cover of “Halo.”
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Give Ryan Tedder this: He never handed the “Halo” track off to a singer this mushmouthed. The lyric is twenty times as urgent as the song.
[3]
Josh Langhoff: The in-your-face physicality of Sia’s voice — scratching against its high end, chewing her words around so you can practically see them — makes almost any song worth hearing. That’s not the case with this pedestrian number, whose chorus shares a chord progression with Sia’s Annie song “Opportunity” and a metaphor with Hayley Williams’s “Stay the Night,” but lacks any lines as sensual as “Come pour yourself all over me.”
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: “Fire Meets Gasoline” should be a gimme for Sia. Her mode is conflagration: she specializes in emotional flashpoints that are as fierce as flames and as ugly as ashes. This, on the other hand, is a march that might generously be called rousing, but even allowing for that generosity, contains none of the pluck or fragility or awe the title metaphor deserves. Sia valiantly tries to dress up the arrangement with gapped chords and a vocal that hiccups and quivers around the melody line, but the effort only serves to underline how thin the song at its center is. An artist who’s wrought so careful and, often, so interesting a persona should not be whiffing with tunes better suited to the third single from an Idol winner’s mid-selling album circa-2010.
[3]
Megan Harrington: The strange thing about Sia is that when anyone else is performing a Sia song, all I hear is Sia. On “Fire Meet Gasoline” I hear Beyoncé and Ryan Tedder in the “Halo”-ish opening and I hear Rihanna and Ester Dean in the “eh eh” outro, when she enunciates every syllable in “bad, bad, certain death” I hear Max Martin. But give this song to anyone else and I’ll only hear the pre-chorus where all the words run together like a flock of birds flying from the singer’s mouth, the mealy and mumbled verses, the sudden snap of clarity delivered by the chorus. By performing her own songs, Sia introduces this peculiar moment of homogeneity and singularity. She is herself and she’s everyone who’s ever sung one of her songs, too.
[9]
Jonathan Bogart: All the drama of “Chandelier” without the incredible pacing.
[5]
Will Adams: I feel vindicated for never listening to 1000 Forms of Fear the whole way through. If the pre-chorus (lifted directly from “Chandelier”), Tribute Band Tedder track and choice of one of the most overused metaphors in pop (at some points I wonder if she’ll bust into “THIS! GAS! IS ON FIIIIIRRREEE”) are any indication, Sia is well past the point of being out of ideas.
[3]
Brad Shoup: Like many a mad genius before her, Sia wants to stack her explosives in one place and run for cover. In the case of “Fire Meet Gasoline,” it’s every combustion metaphor she can think of. The obvious match would be, in fact, the “perfect match” line — a joke so good I can imagine the whole song bursting from it. But trapped in translation, it doesn’t stand a chance. Instead, the honor goes to a busted lighter of a “Halo” knockoff, undisguised by a decent stuttering, submerged piano riff and some white-key chaos at the end. There’s little spark, just a whole lot of the wrong kind of darkness.
[4]
Mo Kim: I think about all of the love songs I used to sing. I think about asking my mother why she waited 23 years on a man who never gave her love and her reminding me that he gave her two children, too. I think about my friend whispering into a microphone at a poetry slam, crying for a world that throbs anywhere you touch, from Ferguson to Paris to San Bernandino. I think about my own heart, how it burns with an anger I can’t remember having lived without — my father warns me about the way hearts like mine crumble into ashes, stain the people carrying them black and bitter. But when I think about love songs, I think about what love costs us in a world that needs our love more than ever. I think about listening to “Fire Meet Gasoline” at 5 am, racing the sunrise back home from the library. I think about how explosive it makes love feel, how love and destruction become intertwined in its sledgehammer pop precision: the escalation of those first sixteen measures, gasps of strings rising only to be cut off as Sia begs me to “strike the match,” to “come a little closer”; the brief half-measure of silence, like a breath held before Greg Kurstin’s sturdy drums pick me up to swirl me in their arms; Sia’s voice, torched all over, cracking yet never slowing its soar towards higher notes; the piano in the background buried until it bursts into a fireworks display of trills and arpeggios in the final chorus. I take in this beautiful cacophony of a love song as I shoulder my backpack through a world silenced, darkened. I think of how much I want to strike a match to all of it. I think of how much I want all of it to burn alive.
[10]