A top 40 hit by a teenager who’s so new and undiscovered SHE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A WEBSITE…
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Martin Skidmore: A 14-year-old talent contest winner (anyone else heard of UK Idol?), great-niece of Dirk Bogarde, performing a Bon Iver song. She sounds much older — there is no teen fun here, just classy singing over classy piano. It’s all very upscale cocktail bar, background music to some romantic scene, and completely forgettable.
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Katherine St Asaph: Man, you really can find everything on the Internet. I’d forgotten what middle-school talent show auditions sounded like.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Seriously — what is wrong with modern parenting? When I was a kid, my sister’s piano teacher taught her Elton John and Roxette. This is worse than sex-ed.
[3]
Anthony Easton: Technical skill wins over any heartbreak, which is weird, because 14 yr olds are notorious for impetuous anger, and this could use it.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: Birdy’s glassy prettiness misses entirely the point of a lyric steeped in bloody desperation. “Come on, skinny love, just last the year,” she trills dutifully, and the pleading doesn’t sound horrible or crushing or organic, it just sounds like an audition. She strolls through the litany of “I told you…” blood-letting as if she were reading a shopping list. It’s an ornament at best, and even then a woefully nondescript one.
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Ian Mathers: Well, it’s an improvement on the original (to damn it with faint praise). Whereas Justin Vernon’s litany of “I told you to be”s came across as petulant, Birdy skillfully conveys the way she can’t help making those demands at the same time as she limns their sheer futility. I tend to prefer solo piano to acoustic campfire twaddle, so the music works better as far as I’m concerned, and she has a lovely voice. The end result is to take a song that I found mildly irksome and recast it as something lovely and desolate.
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Jer Fairall: Justin Vernon bores me to tears, so I never got too familiar with the original, but what might sound mediocre coming from an overpraised “sensitive” adult songwriter actually sounds pretty good coming from a precocious 14-year-old. She’s got an impressive voice; a mixture of early Joni trill and Lilith Fair clarity and resilience, and if I’m hearing more technique than actual passion in her performance, I think we can safely assume that the latter is something she probably still needs to grow into.
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Jonathan Bogart: I’m sure it’s very lovely. And more power to those who can wring meaning out of its spare, crystal syllables. But that leaves those of us who can’t at a severe disadvantage, because without meaning, there’s nothing here.
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Kat Stevens: Somewhere out there, a hard-hitting BBC2 drama (about a young girl that runs away from home and ends up a homeless drug addict hooker but still keeps her teddy under her pillow) is missing some music for its trailer.
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