Count ’em while you got ’em…
[Video]
[5.00]
Taylor Alatorre: The name “trance music” implies a transportation to a separate mind-state, where the genre’s lulling repetitions and slowly evolving progressions have led one to detach from their ordinary surroundings and become immersed in a more meditative, transcendent slice of existence. “Blessings” does indeed transport me to a familiar yet frustrating reality, namely one in which my download of a dubiously legal software crack has been stalled at 96 percent for the past three or so minutes. I really wish I were listening to keygen music right now.
[5]
William John: I encounter this brand of radio-house in almost no other context other than when entering and exiting my gym, a liminal space where Jax Jones, Cheat Codes, Oliver Heldens, and their various associates continue to rule the roost. Like its forebears, “Blessings” is inoffensive and indistinguishable, and is perhaps best described as impetus to remember to bring your headphones next time.
[4]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A gorgeous piece of furniture.
[7]
Leah Isobel: “Blessings” glitters like an airport runway at night: it’s really just a concrete platform, bricky and harsh, but the pianos and Clementine Douglas’ vocal performance lend it a deceptive sparkle. Calvin could make this kind of set-transition banger in his sleep, but songs like this always work for me. I like the feeling of speeding up, achieving liftoff, and ascending into the void.
[7]
Mark Sinker: The salvation of this pleasant but otherwise slight song is the squiggliness, micro and macro, of the singer’s voice.
[6]
Julian Axelrod: I usually prefer the Calvin Harris collabs on the higher end of the star-meter, from his immortal Rihanna collabs to the tropical favor-fests Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 and 2. But he’s found one of his best collaborators in Clementine Douglas, whose house diva purr glides across Harris’s burbling synths like a rock skipped across a digital ravine. You gotta love a song with a generic title that never shows up in the lyrics.
[7]
Ian Mathers: I hope I’m not doing the music equivalent of getting suspicious about em dashes (a noble punctuation mark), but… are we sure this isn’t machine generated?
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: The snare is so disrespected in popular music. It’s not just the upper mid sound that allows the mix’s attributes to have definition, it’s a marking of its own. Please use it wisely rather than anchoring it to the top of the mix to flesh out everything else now.
[3]
Jel Bugle: I heard a Calvin Harris song the other day, and he was doing that country music thing! That one was more memorable (a [3]) than this dance track is: a bit dull, the kind of song to boil the kettle to. Euphoric/soporific.
[2]
I like the trance line here. And I like the vocals here. But somehow, put together, this becomes less than the sum of its parts? And that by itself is rather impressive. [6]