Thanks, Patrick, for “the midway point between James Blake and Sam Smith, sporting a five-o’clock Mumford shadow.”
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[3.00]
Patrick St. Michel: The midway point between James Blake and Sam Smith, sporting a five-o’clock Mumford shadow. The experimental touches…a pitch-shifted wobble, an electric burble…balance out what could easily have ended up just being a goofy vocal exercise. Problem is, this meeting results in both side just sort of fizzling out, nothing bad sticking out but also everything just sounding…fine.
[5]
Alfred Soto: The almost subliminal sax bleats, Nicolas Jaar-indebted electric piano, and Burial-esque percussion squelches cohere into a fetching aural package, but taking it apart is Faker’s post-slacker vocal; it’s as if he thinks singing is cheap.
[4]
Thomas Inskeep: James Blake goes trip-hop and sings.
[4]
Micha Cavaseno: Its the name. His take on James Blake is super reductive and derivative, some real clownshoes-Muse type nonsense. His faux-‘Jazzy’ chops are laughable, his songwriting worthy of mid-tier MP3.com acts, and his singing the hallmarks of mediocre artists polluting soundcloud everywhere. But its the FUCKING NAME, that encourages me to carve a “0” in his chest and kick him in the face, hoping he’ll fall off a cliff and go far, far away.
[0]
Iain Mew: It’s been interesting to watch from a distance the #Tay4Hottest100 attempts to symbolically overturn the biases of Triple J and the poll “Talk is Cheap” won. Not least because some of the alternative approaches for stations suggested in the best pieces sound a bit like the BBC’s Radio 1. I could see them going for this song big time in the right circumstances too, though (he’s been on). It’s the perfect combination of Damien Rice/Ed Sheeran earnestness with a cooler sound, the kind of thing to fit into a credible but accessible space well beyond Australia. Look at it positively and the droning saxophones and drum rockslides do give the songs an extra way of digging in emotionally, lending the opaque words an extra weight. Alternatively, Chet has added just enough hip trappings to cover up for the fact that there’s not much of a song underneath. I’ll settle on some of each.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: Look, I spent enough of my youth listening to dodgy Australian indie music to concede that the movement is not entirely without musical merit. But this? Really? Surely The Kids need to be locked in a room and forced to listen to Tkay Maidza for a week until they repent. “Talk is Cheap” is basically a dude with a boring voice singing a song that’s so compositionally uninteresting and lyrically artless that it makes Vance Joy, by comparison, seem like ABBA and Leonard Cohen rolled into one. The production is polite, nothing more than couple of chords plonked over a beat that takes me back to the early days when computers let anybody make music and then have it heard by nobody. It’s so bland that listening to it feels like chewing on paper. As the winner of a nationwide poll and by default a barometer for my country’s taste in music, it’s disappointing. However, as a symbol for a poll where people go “here’s a list of songs I don’t hate that I am voting for” (other polls, even Pazz & Jop have this problem of dull consensus, but they’re never so aggressively, proudly insular) rather than encouraging people to vote for one or two they loved passionately as it was back 20 years ago, it is depressingly apt.
[0]
Will Adams: I’m typically fine with marble-mouthed baritone — Sampha or Patrick Watson, for example — but that vocal type often requires interesting or pretty music to back it up. “Talk Is Cheap” has a too-long intro that fleshes out its dull palette of sounds, from oozy saxes, tired pitch-shifts, and snoring bass. Chet Faker is left out in the front, and the combined effect is truly enervating.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: A burring saxophone and gestures towards R&B make “Talk is Cheap” a more lissome prospect than Chet Faker’s earlier, fussier creations, if not actually a funky one. His mumble is as unwelcome as ever, however, sounding almost preposterously entitled in its apparent insistence that a vocalist so milky should be taken seriously as a frontman. Even while Faker’s benefited from loosening up, it’s pulled into sharper focus how uncompelling a presence he is. Don’t do him the unkindness of playing Miguel after this; merely following it with How to Dress Well or Autre Ne Veut — or even Radiohead-circa-In Rainbows — demonstrates how determinedly average this is.
[4]
John Seroff: Dominant thoughts emerging on the all-important seventh listen: 1) This dude sounds like Bret McKenzie doing the fuckin’ Cockatoo song in the Muppets except he doesn’t seem to be in on the joke; 2) This dude sounds like Jimmy Fallon doing smoky adult contemporary electromope except… well, that pretty much is what it sounds like; 3) – Chet Faker is a terrible stage name.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: Somebody right now is having sex to this, which ought to make any right-thinking person take a celibacy pledge.
[1]
Brad Shoup: The worst motivational speaker I’ve ever heard.
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