Riiiiight.
[Video][Website]
[3.70]
Scott Mildenhall: But it would be good if you tried.
[4]
Iain Mew: Damien Rice is someone whose influence has loomed ever larger — #1 single; “stadium heights with Damien Rice” — during his long absence. His return pulls back from the self-flagellating excess of his second album and shows the gift for spartan, accessibly intimate songs which Ed Sheeran and Gotye took after so well, but wastes it on a tale of manger stranger danger that’s a lyrical career low. Also, listen closely after the end of the first chorus and you can pinpoint the exact moment where the song would be improved by Lisa Hannigan’s entrance.
[5]
Jer Fairall: His conceit–he loves her no matter what–is among the simplest imaginable, yet his approach is ridiculously bloated: a shapeless five-minute running time, a goopy string section, some nonsense about waterfalls. Someone tell this guy that melodrama requires actual drama.
[4]
Alfred Soto: What a gentleman — he doesn’t want to change her. Can she change him into a bug stain by smashing the guitar on his head?
[3]
Micha Cavaseno: Damien Rice’s music remains the sonic equivalent of a mom eagerly shoving mashed potatoes toward an infant’s mouth, insisting it’s good for you. Except the potatoes are lard with no nutritional value, and no mother would ever seem so smug about shoving rubbish in your face.
[1]
Anthony Easton: I want to change his mind–from those soppy violins, flat vocals, and how he rhymes “manger” with “danger,” minus a point for the undignified begging.
[3]
Thomas Inskeep: Words that are rhymed(ish) in the chorus of this song: “change,” “angel,” “strange,” “danger.” That’s a perfect example of why I was ready to hate this; Rice is precisely the flavor of earnest I tend loathe. Plus, through the song’s second chorus, its instrumentation is just voice, acoustic guitar, strings, and light drums. But – but – somehow, Rice won me over, specifically because this is all written and recorded so well (including his vocals, which have just a smidgen of echo on them, especially at the second chorus) to be incredibly, movingly pretty. Yeah, he’s earnest, but I believe him. There’s nothing cynical to be found here.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Uh oh, manger danger! Call an adult! This is John Mayer mysticism, where the strings bear the burden and the vocals are as studied as the lyric isn’t.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: I listen to a Damien Rice song every four years and always go “Oh, yeah, that’s what he sounds like,” always surprised at such overwrought songwriting managing to not even leave an imprint most of the time. Making it sound like a good-enough woman needs a trying-too-hard performance of a lyric that literally needs the second half of every line immediately removed, Rice exhausted me halfway through.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: I do not hate Damien Rice, and I’m not sure when it became the going thing to. Would people really prefer John Mayer or Ed Sheeran (the operand to Rice’s operator, at least if you go by album titles) to continue to be the template for dude singer-songwriters? If the genre’s sedate and unflaggingly male by default, why’s it a downgrade to become sedate, unflaggingly male — but pretty? I like this better when I hear an imaginary Cake Sale version in my head, with Nina Persson or someone swapped in, but that’s not a criticism.
[6]