If you’re angling for a good score, Ms. Richard, our scale doesn’t even go up that high…
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[6.64]
Anthony Easton: It’s lovely and well constructed, with a floating, gossamer presence. In fact, its presence is so lightly felt that it glides past any attempt at rigorous analysis.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Through a warm synth pad that Peter Gabriel could have played in the titular year, Dawn Richards cries out in her lust and loneliness. By the time she reaches the end she’s found a verse and vocal melody worthy of another Gabriel collaborator, Brian Eno, specifically “Spider and I,” another prayer for stasis accompanied by keyboard: “Put my hands up/And he seeks all the time/Oh, is our love so…/I’m ready to love.”
[8]
Josh Langhoff: I get the idea: Richard loves So, so she takes aspects of its sound, uses its release year as a nostalgic emotional conduit, and segues into one of its signature songs. It’s sort of like Everclear doing “A.M. Radio” into “Brown Eyed Girl.” Actually, “‘86” has more “Little Red Corvette” than Peter Gabriel in its drums and chords, a dual pedigree that ensures pleasantness for people who use such songs as nostalgic emotional conduits, which I do. But here’s what I don’t get: why is this the single? It’s a wisp. I’ve only streamed Richard’s album twice and already I can’t hear “‘86” as anything but a lead-in to “In Your Eyes.”
[6]
Brad Shoup: I couldn’t help it; Richard’s singing here is so open, and the verses are so judiciously offered that when moths chase flames, it threatens to scotch the whole enterprise. If she can plate that stale morsel with the same feelings as anything else, you know? But she does hit an emotional peak at the end, screwing her processing-slathered vocals into an imitation of a shehnai.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: This does everything right in building up towards something big, but never delivers on that drama. “’86” sounds like the intro to a really good song suite, but as an individual composition it’s anti-climatic.
[5]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The huge, slo-mo-John-Hughes-slow-dance-montage feel is purely executed by Richard filling up every pocket of the track with different melodies. She sounds like a one-woman army, and that’s fitting regarding the amount of battle iconography to find in her albums, which this feels a little anti-climactic from out of its original context.
[7]
Will Adams: The distinction of the slow-build format used here is that it doesn’t find Dawn Richard venturing into an expanding sonic world. Rather, the percussive layers and harmonizing vocals come from afar and gather around her. It’s quite moving, each new element raising her to the sky. This is the most sense she’s made to me since “Black Lipstick.”
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Atmosphere? Check. Good singer? Check. Build-up? Check. Pay-off? Um, less so. Maybe it’s just the vocal mixing, but I’m getting a really strong feeling that her influences aren’t 1986, they’re Imogen Heap. Obviously her beats and production are better than that would imply, but “’86,” while lovely to behold, feels empty and drifts aimlessly.
[6]
Jer Fairall: (19)86 as evoked through a series of free floating signifiers: a shimmery New Age synthesizer hum, an elegant Yuppie Soul lead performance, tasteful soft rock backing vocals, the language of heartbreak as stitched together through a childhood spent with the radio tuned into the Top 40 of Whitney and Janet and Anita, yes, but also of “Human” and “Life in a Northern Town” and “No One Is To Blame.” “I put my hands up, surrender/86 on pretending,” goes the lyric that would seem to explain the title, but we all know better.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: After Armor On and “Pretty Wicked Things,” I thought I was prepared for anything from Dawn Richard, up to and including full-on mecha-Godzilla pomp-prog. But the follow-up’s glassy suspension still took me by surprise. Referring both to the year (on Goldenheart it’s followed by a reimagining of Peter Gabriel’s 1986 “In Your Eyes”) and to the slang expression meaning to get rid of something, “’86” seems to resurrect the weightlessness of classic mid-80s sophisti-pop, and even though her vocal processing is very Twenty Tens, the simple momentum of the melody and the increasing power of her reiteration of the chorus — “I can’t run away from love” — is so classicist that she turns it almost by force of will into a classic.
[9]
Katherine St Asaph: I’ve got Twine on the brain today, so here’s a little A&R adventure. You are Dawn Richard. Fans know you as trailblazing; the public knows you only in aggregate, as that one singer from that one band from that one TV show that spawned O-Town. You have a fantastic album, but now it needs a breakout hit. Choose your own single: irresistible New Orleans bounce (“Northern Lights”), sprawling slow jams (“Frequency,” the part of “Tug of War” that lulls you off guard), dubstep (“Pretty Wicked Things,” though as a single it’s probably past time), even crossover pop (“Riot,” which borrows the “Moves Like Jagger” melody even), or this, plodding and retro in the dullest way, the boring Peter Gabriel rework to introduce the exciting one right afterward. If Goldenheart flops — and I hope it doesn’t — this is likely to blame.
[5]