At least she takes her own advice…
[Video][Website]
[6.67]
Katherine St Asaph: Between the languid Beth Gibbons breathlessness, the soft string pats, the downtempo beat and an atmosphere like you’ve left a Rainymood tab open across the room, this’d be far too obvious to use as a makeout track even before the heavy breathing or the mushmouth duet toward the end or the shuddering snap after “try not to fall in love,” which suggests the trying’s useless. It’d require about as much explaining as the fact that her name really is Delilah, like radio’s rom-commonest, and that these really are the Chase & Status singers, and if you’re explaining this much you’d better hope he associates C&S not with dubstep — guaranteed mood-killer, that — but with some pleasant cellar door of a phrase. These are complications, but they’re not flaws. It just means you’d listen to this home alone, disable Spotify and kill last.fm, and admit nothing.
[8]
Alfred Soto: She majored in Portishead and finished her graduate work in dubstep, which explains the tension between languor and the frenetic. Fusion happens at the 2:50 mark: the bottom drops out and Bailey and Delilah’s vocal curl around each other like vines.
[5]
Iain Mew: Immaculate strings, a beat like an old clock ticking the seconds away and Delilah delivers as expressively as ever. Liam Bailey’s forceful arrival adds another dimension but kills the hermetic loneliness and the song peters out a bit from there. Hopefully Delilah’s career isn’t going the same way — after the success of “Go” nothing else has caught on commercially and this doesn’t seem about to change that.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Gorgeous, skittering disco diva breakdown, with Liam providing a little strange tenor as useful leavening agent.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: Liam Bailey is an unnecessary counterweight; the song was already so finely balanced between all its various minimal elements that his creamy echo comes off like a bellowing drunk in a seventeenth-century salon, unaware that with every turn he’s smashes another china figurine to pieces. Okay, maybe I was already kind of invested in the original mix.
[7]
Brad Shoup: I suppose Radiohead is too into disconnection to provide the other half of a conversation. Such a shame, as “Breathe” limns their late-period sound with crisp drums, keening vocals, nervous-making string figures, and a lot of textural care. Delilah deserves better than Liam Bailey’s tapioca soul, but I expect she’ll soon get it.
[8]