Maybe all you critics should just… *pauses dramatically, inhales deeply* let it go.
[Video][Website]
[4.38]
Thomas Inskeep: If you want to be confused, try reading the Wikipedia entry detailing the plot of the Disney Channel movie Descendants, from which “If Only” is taken. Dove Cameron has an incredibly thin voice befitting an incredibly generic “uplifting” Disney TV-movie song. I have no idea how this fits into the aforementioned plot, and am not sure it really even matters.
[3]
Will Adams: If “Let It Go” was sub-“Defying Gravity,” then this is sub-“Let It Go.” The opening verse features some interesting choices, namely the vocal and pulsing guitar obscuring the meter, but then it quickly devolves into a swamp of schmaltz.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Indifferent to the shimmer of a opening, “If Only” presents schlock to a young singer who may do better if she sends her agent to the salt mines.
[2]
Brad Shoup: The biggest hook is probably the delay-heavy guitar figure — it threatens to go EDM right before the second verse, but the fireworks are restricted to Cameron’s vocals and the gated snare hits. But the real punch happens in the pre-chorus, as she navigates the sequence of two-note phrases like someone guessing her way across stones on a pond.
[6]
Iain Mew: I listened to the shortened YouTube edit first, which emphasised the smallness of the song, already present from the shimmering guitar intro to the chorus “aah aah” which is less yawning chasm and more end of a work day. The effect on the typically monumental ballad format was like one of those tilt-shifted landscape photos. The extra minute adds nothing but dilution.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: If this isn’t on the shortlist for the 2015 X Factor winner’s single, then Simon Cowell knows even less about music than previously feared. It’s the time-honoured syrupy soundtrack schlockballad formula given the moderately modern production touches of Little Mix’s take on “Cannonball”, and vague suggestions of country that wouldn’t frighten off British people, like “The Climb.” It has everything: self-improvement, transformation, destiny and struggle, all expressed with open heart and plain words. It’s that universally applicable, uncanny valley hyper-sincerity that, when done well, stands out gloriously.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Critiquing something like “If Only” is pointless; songs like these are for kids, who will love whatever they imprint on. (Signed, someone who argued with her elementary school music teacher about whether the “now you can be whatever you want to beeeeee…” bridge in the Whitney Houston remake of Cinderella makes musical sense and who thinks “Far Longer Than Forever” is a classic love ballad.) Without the story “If Only” is somehow even slighter, so here goes: In Disneyland, the evillest one of them all is conspicuously relatably named Mal, who looks like you combined Punky Brewster and a Junior Miss pageant winner and raised the resulting child in a pop-up Halloween store. (Believing that pure evil resides in a stage-trained child named Dove is an exercise left to the grownups.) Mal is the daughter of Maleficent — played by Kristin Chenoweth, who gets an actually good song, though only by ripping off Eartha Kitt — and she and a couple of sideplots attend a somehow-extant public school, where she is distracted from her unconvincing evil by the Power of Boy. (“Boy” is the extent of him; he’s supposed to be the son of Beauty and the Beast but is played so model-bland you suspect Belle was secretly fucking Gaston.) Cue a song’s worth of long notes and wide-eyed wondering and over-literal references to “the magic running out,” because oh right, she cast a love spell. If you believed for a second there were stakes all would be fine, but as it stands “which way should I go?” comes off like a reverse parody of “which seat should I take,” and every note is imbued with the sound of stage parents giving directions from the wings.
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: It is what it is — a big, conflicted ballad acting as the centerpiece in a Disney work full of much better and much worse numbers. It’s boring to me, but I’m also not remotely the target demographic here.
[4]