No. 1 UK dance hit on which Jax Jones doesn’t sing. And on which Whitney Houston doesn’t posthumously sing. It’s complicated…
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[6.50]
Patrick St. Michel: Pure tropical bliss, a slice of what I’ve always imagined Ibiza to be like made to make the transition from winter to spring a little easier, complete with a decent, unobtrusive take on a Whitney Houston song.
[8]
Will Adams: Glorious from start to finish; there’s not a moment wasted here. Sure, the steel drums, trance pianos, and yo-yo’ing children’s choir place it squarely in the Balearic realm. But the addition of Whitney-via-Kelli-Leigh — without any of the pitched-down nonsense that’s been worming its way into house music — elevates it to the heavens. Every element works to make lifting your feet off the ground as easy as possible.
[8]
Alfred Soto: Fine — love the steel drum hook and house piano, I thought. Where’s the rest? Then the Whitney Houston sample unfurled, reveling in the romantic uncertainties.
[7]
Brad Shoup: It’s about as cheerful as a song featuring a children’s choir singing “kill them all” can be, but the spangly baggy bits drape poorly on the singer’s shoulders. She gets to push about three lines through a fog of echo before she’s pulled for a pitchshifted reliever. The feeling these dudes are looking for was in the source material. A shame: could’ve been a great graduation song.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Here’s some more pop industry real talk, Teddy! So, the singer: an uncredited session vocalist named Kelli-Leigh (though she did appear on Live Lounge, and since this is No. 1, perhaps the “session” adjective is soon for the axe), working with a sample recreation company called Replay Heaven (a common and surprisingly complicated practice that lets producers sidestep sample clearance fees, and the start of a massive Google K-hole that ends up somewhere around the voice of Roc-A-Fella), to recreate the verse of Whitney Houston’s “My Love Is Your Love,” albeit with suspiciously modern inflection, to reproduce Le Youth’s favorite trick. I have spent more time fact-checking this song than I have listening to or liking it. Maybe that’s why critics would rather write about how the music makes them feel.
[6]
Crystal Leww: I’m mad about this on principle because it all comes down to industry dynamics and ego: the most famous guy (let’s be real; it’s almost always a guy) gets all the credit for doing the heavy lifting, no matter whether he deserves it or not, and the background characters get all muddled together. But politics aside, this is half the jam that “Need U (100%)” was. Dumont, in his little attempt to overreach in ambition by using Whitney Houston, ended up releasing something more complicated and less earworm-y. A*M*E not good enough for ya, Duke?
[4]
Edward Okulicz: The best thing about “My Love is Your Love” is its weary satisfaction, like how the best way to end a lifetime’s journey towards happiness it to wave your hands around like someone’s drunken aunt. Somehow, plonking part of it over steel drums makes it sound less warm and adds this weird, inappropriate tension where there had previously been a carefreeness. It feels like a waste of both the source material and the steel drums and piano, which by themselves sound fantastic.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: Kelli-Leigh isn’t Whitney, but then this isn’t “My Love Is Your Love”. That song was completely knackered but all the more happy for it, the sound of a hard-earned end to a lifetime’s search for contentment. “I Got U” takes it into a whole new context. A young, uncredited vocalist presenting her life as one in the past tense (an effect of a surreptitious secularisation of the lyrics) and of “fame and fortune” doesn’t quite make sense, but then that aside, there’s never any hint of danger. Kelli-Leigh doesn’t have the same wear in her voice as Whitney, because she’s living a charmed life of lilting pans and the sound of sun-softened sand. It’s different, but the same.
[8]