We’ve reviewed it as if it isn’t a track off a free album, as you can see.
[Video]
[5.29]
Jonathan Bogart: To: Drake Re: Recent career direction. THIS is how you do self-involved shame-spiral everything-loathing r&b. Best, Jonathan.
[8]
Anthony Easton: The sound of bubbles rising to the surface is basically the same sound Facebook uses to tell me that I am chatting with someone. I wonder if this is deliberate? “Smooth and placid as a way of indicating anger and the ability to commit violence” is a long constructed trope, and this does it as well as anything.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Biographical criticism is often misleading; it’s also exactly what Terius is begging you to try here, and I still don’t know whether it’s deliberate or despite himself. The guitar line plods and ploughs the earth, the pad presses me into the ground that’s crackled by the static, and I’m almost sunk. But every so often a line will cut too close, like the “socialite” aside, or “stop acting like a girlfriend… if you’re surprised you’re here, it means you shouldn’t be here,” and suddenly I’m not singing along but sung at. Then I think of Christina Milian, who’s done nothing to me, and it’s physically sickening. So I guess this is another “Novacane,” an emotional direct hit that works too well to ever want to hear again. If only more of the women involved would record their sides of the story.
[8]
Alfred Soto: At his best Terius Nash creates a kind of musicotherapy, babbling his psychosexual torment into our ears. When he’s lazy though the therapy floats in a thin gruel of tasty licks and enervated synths, with a lyrical tag the only example of imaginative strain. This thing falls in the second category.
[4]
Brad Shoup: Imagine Curtis Mayfield taking time off from Back to the World to score an eyerolling contest with Leroy Sibbles. Surely Def Jam keeps a psychiatrist on retainer? You think the Chili Peppers are flattered by the lift from “Californication”?
[2]
Edward Okulicz: That little snatch of female vocal reminds me so much of Shaznay Lewis I’d be interested in hearing its origin. Which is more interest than I could muster over a stale guitar line. That having been said, the self-harmonising is as rich and smooth as you’d expect on a great The-Dream song. Which this isn’t.
[5]
Mallory O’Donnell: Is The-Dream weird? Yes. Is The-Dream progressive? Yes. Is listening to this about as exciting as changing the trash bin liner? Yesssssssssssssssss.
[4]