Goldfrapp – Drew

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[6.70]Edward Okulicz: The arrangement reminds me of a more organic “Lovely Head” — still their pinnacle — and the use of voice is as inventive and ear-catching as anything else they’ve done. Had this been Goldfrapp’s first single, it would have pre-emptively made sense of a lot of the genre-hopping that characterised their first four albums. As their most recent, it’s a testament to the skill they’ve shown throughout.
[8]

Daisy Le Merrer: On “Drew,” Goldfrapp are going backwards through their own discography, gradually sliding from Seventh Tree acoustic minimalism to Felt Mountain dramatics, proving the thematic unity behind their genre-skipping albums. They don’t include the electro-sexiness of Black Cherry, though, but I also hear some the airiness of Head First. Goldfrapp have always been great at self-presentation, so they probably were bound to get into self-mythologising (or at least self-reference) at some point, and they’re doing it with the same flair.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Seriously? This enervated, drippy thing is a single? They paid money for those strings?
[4]

John Seroff: I’m torn. Part of me is drawn to the gently dreamy and theatrical James Bond chansonesque charms of “Drew”; a more cynical part can’t help but be reminded of Matt Besser’s “Everything Can Be a Musical” Bjork impression. This is something of a Beaujolais Nouveau: light, clean and pleasant but with little depth and not much legs.
[6]

Iain Mew: “We might as well melt into Sunday.” Gosh. Did you find “A&E” beautiful but just a bit too energised and hopeful? Goldfrapp have just the song for you, and just enough bass string hits to stop it from collapsing under the weight of its listlessness.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: If someone heard Seventh Tree and commissioned the musicians for a big-budget film, you would get this. Sometimes big budgets pay off.
[8]

Brad Shoup: In the interest of boosting my last.fm artist count satisfying an aesthetic itch, today I’ve spent a couple hours binging on movie themes. I love the classic, Blockbuster-Era Hollywood score for its remove, for believing grandiosity belongs on any human scale. The right cloud of strings and brass becomes a giant’s caress. And that’s what’s here: music for conjuring solitude, a tin roof for a day-long rainstorm. Rolling Silvestri strings (or are they Williams’s?) send Goldfrapp’s perfectly resolving sigh of a melody breaking upon the beach again and again. Imagine a Bond theme written for a dying archvillain.
[9]

Scott Mildenhall: Goldfrapp seem to be in perpetual flux between electro and sort-of-folkiness, often with astonishing results, as their all-killer-no-filler-save-for-the-new-ones singles compilation attests. What it also attests though is that when, as here, the coin lands on “folky”, the best (“Lovely Head”! “A&E”! “Happiness”!) still come with a pop sensibility; a tune, decidedly not as here. At times it just feels like the least eventful ever Bond theme; very pretty, but not particularly compelling.
[6]

Will Adams: A stale puff of a song, made staler by unnatural-sounding guitar arpeggios and string hits. I’m not opposed to letting computers play the instruments, but a song aiming to sound as pretty as this wants should at least try to be human. Even then, though, “Drew” is a bore and a chore, meandering for four and a half minutes without any payoff. I know Head First was stuffy, but did anyone really want another Seventh Tree?
[3]

Anthony Easton: Perfect summer music — in the glacial coolness of melting ice through the veins of the listener sense, not in the drink and party and dance sense. Alison Goldfrapp’s formal melancholia continues to rest west of Nico and north of Cohen, which is lovely.
[7]