Change one letter and we could’ve used this…
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[6.29]
Josh Langhoff: “Real” creates tension between its words, longing for a time when life seemed more vibrant and immediate, and its music, irreducible and evocative of nothing outside its own sleek danceability. (Well, maybe it evokes a show where damaged people hail cabs on rainy nights; maybe that’s just me.) The song is the thing but it claims otherwise. Something exists even realer than my twitching torso. I dig the three-against-four bits.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Disco lasers scatter across smooth water, disrupting the gruff of one voice and the smooth of another. A little lonely, but more delightfully artificial — especially for a song obsessed with a relationship’s authenticity.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: The ultimate sadness of this is that although Yasmin feels they’ve reached “the end of the road”, it doesn’t quite sound like things are over. It’s totally the sound of things all being a bit rubbish, petering out to a conclusion of absolute nothingness (one of the finest effects a song can create), but that’s just it: they still are petering out. That moody ticking noise that sounds a bit like the clucking of a metallic hen (technical term) feels like it’s grinding to a halt, but it never actually gets any slower. Worn down by the monotony, Yasmin’s never actually going to verbalise these thoughts, not any time soon.
[8]
Jer Fairall: That spidery pan-ethnic synth bit that occasionally spreads out across the track like an unwelcome vine vividly suggests either a manifestation of the song’s fractured emotional subject matter (“we used to be real” but, whatever “real” means, “we” aren’t it any more) or a boredom with the careful austerity of this brand of club track. The tension is compelling enough, but having opened the door to let in some discordance, I would have welcomed a bit more of it.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Getting shown up by waltz-time synth plink? Hard to recover from.
[4]
Crystal Leww: I’m a sucker for this wave of house that seems to be popular right now, so predictably I love this. The brief interlude seems a little forced with that pinging taking center stage in the production as opposed to playing a fun bit role. Did someone want a drop or something? Thankfully, it quickly returns to what works. Yasmin is even allowed to riff a little bit in the end on what had largely been a restrained vocal performance. I can imagine the whole song playing in an art gallery or a part of it playing in a club.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: Credit to Gorgon City for allowing plenty of space for Yasmin to sing, as her vocals (especially the way she can stretch out words) are the highlight on “Real”. That’s about the only compelling element here, though.
[5]