Really, we didn’t plan the score this way…

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Alfred Soto: Mariah Carey released an album called Caution in 2019. Brief and tuneful, it made something out of its guest appearances and Carey’s middle aged helium wheeze vocal performances. She and Jam & Lewis coast through “Somewhat Loved,” though “coast” is the wrong verb for a tune with such a burdensome verse and rinkydink chorus. 
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Katherine St Asaph: Like trying to recapture the glorious past if that part of you that contained the past’s glory and gut and glee got hollowed out years ago. Which is to say that while Jam & Lewis’s production is authentically effervescent, Mariah’s voice sounds hollow, and that in turn deflates the track.
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Edward Okulicz: Jam & Lewis aren’t rehashing their glory days but rehashing someone else’s. The mid-section with Mariah’s whistle register is great, though, and a little funky too. Without that, you’ve got a largely frictionless mid-90s R&B sort of thing of the type a contemporaneous J&L production would have sounded epic and thrilling next to.
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Samson Savill de Jong: Jam & Lewis tried to prevent this song from being boring by switching the beat up in at least three distinct ways. They failed.
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Nortey Dowuona: The piano and gossamer synths gather around Mariah’s fluttery flow. Mariah hovers in her higher register, perfect yet disembodied, as each drum progression hammers down. Her voice swallows the piano and synths whole as the bass cycles the pedestrian drums, which simply keep time as Mariah, Jam and Lewis vamp right out.
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Oliver Maier: Total glamour and consummate sleekness. The feeling that Jam & Lewis and Mariah are trying to out-dazzle the other via their respective contributions pushes this beyond feeling perfunctory into being at least a little bit enchanting.
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Thomas Inskeep: This all comes down to the chorus, which gives you what you want, meaning classic-sounding Mariah. In this case, that’s a serious callback to the piano of “Always Be My Baby” — ironically not a Jam & Lewis record but one by Jermaine Dupri — and the bridge, which features the whistle tone. The verses are a little wispy, a little nothing. And don’t examine the lyrics too closely. But the chorus? That’s the stuff.
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