Teddy Riley produced this! Or should that be: Teddy Riley produced this?
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[4.00]
Iain Mew: Good voice, pretty well put together, but I liked it much better when it was called “Beautiful Monster”.
[5]
Brad Shoup: In dealing with mystical arcana in pop music, I like to refer to the Michael Jackson Gradation of the Occult. Sadly, all the Green Gartside impressions in the world couldn’t push this damp song past Level 1 — “Ben” — from which one could at least infer the threat, however remote, of leptospirosis.
[1]
Jer Fairall: This kid does a credible imitation of Michael Jackson anguish, and he looks young (however buff) enough for the song to wring plausible tension out of his guilt over trading more wholesome (spiritual?) concerns for pleasures of the flesh. His naiveté is actually cute rather than sexist, as long as you recognize that he hasn’t yet learned how to differentiate the woman as a person from whatever it is he feels he’s sacrificing of himself. It’s something he needs to grow out of, and hopefully will soon, though I’d prefer he grow out of this kind of third rate boy band mush even sooner, and the delusion that he doesn’t need to hire guests to do his rap verses sooner still.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: Kid can dance; kid can sing; somewhat more surprisingly, kid can rap. On this evidence, however, kid can’t do all of those in a song that raises my interest above the tepid.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Mild-voiced, mild hysteria. Ne-Yo’s specialty, but with no record out the disciples crawl out of the shadows. But this young fella already sounds as if his handlers had Pro Tooled the life out of him: a voice with no quirks, lyrics with no furtive turns of phrase, and a beat that’s top ten bound. They hope.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: Well, that answers the question “what possessed him to rap?” Transforming him into Ne-Yo, sadly, would require services no succubus can offer.
[5]