Bri’ish boy band takes a page from Bruno Mars.
[Video][Website]
[3.44]
Katherine St Asaph: JLS just leaves it there, afraid of a love affair. And I think they know that they jacked Bruno.
[2]
Brad Shoup: “You give 100%, but you’ve never seen a cent,” goes the line, which is probably as honest as a songwriter-for-hire can get. I’m certain the drum programming took up the majority of billed hours; the least, Googling “Bruno Mars + litigious.”
[3]
Jonathan Bradley: There’s actually a nice rolling R&B feel to this instrumental, even if the intro is a public domain take on “Empire State of Mind.” If Usher hadn’t sold his soul to David Guetta and will.i.am, he could have wrought something rather pretty from it. These wispy boy band tones are tasked with turning a nice tune into a memorable song, however, and they’re a whine too far.
[3]
Iain Mew: They don’t do a bad job of the harmonies, but this is so fluffy and lightweight that it’s easy to forget it’s playing. Only the unusual cut off half way through a line at the end demands to be noticed. I suppose the short turnaround time on ripping off the chorus from “Lighters” is impressive, if nothing else.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Singers make all the difference. So do chord changes. Why didn’t these youngsters let Ne-Yo doctor this song into something worthy of the top five?
[4]
Kat Stevens: Weirdly reminiscent of Atomic Kitten! Alas not in a good way.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: A criticism I seem to recall from about 10 years ago is that UK pop music would never fly anywhere else because it sounded so cheap. I really thought things had changed since then, but “Take a Chance On Me” already sounds far more dated than the average Blue single, and the opening is a little close to Atomic Kitten’s “If You Come To Me” for my tastes.
[3]
Hazel Robinson: With the changing of the clocks come the winter-season singles. There’s a particular art to making a pop song sound cosy and this manages it, but without the sentimentalism of, say, Holding On For You by Liberty X or the darkness of any of Abba’s melancholia, so it just misses out on the spirals of evaporating breath and crisp frostiness of about a month’s time, instead getting some sense of scarves laden with lingering October damp. Which is an evocation of something, at least, but not quite the sort of romance I think it wants.
[7]
Zach Lyon: It’s really much better when you don’t turn it on and just let ABBA get in your head.
[3]