Katy B – Crying For No Reason

There’s a reason you haven’t heard of Katy A, Katy C, Katy D…

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[7.33]Alfred Soto: The sincere piano chords and lines about confronting fears scared the hell out of me: Katy’s gone Ryan Tedder on us. Then the second verse picks up the face by putting the synths on flicker mode, turning the song into late nineties Kylie — the Kylie who thought she could philosophize her way off the dance floor, the greatest classroom devised by man. Or she might have listened to mate Jessie Ware’s record.
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Anthony Easton: The last fifteen seconds of this are so layered, baroque and condensed that it becomes a fascinating transhistorical artifact about the nature of disco. The rest of it is marred by a voice that just refuses to commit.
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Scott Mildenhall: This could be massive; it could very easily pass with as little fanfare as Katy B’s last two singles. It certainly seems to want to be massive, and that’s highly uncharacteristic — even irrespective of who it’s by, it comes as a bit of a shock to hear on the radio. It’s not that it’s unusual to hear vulnerability — it’s not even like there isn’t a lot of vulnerability in “5AM” or “Broken Record” — but rarely is there such an absolute low, exposed and reinforced repeatedly and harder and harder; a pummeling sadness beyond resolution. It could be hammy, but somehow it’s not.
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Iain Mew: The lyrics wallow, but nothing else does. In fact, Katy’s performance is one of quietly assured strength, backed up by restrained electro that sounds nothing like losing control, though it’s thrilling when it kicks in. Which for a song called “Crying For No Reason” ends up making a brilliant kind of sense — it’s a great way to express emotional release as a means of taking control of buried feelings, even without understanding what they are yet.
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Brad Shoup: It’s a hell of a performance and a nightmare of a production: no prominent melodic or percussive outcropping (though both the pneumatic slap on the two and four and the wah-wah house riff, both stashed ’til the end, could’ve suited). It’s really a gale-force apology, gaining speed as it nears landfall.
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Katherine St Asaph: X Factor trance made luminous by its singer.
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