We still like Disclosure more…
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[5.75]
Iain Mew: Nelson Piquet once described driving a racing car around the streets of Monaco as “like riding a bicycle around your living room.” It’s a description which comes to mind when listening to Hannah Reid’s performance on “Wasting My Young Years.” There have been other UK next-big-things with similarly forceful vocals, and there have definitely been ones with similar sparse, dim lit restraint, but putting the two together takes a unique skill. She sounds like she’s singing her heart out but still holding something back not to tread all over the track; it’s a lovely effect, and the uncertainty is a great match for all of the “maybe”s.
[8]
Anthony Easton: That falsetto wavers between the right and wrong side of annoying. The piano is cocktail bar-worthy, which means the wavering falls a bit closer to annoying, but how she seems to genuinely believe it doesn’t matter falls a bit closer to the right side. An equilibrium has been achieved then.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: Wasting your young years chasing Adele…what a waste.
[3]
Brad Shoup: Everything, from the chording to the drum work on the refrain — deployed in a way that provides more drive than the tempo would otherwise give — to Hannah Reid’s ability to constantly extract the right segment from her range, suggests some deep mystery of the soul. Then you read the title. But I can mentally blur out the callow bits; the track’s just that mournful.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: As far as spartan demixes of dance music go, this is pretty nice. Where’s the original version?
[7]
Alfred Soto: Remember Julia Fordham? An Annie Lennox without David Stewart, which is to say “Annie Lennox.” Thanks to Adele, her kind of “sophistication” might sell buckets now. The hints of a dance pulse embalm this tune by suggesting what friction the too-sensitive-by-half vocal could have used.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Are we sure this isn’t Eliza Doolittle? Because ten seconds of her artificially plummy, unenunciated tone and I feel like Henry Higgins.
[5]
Will Adams: Hannah Reid’s lump-in-throat timbre captures the lyrics’ ambivalence effectively. Words like “fine” and “maybe” and “I don’t know” are meant to land softly, to not give anything away, to keep the burden off the other person. But the music betrays what’s at stake with crescendos as small as letting a sigh leave your lips. It’s a touching contrast, though the music seems too tasteful, as if to imply that something more honest lurks beneath
[7]