Partly we’re including this because of the GREATEST VIDEO EVER…
[Video][Website]
[6.86]
Anthony Easton: ’70s funk and ’90s country give birth to a full-throttled rock vocal with some R&B accents. I am looking forward to spending the rest of the year watching Melanie Fiona work, even if she vastly overrates her ability to burn that mother down or create something new. Novelty is overrated.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Tucked away late into Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid, this might have been a welcome diversion back into “Tightrope” territory as the album grew increasingly and uncomfortably ornate, but as a showpiece it is a game yet inferior wannabe. If you’re gonna do derivative, though, best to have horns that sound this eager, guitars that drip with such sleaze and snarl, and a vocalist this adept at working the room.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Thanks to a flat drum part and lyrics on the boring side of positivism, Fiona’s attempt at rock ‘n’ blues isn’t quite the something different or new that’s advertised, but her vocal is sexy and fine.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: There was a time in the early ’90s when hard rock and diva R&B weren’t mutually exclusive. “Free Your Mind”, “If”, “Scream”, and more (list ’em in the comments!) set fierce vocals against equally fierce guitars, and “Watch Me Work” imagines an alternate history where that strain didn’t die out, only got tuffer, so that Fiona’s unmistakably post-millennial vocals rub jagged against garage-rock guitars and Detroit horns, and the scream and sass makes a space where something like the righteous rage of the more-film-study-collage-than-music-video is possible.
[9]
Iain Mew: So many empty clichés about how amazing Melanie is going to be, but she never lingers on them too much, and the song thumps and whoops away just hard and fast enough to get away with it.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Incredibly, the beat-combo guitar is seamless. It’s a decline-of-Wigan Northern Soul tune, a four-on-the-floor stomper with Fiona providing the muscular vocal that curators often had to make do without.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: This could be a filler single from the best era for music ever. 2012 is not that era, so this sounds fucking fantastic; you can’t help imagining, though, the phenomenal track beyond the sass and guitars. Maybe it exists in the badass-pastiche of a video?
[7]