Why was her cover of “Peg” not a worldwide Number One? Who can say.
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Jer Fairall: Brings back not at all unpleasant, yet not at all necessary memories of Texas’ “Say What You Want.”
[5]
Brad Shoup: It’s a bit distressing to hear a sudden thinness in Pallot’s upper range, especially since she’s helming a muscular slice of VH1 R&B. The guitars flex melodic, even bringing “Stand By Me” to mind for the brief bridge. The force of the track turns the “Area Man Solves Difficult Woman” headline sideways: greed becomes good. I’m just hungry for more control.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Nerina’s voice builds linearly, while the instruments grow exponentially; by chorus two, her voice is dwarfed. If this track can’t make her soar, how am I supposed to believe love can?
[6]
Iain Mew: It’s… very pretty. Which of course is the sort of thing I say because I like all the sounds but can’t find anything in them or the words or the voice to latch onto and actually love and the song keeps slipping straight past me even when I try to listen hard. Except there’s the one moment which leaps out a mile – the sudden roar of the guitar crashing in during the second verse and everything getting twice as loud. That much at least is startling and thrilling and leaves a feeling of energy which stays with the song a while past that point.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: It’s certainly not the song’s fault that the Related Videos made me think it was going to be some awful/sublime European dance-cheese fest. (I should have looked closer for the relationship; there’s a fairly common song title embedded here.) But with that in the back of my head, I couldn’t hear “yet another white girl singing in a pop/folk mode, you know, with Real Instruments” as anything but kind of watery and washed out. It does eventually work its way into a sort of twee ekstasis, but I can’t help thinking it would be much improved by a synthetic pulse.
[6]
Zach Lyon: I’ve been waiting all year for us to review a song that I can describe as sounding like “the type of music I’d hear at work;” meant pejoratively, of course, as I would be talking about the type of for-middle-aged-white-people acoustic tripe that can only be defined by its inoffensiveness, music that wouldn’t even make the soundtrack to a Caribou Coffee shop let alone a Starbucks, faceless music that is meant to tolerated by the widest common denominator and is thus enjoyed by no one. (Also, zydeco. White boomers theoretically appreciate the fuck out of zydeco.) At certain points in certain excruciating days, “the music I’d hear at work” is the worst thing I could possibly say about a song. Well, now that I’m quitting, I guess I have to use it up now, because at its worst, “Put Your Hands Up” sends me there. That is, before the strings hit, and even then, I don’t know how it’d sound pallidly farting through the speakers high above the dining room. Maybe that’s the thing: maybe all those crappy songs I hear would sound this good through my car speakers. And with lively strings. Lively, beautiful strings. Probably not, though.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: When Kylie Minogue’s people passed on this song, Nerina should have offered it to the Noisettes, as it sounds like a close cousin of their “Never Forget You.” That’s a compliment, and Shingai Shoniwa would have absolutely nailed this vocally; Pallot herself doesn’t have the power to sing like she wants you to feel. When the volume stays low her voice, and the strings that bounce off it, are good enough to carry the tune. But if it were any more excitable, she’d sound even more buried. Even so, the song is strong enough to stand out.
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