Sadly not a Jedward cover…
[Video][Website]
[5.75]
Scott Mildenhall: Perhaps if Oritsé Williams was high enough up the JLS pecking order to land presenting gigs with Global Media, this would have the airplay Luvbug just happen to receive. On the basis of how good it would sound on the radio, it probably should. It’s a low-key earworm, pulsing with tempered emotion that stops just short of reaching a climax, the dangled hook lingering as it ultimately drifts away. Radio rewards the repeatable, and this rewards repeats.
[7]
Kat Stevens: Surprisingly thoughtful debut solo effort from Ortise. Rather than loudly pronouncing his impact from the mountain top, he’s realistic about having to start again from the foothills and is calmly, determinedly, striding his way back up to his former heights.
[6]
Will Adams: Ortise Williams’s boy-band origins probably explain those high-register indulgences; they clash with the track’s smoothness. But those minor hiccups can be entirely forgiven for that gorgeous backdrop of pitch-drifting synths and muted guitar pedal tone. Pusha T enters for as long as is necessary, bringing a rhythmic bassline with him, then allows the song to swirl like cream in coffee.
[7]
Mo Kim: First listen, but damn, I can already imagine listening to this as I walk through my neighborhood past midnight. The wind will be so cold it’ll bite my face off. Sometimes you don’t appreciate warmth until you go outside.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Talk about a weird date: King Push gets surly over OWS’s obsessive ticky-tock guitar. The first part is anonymous and awful, but I’m a sucker for those guitar parts so long as I don’t have to figure out what the hell “You’ve hit me way down below the water” means.
[3]
Jonathan Bradley: A British boy-band alum finds the R&B in arena-rock balladry, and it’s a welcome discovery. It turns out there’s soul in Snow Patrol, and its chilled restraint refreshes even without offering anything in the way of sustenance. Another discovery: that of Pusha T, who’s finally found a place where his concrete syllables aren’t welcome — especially when these eight perfunctory bars contain none of the pungent grandeur he regularly summons with his interplay of allusion and elision.
[6]
Micha Cavaseno: You know, there are some who will say that its a wonderful thing that Pusha T has been able to leave the one-dimensionality of rhyming about cocaine over the stuff that sounds like a cash register falling down a set of stairs. THOSE PEOPLE ARE WRONG. Its funny how he brings up the abyss, because this song is ABYS-MAL. Bonus point for the atonal synths whining beneath the Coldplay hop-along of this junk.
[3]
Andy Hutchins: A Pusha T verse once helped a former boybander shoot to megastardom on his first proper single. This weird nine-bar one with a truly unnecessary dismount will not, though the oceanic production here certainly fits the song’s title.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: I like the fact that people are imitating the ’80s blue-eyed soul moves of dudes like Miguel and Twin Shadow from a couple years back, but Pusha’s verse skips abruptly to the early ’90s, and I’m left revising my mental comparison sheet to include PM Dawn.
[6]
Ian Mathers: That close-up, grainy little sample anchoring the production sounds a bit like Massive Attack’s “Antistar” reconfigured to slightly less bleak ends, and OWS sells the hell out of the ambivalence and eventual commitment of the lyrics over it. I kind of figured the title would wind up in some sort of wince-inducing metaphor, but it’s actually well-deployed. The song might start out, as he sings, “a little bit cold, a little bit choked,” but it’s moving enough I’d like it even without King Push, who delivers a fine, brief verse (I especially like the abyss line) without ever stealing the spotlight.
[8]
Iain Mew: I appreciate how this sounds cool and sleek but is also, in its self-pity and conditional pleading, a sweeter “Beat Again.”
[7]
Brad Shoup: That snare is so terrible. It’s like a cricket getting stomped mid-chirp. He’s On Weeknd’s Sound, I guess, but he’s ended up more in Zhu’s territory. For Pusha, the skip asserts itself, but “oceans, timeless, the abyss” is about all he has to add. Sad teenz deserve more.
[4]