Skye Newman – Family Matters

It’s a rare condition, this day and age, to read any bad blurbs on the Jukebox page…

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Claire Davidson: I can see why, only two singles into her career, Columbia has given Skye Newman such an immediate push: it’s not everyday you happen upon a vocalist genuinely reminiscent of Amy Winehouse, albeit without the more sardonic contours that emphasized Winehouse’s gallows humor. In “Family Matters,” though, there’s little room for self-deprecation, as Newman narrates her family’s intergenerational struggles with drug addiction with a sobering bluntness, detailing the degree to which her own life has been endangered due to growing up in such an unstable environment. Newman’s candor is admirable, but the song surrounding her seems unsure of its own scope: the first verse begins as a more agonized ballad, whereas the second seems to flirt with a particularly morose form of ironic deflection, incorporating the presence of a more relaxed groove. “It is what it is” may be the song’s refrain of radical acceptance, but it’s clear Newman is looking to express a more visceral pain, leaving the remainder of the track feeling complacent by comparison.
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Julian Axelrod: Weirdly anonymous for a song with such intensely personal lyrics. Skye Newman is the T-1000 to Sky Ferreira’s Terminator, a blonde pop singer emerging to consume her like-named predecessor after a decade of dormancy.
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Leah Isobel: Not to be a grump, but this feels vaguely condescending. The petulant lyrical tone (“you’re so dramatic/ I could tell you about me/ but you won’t understand” is a real whopper of self-righteous judgment) and Skye’s showboating performance aim for gravitas but land on hamminess instead. Still, I can’t drag this too hard. Even the clumsiest attempt to confront real suffering will matter to someone; perhaps that’s enough.
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Tim de Reuse: There’s been a zillion cultural artifacts produced in the last decade about capital-T Trauma in the last decade; it’s so zeitgeisty you can’t even make an animated Disney feature without fitting the word “intergenerational” somewhere on the back of the box. At this point, one gets tired of the subject. The way Newman’s voice cracks out “it is what it is” seems refreshing in contrast; she’s offering no narrative of overcoming, just the tremble of joints under heavy weight. “A line meant two things / since I was like five” is an awkward, goofy zinger, but I wouldn’t have bought the depth of her predicament if she had put it more poetically.
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Mark Sinker: Swearing is like the sunglasses in They Live: pop them on your face at the right moment and the structures that rule us are revealed. The vocal is a seamless fiction until we get to “bastard” and suddenly it’s pure Bexleyheath. (I have no idea where in South East London’s she’s from, to be honest. This is a somewhat muddling and faraway region of London for me and anyway her shtick is apparently that she moved around a ton – but the desedimentation effect is what it is… )
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Ian Mathers: Honestly, I don’t find myself minding the way both the vocals and the lyrics feel a bit off to me, because I’m so distracted at the way the production makes me feel like someone’s homaging the first Unkle record.
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Nortey Dowuona: From sparking one career to sparking another, Boo is a true Young Money legend.
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Jel Bugle: This is totally Voice UK coded! Olly Murs and will.i.am would both turn around in their chairs. She sounds like Anne-Marie; it’s totally all right. 
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Katherine St. Asaph: The industry’s obsession with finding authentic-sounding Amy Winehouse-type singers without the inconveniently authentic volatility is rivaled only by its obsession with finding powerful-voiced soul singers without the melanin. What’s good about “Family Matters” are mostly the parts that sound like like Alicia Keys’ “Un-Thinkable”; what I in particular appreciate is how it sounds like a former American Idol fifth placer whose second post-Idol album exists solely in rural used record stores and YouTube playlists with the description “Provided to YouTube by TuneCore.” It’s pitched at a somewhat younger demographic, sure, but what separates “Family Matters” from, say, Alyssa Raghu or La’Porsha Renae or Elise Testone is less a matter of quality than the budget for marketing and expensive-sounding sounds. Newman’s lyrics are actually pretty raw, but in a straightforward way that makes them feel like raw pulpable material for AI slop (“With straightforward yet poignant lines, Newman speaks of family wounds, unmet expectations, and the desire to be seen for who she truly is, not who others want her to be,” groundbreaking really). And while none of this is really fair to Skye Newman, who isn’t responsible for the obsessions of A&R types, the allocations of record-label budgets, or the mindset of SEO bros, the context is still there.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Perfectly fine as a piece of writing, but everything about this sounds like it was composed to later be sped up and rapped over.
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Jonathan Bradley: “All happy families are alike,” wrote Tolstoy. “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Right, but that doesn’t mean every chronicle of an unhappy family is worth the Anna Karenina treatment. “I could tell you about me,” says Skye Newman, her voice a baby-croak. “But you won’t understand.” What are we doing here then?
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