Phweer-neer, ne-nee-nerr, phweer-neer, ne-nee-nerr…
[Video][Website]
[6.15]
Chuck Eddy: Subtracting all the humor and irony from the old White Town hit (sung by a man — which was its whole fucking point), not to mention somehow making it feel even more frozen, suggests these people are stupid. Or at least the woman is. And Wiley pretty much just sounds bored.
[4]
Ian Mathers: Wiley and Emeli Sandé don’t just speed the chorus up a bit, they give it a subtly different emphasis (and not just because it’s now being sung by a female), and the result goes perfectly with the nicely low-key ebb and flow of the production here. Even Wiley, while his usual frenetic self, isn’t quite as in-your-face as he normally is, which suits a track as quietly propulsive and sneakily addictive as this.
[7]
Iain Mew: Just a touch too uneventful to truly love, but pulls off an excellent trick that I’ve only ever heard once before – that of being built around an element not being present. Less the imperial sampled march of the White Town version, with only distant echoes of it in the deep bass, this take’s tension is magnified as a result. Everything sounds even more disquietingly roomy as it waits and waits for a release that never quite emerges. [7]
Alfred Soto: It kicks up lots of dust, but when it’s over I don’t know what just happened. The accelerated pseudo horrorcore sample ubiquitous in the nineties makes a reappearance, annoyingly.
[5]
David Moore: The original’s tinny horn hook could have been a dentist drill to 90’s nostalgia, an automatic “8” on principle, even — maybe especially — for Flo Rida. But here it’s smothered in a low, burbling mess, over which Emeli Sandé does a pointlessly tasteful homage and Wiley, barely present, alludes to a much better song he did once. I think it was about a watch.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: Just like when Tyler James covered “Your Woman”, Wiley badly misunderstands what worked about the original. He strips out the yearning, psychosexual drama and ambiguity that made the original such a shock, to make a song that commands no attention whatsoever. Emeli Sandé’s vocals and the interpolation of that famous old record are so tasteful – there’s nothing interesting going on, and as for Wiley’s presence – he’s like a spectre trying to float above but being drowned out in the (barely audible) din. Maybe he thought that the source was so good it couldn’t fail, but this does.
[2]
Alex Macpherson: It’s pretty damn satisfying to hear the weediness that dragged “Your Woman”‘s catchiness down to mediocrity replaced with Emeli Sandé’s sultry murmurs and buffed up with a house beat and smoothly textured synths. But the way in which Wiley uses White Town goes beyond merely recontextualising a familiar hook; “Never Be Your Woman” crafts a narrative of its own that’s compelling enough to make you forget all about the flawed original. He’s always been a better producer than an MC, but this is possibly Wiley’s finest vocal performance yet, completely inhabiting a dislikeable character without rendering him unsympathetic. He’s terse, snappy, pushing past queues and treating women like shit, but this imperceptibly turns to numbness in processing the sensory affects of another unfamiliar flat — “air freshener, Wild Orchid”. His final attempt to restake authority is empty – “Sighted with another woman in Shoreditch / It’s my house, I pay the mortgage” — the women who cut their losses having long gone.
[9]
Kat Stevens: This is a queasy old claustrophobe of a track. No snare or kick drum, the barest hint of the original synth melody slipping through the cracks, a ghostly Emeli dancing around her words like she’s never heard Jyoti’s miserable monotone. Wiley’s matter-of-fact yabbering about recognising the flavour of a particular Glade Plug-In is the only solid element that makes this a song, as opposed to a mirage.
[4]
Martin Skidmore: Emeli Sandé sounds great on this, smoky and sexy. There’s a lot of her, and not so much Wiley: he is on slightly muted form, maybe because the pulsing house beats don’t offer so much in the way of dynamism for him to ride, but also lyrically he doesn’t seem quite to be in the same song as the chorus. I’m a fan of Wiley, but this is good almost despite him.
[7]
Martin Kavka: This is an object lesson in the importance of production, even for a song that might seem predestined by its interpolation of big chunks of a classic. Naughty Boy’s original version is a deep affair; both Wiley and Sandé come off as lonely folk who need to drown their sorrows in another song after “Kun For Mig” ends. On the other hand, the video, set to a remix by Shy FX, repeats the string line sampled in the White Town track, and everything becomes far more joyful, as if Wiley and Sandé are relieved never to see each other again.
[7]
Matt Cibula: The crooning is delicious, the raps are sharp, but it’s the heffalumps and woozles of the beat that do me head in innit.
[8]
Doug Robertson: It’s dark and miserable. The orange flare of the street lights are distorted in the puddles and this is the late night soundtrack filling the air as you think over the evening‘s events. Musically tinged with an air of regret that’s at odds with the braggadocio in the lyrics, Wiley almost comes across as vulnerable, while Emeli’s chorus makes her sound resigned to her fate. Nothing makes you feel more alive than the pain of heartache, no matter how much you might wish you weren‘t. This is the sound of slow feet on cold concrete and it rarely sounds so beautiful.
[9]