The Singles Jukebox

Whatever you’re singing about, PhilPhil, we don’t feel the same way.

[Video][Website]
[2.90]

Will Adams: Wet match, more like.
[3]

Cédric Le Merrer: Full disclosure: my previous job involved working with Universal to use their artists as “brand content” providers. I didn’t have a say into which artist would be foisted upon me, so when they insisted on Phillip Phillips, my qualms about him being completely unknown in our market didn’t register. I kept my opinion on his utter blandness, though, as it really fit well with our brand’s non-existent personality. Still, I had a hard time finding what distinctive content Phillip Phillips could bring to fill our desperately empty vessel. We ended up doing a social media contest around how he’s wearing a lot of checkered shirts, and you, social media user, probably do too, right? Nobody really engaged with our poor brand. The whole thing was a complete waste of everybody’s time. The point of this pitiful story is that, when listening to this new song, I pity the next guy to whom Universal will push Phillip Phillips as content provider.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: RA-retreat-at-a-quarry transcendentalism, which always sells well. Also lucrative: the poppiest parts of “I Will Wait” and “Waking Up in Vegas,” that lilt at the end of the chorus that’s lifted note-for-note from something, actually probably multiple somethings, the particular passion of a discreetly multitracked chorus.
[3]

Alfred Soto: A Mumfordized Dave Matthews prototype, strumming furiously and with meaning, will burn you with his raging fire of Quaker Oats.
[1]

Brad Shoup: Of all the things ghosts can do, bringing you down is perhaps the least writerly. But I’m sure that Phillips is haunted by naught but the Holy Ghost, which would explain the atrophied muscle on display. The strings yearn to dance but are denied. Phillips aches to connect, but he doesn’t have the vocab, or even the vocals. This is so mushy I can’t imagine even my old youth group pumping this.
[1]

Patrick St. Michel: American Idol winner filling the void left by Mumford And Sons nobody was clamoring for.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: Isn’t it strange how things link up? Avicii took sounds that code American and donked them up a bit. At the end of last year his compatriot Kevin Walker, the latest winner of Sweden’s Idol, watered that down to watery effect. Now, presumably independently, Phillip Phillips has something that sounds like that, but with all traces of donk removed. So it’s like being back at square one — it even basically sounds like a Winner’s Song — but with hallmarks of a journey that it probably hasn’t actually taken. In any case, the core has wound up hollow.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: I don’t get it. I’m scanning the credits of this looking for at least Ryan Tedder as one of the lyricists, and he’s not there — “live until we die” in a song about a “raging fire” of passion or something is exactly the sort of misstep he’s really made his own. Oh, there’s a credit for the guy who worked with Train and Five for Fighting. I get it now — “Raging Fire” is a bunch of big, crowd-pleasing but ultimately weightless shoutalongs with absolutely no guts or self-belief in the delivery. “Come out, come out,” Phillips sings, as if beckoning me to buy raffle tickets or join his youth group. Whatever story this song is trying to tell/sell with its wide-eyed earnestness, it’s barely even a synopsis. A waste of a decent string-‘n’-chug opener.
[4]

Anthony Easton: For all of the passion, this is so profoundly sexless. I mean this is the general argument against the genre, but one is never quite sure who is turning the soul into which fire, but even Wesley’s “strange warming of the heart” had more energy and more desire than this, and that is assuming he is talking about Jesus. If he is talking about a sexual object, well that just makes me sad for the object of choice. 
[4]

Megan Harrington: Do you know what will live even after we die? Church camp. Enjoy your Phillip Phillips celebratory banjo and acoustic guitar recital sing along, future children of 2146! 
[2]