Friday, August 28th, 2009

Taio Cruz – Break Your Heart

He’s the British Ne-Yo, allegedly…



[Video][Website]
[6.25]

Michaelangelo Matos: It took a moment to realize who he reminded me of vocally: Adam Levine. Which is weird, because it took looking up his bio (Nigerian-Jamaican Londoner) and watching the video (party-on-a-boat flirting contest) to make me realize it, and neither of those things really matched up with what I was hearing, or hearing in his voice. Either way, he’s got such an easy way with the vocal, and the synths are so agreeably bouncy, that this could have been a summer jam if I’d only heard it a month earlier.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Ryan Tedder with Auto-Tune joins Haddaway.
[3]

Hillary Brown: Oh, my, this is a face full of adorable, spacey meringue. Light like a cloud or buoyant like an astronaut, whatever metaphor you choose probably doesn’t capture its fabulous charms.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: Pleasant, forgettable, borderline beautiful in parts, with eh-eh-eh hiccups I could possibly grow to like and synths I already do. (Do those count as “two-step”? Or is that long extinct?)
[6]

Martin Skidmore: The backing synths are a bit busy for my liking, but the music has a full-bodied liveliness, and he’s a decent R&B singer, with a pleasing huskiness. The chorus is genuinely catchy too.
[8]

Martin Kavka: Never has assholishness been so charming. In part it’s because the beat moves along at such a crisp pace that there’s little time to reflect on what’s really at stake in the lyric, but it’s also because the lyric is honest and self-aware without being melodramatic, and the strength that exudes from that place is incredibly hot. This is why people fall for bad boys.
[9]

Alex Ostroff: An avowed heartbreaker warning us away should sound menacing or torn or…anything but blank, really.
[5]

Frank Kogan: Well-scrubbed international Celtic-or-something mish-mush music, instantly gleaming and pleasing, and then it worms its way into blandness and out of my heart even as it promises to break it.
[5]

3 Responses to “Taio Cruz – Break Your Heart”

  1. Fine, but there’s basically no reason for this to exist when will.i.am feat. Cheryl Cole – “Heartbreaker” already does. [6]

  2. Matos right on with Levine comparison.

  3. Would this have hit #1 in the US without the (crap?) Ludacris cameo?