The plot of this video isn’t exactly subtle…

[Video][Myspace]
[5.38]

Al Shipley: She’s mothered children by both Lil Wayne and The-Dream shortly before they both became two of the most ubiquitous, unstoppable forces in popular music, which might make Nivea the anti-Erykah Badu. Her own ear for hitmaking (or even just singing) is still nonexistent, though.
[3]

John Seroff: You know how it is when you hear an artist and remember that you meant to listen to more of their music and then forgot? That’s Nivea for me; a musician who floored me with every single I heard (“Laundromat”, “OK”, “25 Reasons”) but somehow never followed up to find out who she was and what else she did. A big thanks to the Jukebox for this overdue reminder in the form of a sloppy goodbye kiss rendered in the highest of drama; I’m soon off to go hunting for the Japanese-only/The-Dream produced Animalistic, but “Love Hurts” will absolutely keep me busy till then.
[8]

Martin Skidmore: She does sound throatily pained, but the music washes along muddily to no great effect, and the song rather drones. I found it a rather miserable experience to listen to, despite it being more or less my kind of thing.
[3]

Doug Robertson: I can’t remember if I’ve heard Nivea before or not. Her bio suggests I have, but there’s a big gaping hole in my memory where her tracks should be. It’s not going to be filled by this, although this is filler of the most generic kind, destined to fill that awkward gap between the news and the first ad break of whichever local radio station that you listen to at work, but nowhere where you actually have a choice in the matter.
[4]

Chuck Eddy: Passable emoting of a so-what storyline, and the chorus gets beauty from its quasi Middle Eastern undulations. But in the words of another, far better “Love Hurts” from daze gone by: Some fools fool themselves, I guess. They’re not fooling me.
[5]

Mark Sinker: The cloud of your own multi-tracked voices as a miasma of pain goes all the way back to Robert Wyatt, and this is a lovely summery half-senseless delivery of same, even if the tape-wind breakdown device makes no sense as drama and nearly derails the intro: it doesn’t know what it’s there to do (and it’s a trick that’s surely never not irritating these post-tape days). A passing Hazel Robinson disapproves the beat — which OK, I didn’t especially take against till it was pointed out — but the pre-romantic part-writing and asymmetry of the songshape are gorgeous deft devious ways to make anger private confusion into something so pervasive that all you have left to do is luxuriate in it.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Auto-Tune droids, take notice: this is what an emotion sounds like. Rough around the edges, sung to the breaking point and almost uncomfortable to listen to (and to watch, at least the parts with a dream-sequence Wayneblur). Don’t worry, you still get to keep your lush production. You’ll just make it add up to something! That’s not so hard, right?
[8]

Chris Boeckmann: Really strange production. I feel like I’m wading in molasses, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except the song is totally unremarkable: competent but generic ‘love hurts’ material that Mary J and a handful of other R&B stars passed on.
[4]