Wednesday, October 15th, 2014

The Veronicas – You Ruin Me

The Veronicas: Grouse


[Video][Website]
[3.73]

Micha Cavaseno:
About a perfect midway point between Christina Perri’s “Jar Of Hearts” sense of grandeur and Rihanna’s “Take A Bow” in theme, The Veronicas go for the ballad and just kind of make it happen. The verses are awkward and ungainly, and the bridge falters before returning to the hook that I’m just not riding for in any sense. Pretty weak overall, and not inspiring trust to invest in their grasps for maturity.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: Songs that have genuinely just been removed from the depthless, near-deathless Heart playlist: “Counting Stars”, “Just Give Me A Reason”, “Locked Out Of Heaven”. A song just added: this. So with a degree of implausibility, it has a shot at ubiquity. Australian hits tend not to have a pathway to the UK — it can take “4ever” for one to appear, 4years late — but perhaps there’ll always be a chance for something so firmly into Christina Perritory. Caught somewhere between the unravelling derangement of “Jar Of Hearts” and overall rangelessness of “A Thousand Years” though, it’s found something of a no-man’s land: all unease, but no punch.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Finally, Australia finds a way to thank Pink for all the memories.
[4]

Alfred Soto: At first it sounded like a ponderous ode to her guitar, but if the Veronicas think instruments and hence music deserve praise then they need to write better material than Linda Perry on Xanax.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: This sub-P!nk piano-and-strings ballad is limper than a piece of wet spaghetti.
[1]

Jer Fairall: The vocal suggests someone who has spent the time they should have been listening to Tori Amos absorbing the schlocky lessons of Christina Perri and Lana Del Rey and Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper” instead. Even the genuinely rueful note struck, ever so briefly, by “In the end, I hope she was worth it” is diminished by a string section and backing ahhhs that reveal someone’s failure of confidence in the whole thing.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I am generally pro-The Veronicas. The Veronicas make it difficult to sustain this position.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: I think I’m ruined, because all I can think of is “this is so boring.”
[1]

Will Adams: A miserable mess of confused metaphor and maudlin arrangement. If this is some attempt to display artistic growth, they’ve got it really, really wrong.
[2]

Anthony Easton: I know this is fucking terrible — sentimental nonsense and well thought-out hack work with very few interesting details — but how she sings ‘”you ruined me” is such a total capitulation to bad choices and worse metaphors. It ruins me in solidarity.

Jonathan Bogart: The sentiment is general enough that it could easily be latched onto by a horde of done-wrong-by listeners. That’s the problem. It excerpts too well: the same two-note plod (expertly timed and orchestrated, of course) throughout, with no change in dynamics or ideas, means it’s always only going to be an accessory to an emotion, and never a center of emotion itself.
[5]

Reader average: [6.6] (5 votes)

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One Response to “The Veronicas – You Ruin Me”

  1. There’s so much to hate about this song but I liked Jar of Hearts too much to be genuinely mad at it.

    (also if someone had mentioned Kelly Clarkson you would’ve nailed every reference point that this song made me think of.)