The Singles Jukebox

All this after we didn’t even do Marit Larsen’s single too.

[Video][Website]
[5.50]

Micha Cavaseno: Sounds like Kate Bush if her ambition had been sapped and then replaced by sap.
[2]

Alfred Soto: The track builds towards a piano and strings climax that’s one of the year’s best instrumental passages; the rest is soupy because it wants to hide its conventionality.
[6]

Iain Mew: “…so now it’s time to carry on” bursts in Raven, song fully formed, like it’s always been around. What comes after is solidly constructed and the arrangement is expansive and polished, but that exciting moment of being thrown in mid-flow is the one that most elevates the song.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: Mover over, Delta Goodrem and Lucie Silvas! Oh, you did. Granted, Radio 2 have probably had at least one song that sounds exactly like this on their playlist every week since, but it’s about as redolent of 2004 as Little Britain. Goodrem’s and Silvas’ hits sound better than they did at the time, but even in another ten years this will be far too syrupy. It’s impressive, if anything: proof that there is such a thing as over-pleasant.
[5]

Brad Shoup: A fine valediction, sung as if from the perspective of… I dunno, one-half of a performing duo or something. Everyone’s just paddling toward that TV-movie ending, where the singers go slo-mo and all the etc. is covered in small white type. 
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Marion Raven’s first album was an unheralded high watermark of the Clarkson/Pink genre of girls with shiny guitars and big pop songs. It’s weird then to hear her grown up from that sound, itself a growing up from her M2M past, and settling comfortably in the kind of Bareilles/Goodrem inspirational balladry you always get the feeling she could have done in her sleep but never would have. It’s weird to hear her voice so devoid of anger. It’s nice that she’s picked up a wonderful arrangement, but it doesn’t sound especially like she believes in the song. For all that, the right placement in some TV drama and this is a global hit in waiting. And yep, it’s better than the lead single from Marit Larsen’s album.
[7]