So this isn’t the last xx-related thing we’ll be looking at for a bit, either.

[Video][Website]
[5.83]

Jonathan Bogart: I don’t know if this is for old times’ sake or for new times’ sake. I was never all that enamored of Everything But the Girl, and I’ve never really heard any xx, but this hit me quite the right way, her voice as coolly melancholy as ever and the digital dreampop rustling up to submerge her.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I don’t have any deep thoughts or notes, but I want my love of this recorded.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Tracey Thorn has one of the greatest voices of the past few decades, but even it has limitations. Covering the crackling, not chilled part of the xx’s original is a welcome move, and of course Thorn handles the lyrical nuances deftly. But emulating the original vocalist’s raspy, untrained style, staccato and strain intact, plays against so many of Thorn’s strengths that this is genuinely uncomfortable to listen to.
[6]

Brad Shoup: It’s the sound of someone breathing into a window. Last time I checked, R&B didn’t stand for Respiration and Blahs.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Although she’s exactly the singer who can inhabit this example of not unpleasant atmospherics, for once she sounds tentative, exploratory, as if the producer had recorded a first take.
[4]

Jer Fairall: Take note, Feist: this is how it’s done.
[7]