The Singles Jukebox

The big picture here is that this song didn’t do what we all thought it would.

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Nellie Gayle: London Grammar’s debut album cemented their status as the patron saints of melancholia. Most of the songs were centered on winding Hannah Reid’s beautiful voice around heartbreaking and soulful elegies. ‘If You Wait’ was mostly a static narrative on loss and confusion, but ‘Big Picture’ signals a departure from that era into one where the stories are still unresolved but also defiant. ‘Only now do I see the big picture/But I swear that these scars are fine’ – it’s fair to say that whatever hurt precipitated LP1 isn’t quite healed, but it’s being viewed in a larger context. There’s something poetic about sadness, and that’s what London Grammar specializes in. The first single off the new album beings with ‘Let winter break.’ They have forced that chapter to conclude, and a new one to dawn. Now they are using bolder and more upbeat instrumentation to transition towards the next chapter in this narrative: recovery. 
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Hannah Jocelyn: I’m not a fan of “only you could have hurt me in this perfect way tonight”, but everything else here is stunning, even if it doesn’t quite build to the level it teases. Here’s hoping they “About Today” the hell out of this live, but as a sucker for endlessly drawn-out reverb and delayed guitar lines, I don’t see much wrong here. 
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Claire Biddles: London Grammar are too polite and too precious to expel emotive weight sonically. Hannah Reid’s vocals are like a classical singer attempting pop — an Adele-like big confessional stripped of its power and feeling by its precise enunciation. I expect the anxious instrumentation to explode into something bigger eventually, but it just stops. Perhaps I should be glad of this break from indie music’s preoccupation with the Arcade Fire-lite build-up-and-release structure, but the song ultimately feels tentative where it should be resolved. “Big Picture” might make more sense as the first song on an album that loosens up eventually, but taken alone it’s too frustratingly tightly-wound.
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Iain Mew: The grand sweep of the music and Jonny Buckland-like guitar had me thinking that they were moving away from the vocal-much-larger-than-everything-else-but-careful-with-it approach. Then comes “I swear these scars are fine” and the riff looping round without exploding like it so easily could, and it becomes clear that the powerful sense of just about holding something back has just spread to the rest of the group.
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David Sheffieck: I kept expecting this to explode into some major-key, sing-along chorus, and was almost disappointed when it didn’t. But then I realized I’d been pulled completely in as the song unspooled like a wire over nearly five taut minutes, and easy catharsis was neither what “Big Picture” wanted to achieve or what I’d needed from it. The rare song that sounds arena-ready without pandering to the cheap seats.
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Micha Cavaseno: You know, they certainly get that if you’re going to make a big deal out of thinking something’s panoramic, emulating U2 is a good way to do it. The problem is, Hannah Reid is mistaking singing loudly with feeling as achieving expression… There’s moments where she’s cramming words in, other times where she barrels forward. And not one time I can remember a solid detail about this song.
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Scott Mildenhall: Cinematic as London Grammar often are, it’s a surprise Hannah Reid can suddenly tell, because it doesn’t sound like the fog has cleared. Big and hazy are two of their identifying characteristics, and along with her empyrean voice, they set the tone as well as ever here, but there’s also an unfortunate tendency towards listlessness. While the guitar motif — ripe for remixes — shores things up somewhat, the lack of melodic direction leaves “Big Picture” a little hamstrung; all atmosphere, but hard to get a handle on.
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