…and Rebecca Ferguson. She’s a real artist.
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Katherine St Asaph: On the Stateside “X Factor,” a finalist who’s essentially Joe Cocker was described in utter seriousness as “the male Adele.” If that wasn’t blatant proof of “X Factor” strategy post-“Rolling Like a Katamari,” there’s this.
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Alfred Soto: Hackery, of course, but I prefer Ferguson’s supermarket-bought grit to, say, Lana Del Rey’s hand stretched towards the spotlight. I bet you expected interesting things out of Macy Gray too.
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Brad Shoup: “I told management they needed to let me write it because otherwise no one’s going to think I’m a credible artist,” Ferguson told The Sun. Which is funny, cos if you picked your top 10 Aretha Franklin songs, odds are she’ll have no better than a co-writing credit on a couple. And anyway, it seems that modern pop credibility means recruiting your session musicians to approximate the style of a time more “real” than ours. That’s the tack here, with Ferguson providing little more than a scratch track for a forthcoming Aretha project. It shoots for Jessie J-style balloon-popping, but settles for Duffy discovering The Band. Impeccable taste is pretty boring, it seems.
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Iain Mew: It’s the audible level of toil that’s gone into the unspoken “…and me!” at the end of the title that makes this equally hard work to listen to.
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Kat Stevens: Rebecca always looked massively uncomfortable doing big dance bangers on X Factor but it didn’t stop them sounding awesome! E.g. on “Sweet Dreams” her voice had a spitefulness to it that was totally compelling. Unfortunately for her career launch it seems she’s retreated into sappy soul-sucking ballad boredom. What a waste! To make things worse, in The Current Climate the ‘poor-but-happy’ theme has a nasty whiff of Conservative propaganda. Hey, Britain! Times may be tough and you’re homeless because of the last 30 years of godawful social housing policies and artificially inflated house prices, but CHIN UP at least now you’re unemployed you can VOLUNTEER out of the goodness of your heart to help out the Big Society. Why not start by slaving away unpaid for Tesco? Makes me sick to my fucking stomach.
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Edward Okulicz: Her voice is good but no better than a thousand session singers plying their trade. What separates her is opportunity, and damned if she’s not going to grab it with both hands — she’s shooting for soul and feeling, but she’s over-selling it, emoting as if it’s already a standard we know and love and trying to raise herself to some monolithic representation of the idea of Real Artistry. She makes her voice tremble with vulnerability ever so slightly as if she actuallyfeels a damn thing, which she doesn’t, and couldn’t; nobody could. The song, the arrangement, it’s all signifiers and no meaning. It’s not even trite, it’s nothing. I guess she could probably carve out a long-standing career as the old Corinne Bailey Rae, but even she decided to go off and start being good leaving a hole nobody actually needs to fill.
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Anthony Easton: How does this sound so American, so 70’s, so weirdly R&B/easy listening/country revival, like when a few years ago we remembered Bettye Lavette, Betty Davis, and Mavis Staples? How did something this good come out of the second runner up on “X-Factor”? (also, a money, a house, and a car is much better than love, and no honor in poverty when one is starving, but that is beside the point.)
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