Today’s theme is distractingly skinny singers.

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[5.00]

Anthony Easton: The elephant standing in this room is the profound mediocrity of the track right? Because i want to talk about nothing more than the elephant being the profound mediocrity of this track.
[3]

Kat Stevens: This is undeniably a big pile of arse. Especially the dubstep breakdown (not clumpy enough for proper heffalump madness) and the fake swearing. Yet the “Aaaaaaaaaaaah! There’s an Elephant!” is clearly the successor to “What’s that coming over the hill ISITAMONSTER” and thus wins several gold medals for silliness.
[5]

Iain Mew: If you saw that Alexandra Burke’s comeback was produced by Erick Morillo and called “Elephant” and were hoping for a song in which MASSIVE HULKING TRANCE SYNTHS act out the part of the metaphorical elephant in the room, you are very much in luck here. I wasn’t clever enough to think of the synths part, which made it even better when I realised that that was the plan. I also like how the song leaves open to the imagination what the unmentioned problem actually is, making it impossible to argue with the emotion belted out.
[8]

John Seroff: It’s hard to imagine a clunkier metaphor to base a dance song around than “the elephant in the room.” Does everyone in the club swing their trunks during the slow parts? I’m personally a bit of a sucker for this sort of silliness at 130 BPM but something this blatantly standard is unlikely to win any new converts.
[5]

Brad Shoup: It still seems odd to hear what is so clearly a club-aimed tune set in the living room. I suppose that’s on me for thinking of this kind of pop-house as purely functional. Still, the argument serves the song: our impassioned singer is flayed with tuning, and while it’s included to augment the soft-pulsing sections, major demerits are in order for explaining the metaphor.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The title’s the best part, and she has neither the vocal nor lyrical chops to develop the metaphor. When the track turns into an early nineties dance party at the 1:29 mark, my sigh of relief fogged my hands.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: This is some primo kitchen-sink drama, and if you can’t tell whether Alexandra’s voice is agitated or just overproduced, or whether the drama is meaningful or the cheap work of crescendos, that’s probably by design: using the medium she’s got.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Somehow the trance synths sound broodingly violent rather than oppressively joyful, as her voice loses its grain in the watery dissolution of AutoTune. None of that explains why I like it; maybe it just explains why I’m not bored.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Alexandra Burke is talented, sure. But she’s not talented enough to sell this song’s misjudged lyrics (even in Neil Tennant’s hands, the elephant in the room expression sounds clunky). And her personality is a long, long way short of being able to escape being processed until she’s barely more than a voice compressed so it can stream on a 28.8kbps modem, and to make it worse she’s attacked by bog-standard shit 90s Eurotrance to further complete the humiliation. Mind you, she does better with the hysterical bits so her next single would do well to feature some proper shouty bits. “Elephant” is a confused mess, too awkward to even call a good try.
[3]