The Singles Jukebox

Give Alex da Kid an inch and look what happens.

[Video][Website]
[2.90]

Brad Shoup: After a couple years of being a wisp-for-hire, Skylar Grey steps up front for… a song about isolation. Find no hope here — her merely-decent voice points up the verisimilitude. Thank goodness for the multi-tracked handclaps and BGVs; otherwise I might’ve envisioned a heartbroken teenager recording in the basement and given this song a higher rating.
[5]

Hazel Robinson: Skylar Grey keeps turning up with unbearably sappy choruses on hefty, emotionally punchy tracks. It works on “Coming Home,” grates on the (nevertheless exceptional) “Words I Never Said,” and she somehow seems to have managed to do it on her own track. Even overlooking the hopelessly teengoth lyrics, this is utterly poor. Sure, she’s worked with rap’s elite, but so did Dido ten years ago. And Dido shits all over this whiny mess.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Skylar Grey’s solo career isn’t supposed to seem like a punishment. After all, she and Alex da Kid are responsible for “Dance Without You,” a thunderbolt wallop compared to this light pat. But there are pills! And cutting! And she dyes her hair! And walks a tightrope and sets herself on fire and oh wait, I guess we’re in metaphorical territory now. Sorry — just distracted by the powerless chords in the dippy chorus. You were singing something? Oh, the song’s over. Huh.
[3]

Michaela Drapes: A song that glamorizes cutting is infinitely worse than a thousand pro-ana Tumblrs. It’s hard to say what’s the most terrible bit here: the snoozy, plodding beat or psychically damaging lyrics.
[0]

Zach Lyon: God, she actually thinks this is helping, doesn’t she?
[1]

Jer Fairall: Next, on a Very Special Blossom…
[1]

Martin Skidmore: I really like the shuffling, atmospheric beats from Alex Da Kid on this. I also like Skylar’s sweet pop-soul vocal on top of it, but she does sound like she is kind of stiffly following the song rather than taking it on. I wished she could go bigger on the chorus in particular, maybe especially on the title word. Still, it’s all pretty good.
[7]

Rebecca Toennessen: She’s got a honeyed voice, mad multi-instrumentalist/producer skills and a girl-next-door-turned-a-wee-bit-slutty-but-still-respectable looks. But I’m missing a bit more vocal desperation, more anguish, more FEELINGS. Sometimes I want a beautiful voice to deliberately make itself ugly; this is one of those times.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: Carrying a whole song with one really good trick can be done, but one as wet as this would embarrass a performer ten times as accomplished. It’s so hackish I expect everyone involved to reveal it as a parody halfway through.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: I have a lot of affection for Grey’s thin, smoky voice — her turn on “Coming Home” was one of the highlights of 2010 as far as I was concerned — and I can’t get enough of the non-single promo “Dance Without You,” which is 90s alt-rock chords over a stripped-down dance production borrowed from Tom Waits’ beatboxy Real Gone, but the dull monochrome of this song isn’t written well enough for its routine self-pity to spark into anything more generous. Bless anyone who feels less alone for it, but I prefer to suffer in silence.
[4]