in which we ask ourselves what this “joy” thing is…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Brad Shoup: It’s been so long since I’ve had to consider the soul/funk revival. Between buying a Budos Band album and this I’ve started engaging with modern Southern soul on its own terms, picking gorgeous melodic threads from slow jams, and observing indie rock trip over its folksy shoelaces. What am I to do with a half-decent Mike Terry impression and a bashful recreation? The soundspace is so empty, and it’s not like I can wait around for hooks. This is hero worship without the save.
[4]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Hard-earned wisdom about facetious men taking advantage of women, no wonder how worldly they consider themselves. “I’ve seen a hundred thousand faces and only called a few my friends,” Jones sings, knowing sure and well that she should have kept those lessons close to heart. She sings of memories of misery like she’s wrangling with it at that very moment, the final vamps sounding particularly vivid. Ambient swirls book-end the rambunctious bloodletting, like you’re coming out of a portal the moment you leave the world of Jones and her (skilled, on the money) band.
[7]

Crystal Leww: This is a song about the downs of a relationship more than the highs, but bloody hell does Sharon Jones sound joyous.
[7]

Jessica Doyle: The video is 3:33 long, but we start seeing shots of the band packing up their instruments around 2:58. Which seems appropriate: the backing arrangement feels astonishingly lethargic. I kept wondering if there was something wrong with my headphones, that I wasn’t picking up the guitar. Or a better percussion. Or something.
[4]

Anthony Easton: Sharon Jones is a lot like T Bone Burnett. I know that they are skilled, and they have made some amazing music, and occasionally work that I really love, but no matter how much I listen to them, I get this oleogenious layer of genre purity and historical revivalism, of a kind of music was better in the good old days. Jones is better than Burnett, because she might have less problematic baggage, but the feeling is still present. 
[7]

Alfred Soto: Listening to Jones ascend a few notes at the end of a line while soul girls chant “feelin’ like a stranger to my happiness” is exactly the kind of dialectical shit I like to hear in music, even xeroxes as mellifluent as this. But while it doesn’t overstay its welcome, the peals of laughter underscore the packed house party of a mix. They’re trying too hard to sell a contradiction.
[6]

Ramzi Awn: Stream-of-consciousness soul sounds good when Sharon Jones is singing it.  And “Stranger to My Happiness” delivers an effortless three-and-a-half minutes with a good hook.  No reason to press pause on this one.       
[7]

Jer Fairall: Sharon Jones is a powerhouse, and I guess I’d be perfectly content if she and the Daps kept on making records that sounded exactly like this for decades to come, but as Nate Patrin hinted at in his review of Give the People What They Want, it’d be interesting, and certainly refreshing, to hear them leave the luxury of 1968 for a bit to explore the encroaching strains of electro-funk and disco that Marvin to Diana and the Temptations eventually had to face. “Stranger to My Happiness” is typically confident, and deftly executed, but almost boringly comfortable, Jones’ assurance and dexterity as a vocalist trying to force a sense of danger and tension onto the material that just isn’t there in the song.
[6]