No, not a heartfelt tribute to Blacc’s recently deceased friend John Lennon…

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Katherine St Asaph: Heather Havrilesky, in The New York Times: “American pop culture leaves little room for mixed feelings, thereby inciting mixed feelings every step of the way. No wonder filmmakers and TV producers like Steven Spielberg and Matthew Weiner have inserted the ambient glee of Saturday-morning cartoons and radio D.J.s gasping over sunny weather in order to conjure foreboding and suspense. The hopeful words of wisdom inscribed on a tea bag take on the weight of an omen; the funeral dirge and the bubbly pop anthem eventually start to sound like the same song.” And how.
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David Sheffieck: Make no mistake, this is the follow-up to last year’s “Wake Me Up”: while “The Man” may have been Aloe Blacc’s first official single off this album, this was released almost a year to the day after his Avicii collaboration and is clearly angling for the same summer-smash position. It’s hard to imagine a worse attempt. Where Avicii brought a charge of the new to that single with his mesh of EDM and country tropes, Blacc sounds like he’s scraping desperately and cynically for something that will appeal to the same audience. Chanted choruses, rolling beats, bluegrass flourishes, lyrical platitudes: Blacc is angling for college kids to turn this into the exact same kind of empowerment/party anthem that “Wake Me Up” was. Why should they, when they did so much better a year ago?
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Alfred Soto: Or: Fastball’s “The Way,” updated.
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Jer Fairall: Blacc’s voice remains an appealingly smooth evocation of Bill Withers’ greatly-missed sense of bruised wisdom, but a little grit in the production would do a lot to offset the greeting-card platitudes that he’s favoured on his recent singles. Hard to believe that this is the same guy who was covering the Velvets only one album ago.
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Anthony Easton: Has Aloe Blacc had days where they listed all of the ways that this song makes me hate him, therefore invalidating his general message? Also, I wish fervently that he was gone sooner than tomorrow. This is the kind of feel-good douchebaggery my Calgary cousin will play on the way back from the bar, after spending more money there than I have for groceries in a month. I refuse this kind of romantic poverty tourism.
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Megan Harrington: Aloe Blacc is perilously close to doing that Bruce Hornsby gloss-over-the-struggle-with-some-big-chords-and-a-lot-of-open-hearted-thrum thing. It’s easy to reduce this song to its fist-in-the-air “Hey!” chorus, but there’s also a bridge that works chronologically backwards from five star hotels to roach motels, from Rodeo Drive to thrift stores. Blacc’s bottom line is to live for the moment, and he’s aware that his moment is better than most, but “Here Today” isn’t an empty-headed distraction from true suffering. 
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Thomas Inskeep: In case the Tony Rich Project was too hardcore for you.
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Patrick St. Michel: This flaccid, sub-Sesame-Street-level observation of a song — whoa, I’m going to die? And I don’t know when? Makes you think — wasted nearly four minutes of my supposedly precious time on this planet to hear Aloe Blacc preside over schlock even fun. wouldn’t want any business with. Way to contradict yourself.
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Will Adams: Aloe Blacc’s cloying timbre reaches its nadir at the cringe-worthy chorus, when he sounds so satisfied belting a cliché as trite as “here today, gone tomorrow” in the service of yet another YOLO anthem. Ladies and gents, we’ve found the year’s most embarrassing moment in music.
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Brad Shoup: I get the feeling Aloe didn’t spring for drums, preferring instead to put a mic up to the studio next door. During the bridge, the track cuts out to just piano and kick pedal, but you can barely tell the difference.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: I lived in ignorance until the little hours of June 2nd, when Aloe Blacc’s “Ticking Bomb” was announced as the theme song of WWE’s Payback pay-per-view. I overrated “The Man” and its hoary clichés; made excuses regarding his refusal to be interviewed for a recent documentary on ex-label Stones Throw; felt a pang of weird pride when I knew he was swimming in Avicii money. And yet it took a sonic alliance with televised wrestling (one of my favourite things in the world, for all that is sophomoric about it) to break the spell: the graceful, genre-bending brainiac that gave us 2006’s Shine Through was no longer here. He was now flying the flag for WWE Soul, an offshoot of the brainless WWE Rock that regularly appears as theme songs for wrestling pay-per-views. Appropriately, “Here Today” is as obvious as you’d imagine — yup, you’d be right for thinking “gone tomorrow” pops up in the lyrics — and more depressing than you’d think. Blacc used to be one of the weirdos, one of the guys you wanted to root for, but then he cashed in his chips and went corporate. In music, that’s called wasted potential. In wrestling, you’d call that a heel turn.
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