uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

[Video][Website]
[3.57]

Crystal Leww: Has this genre of music changed at all in the last century?
[2]

Megan Harrington: I can’t, in good conscience, say I dislike this song. Those pouty xx guitars, the pastoral Bon Iver imagery, even Bay’s conjuring of ’80s Bono at the music video’s beginning are all qualities I find striking despite their over-saturation. “Hold Back the River” is the sort of solipsistic struggle fist pump I would have idealized in my early-20s. Bay sounds like the kind of guy who can’t respond to your texts and doesn’t have any time for you during daylight hours but when he’s high at 2 AM mumbles some platitudes about how you’re his perfect fit. I can’t say I dislike “Hold Back the River” but I can say it’s a fraudulent sentiment rounded out with hacky pop-folk anthemics. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: God ain’t holding back the river if you keep strumming and yelping like that.
[3]

Iain Mew: I’m here for roomy, twinkling guitars that sound like Daughter making it to the mainstream. Not here for soulful bellowing of pleas to mystical water, but the ending once that suddenly drops out is lovely.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Someone saw the Kings of Leon “Redneck U2” lane had been left open. The whole sing-to-the-simple-jumping-melody verse format is “cute” if not tedious, and those fast vibrato moments rest on his song like teenage blemishes showing a quaintly earnest quality. Pass tho.
[2]

Anthony Easton: James Bay is this weird section of Northern Quebec that has always been terra incognito from me, though less with my time in Montreal, where I would see Inuit families shopping at the IGA in Alexis Nihon, because the groceries were a tenth of the price as they were up north. A country-inspired song about the plane ride from James Bay to Montreal (sung in French and Inuktitut), based on the theme of lonely water (or a river that flows from James Bay to the Saint Laurence), would have potential for something genuinely new. I was bored enough by this guy that I had to invent counterfactuals. 
[3]

Will Adams: I was with it until the Of Monsters and Men tribute band revved up. The quietest moments of “Hold Back the River” are the best, so the additional orchestration seems superfluous.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: Another guy who came up with a nature metaphor who thinks that shouting it over and over makes it deep. 
[3]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: There’s nothing bad about James Bay, really: he’s got a solid voice, understands how this type of emotive srsface-songwriter gamut is ran, probably is A Lovely Guy. But there’s nothing interesting about “Hold Back the River”, not when “Budapest” and the other one that sounds just like “Budapest” are never off the radio, and Lord knows that those were not fascinating songs. At least “Budapest” has the oops-a-daisy singalong in its verse, or is that the other one? Anyway, a [10] on the “Budapest” scale.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: For those for whom James Blunt and Ed Sheeran are too edgy. Bay has that straining-vocals thing going on, that’s how you know he’s “soulful” and means it, man. 
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: Serious question: Is there a big dam-bursting/unbursting scene in an upcoming franchise of 2015-6? Mockingjay? James Bay is crying out to confirm my preconceptions.
[5]

Josh Winters: Apparently there’s a sizable demographic that wants to know what it would sound like if Ed Sheeran made a OneRepublic track. You can count me out.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Music for a bathetic placement on something like Waterloo Road or whatever, where the absurdity of the show will be first enhanced by the song’s self-seriousness, then reflected in it. Only look again — that isn’t a reflection. The absurdity was there all along. It’s mundane absurdity, that of the previously heralded Michael Kiwanuka and Tom Odell, ridiculous in its beigeness, yet actually too beige to be really ripe for ridicule. Perhaps this at least has a pulse, but then so do fields. Lots of them. Endless, endless fields.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Once you hear Bay’s t-shirt-in-winter of a vocal track the bashful acoustic plucks, you know we’re about to board a tambourine train to some bullshit nature metaphor. He mentions a “friend,” but even if he’s trying to recapture some platonic energy, you can see why the other person put in the distance. He can stack as many yowls together as he wants, he can’t drown out the phrase “life got in between”. Supremely weaselly.
[2]