Calvin Harris ft. Ne-Yo – Let’s Go
Yo dawg, I heard you liked “We Found Love,” so here’s Ne-Yo on your Calvin Harris so you can trance while you trance…
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[3.57]
Anthony Easton: It is an odd space, where the artist who guested on one of the biggest hits of the summer is so anonymous that you cannot tell him from the guest star, or why there was a guest star on the track in the first place. (Three points for the disco lasers.)
[3]
Brad Shoup: Disappointingly similar to “We Found Love” in key places, but a sequel that swaps out its original star has a lot to make up for.
[1]
Andrew Ryce: On paper this is the stuff that dreams are made of. In practice it’s the stuff that unfortunate, middling reality is made of. Strangely, the chorus’s sizable BIG PUMPING TRANCE RIFFS don’t quite mesh with Ne-Yo’s vocals; he sounds too subdued, disinterested, the unfortunate dance-track-guest-vocalist syndrome. The verses are absolute fire though: it’s pure Europop-fluff with more substance than Rihanna’s gliding performance on “We Found Love,” and with an at least half-decent chorus, I’m ready to possibly hear this one ad nauseum. But it’s Ne-Yo, and Ne-Yo is one of the greatest R&B singers of our time, and so naturally it will probably go ignored, at least in the US.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: It’s been pleasing to see that mutant strains of trance have colonized the American charts along with the concurrent invasion of Euro club sounds: subtler compositions like Drake’s “Take Care” and Rihanna’s “We Found Love” squeezing in through the boisterous stampeding Guettas, Cruzes, and LMFAOs. Calvin Harris tries to repeat his success in producing the Rihanna track by reconfiguring the same basic palette into a (not very) different song. It fails for three reasons: the tension and release in “Let’s Go” is less finely controlled than in “We Found Love”; while Rihanna has an icy blankness that alchemises platitudes into emotion, Ne-Yo is an expressive singer here given nothing to express; and, finally, “Let’s Go” is a degraded version of something that has come before. No, not “We Found Love,” but Ne-Yo’s sinuous, sublime 2008 single “Closer.” Ne-Yo was among the first American R&B singers to embrace European sounds, and he did so by subsuming them into his own creative outlook, rather than — like Usher after him — lending himself out as a hook for hire.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: “Let’s Go” is better than “We Found Love” because seizing the night’s ladies makes more sense than yellow diamonds in the light as you’re standing side by side. It’s different than “We Found Love” because the synths sound like Missile Command and not agitated seagulls, and because even Stargate and Afrojack can’t make Ne-Yo sound colder than Rihanna. In all other respects, it is the same song. It needs no further rewriting, Calvin.
[5]
Iain Mew: The record that “Turn Up the Music” wished it could be.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Ne-Yo does barely better than The Bieb did on his collaboration.
[1]
This is disappointing. I don’t even care about the similarities to “We Found Love” – I actually really dig the music. It’s just that, as Andrew pointed out, Ne-Yo doesn’t blend well with trance at all.