We’re giving up on them…

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[3.20]

Josh Winters: Not actually an anthemic bisexuality ballad but instead a high-school-GSA public service announcement.
[2]

Patrick St. Michel: Cram in as many progressive points as you can, but this is still a very boring after-school special.
[1]

Thomas Inskeep: “Buzzy” because of its lyrics, which first romantically reference a woman and then a man, but otherwise no one would notice. This is essentially Train with a stale trip-hop beat and a C-list rapper who sounds like he’s aping will.i.am, and it might actually be even worse than I’ve made it sound. 
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: Ooh, male pronouns! Too bad the song’s so blandly antiseptic it comes off as Christ-pop rather than sexuality-is-a-spectrum. I look forward to scrambling for the mute button when this starts to swell in an insurance ad.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: There’s something curiously hymnal about this, especially in the pre-chorus. In particular, when Chad King sings about “him,” he could very easily be referring to Him. Praise be the perceived universality of love, especially when writing a pop song. Essentially these two are Simon & Garfunkel for the Diply generation: trendy vicars making songs for trendy vicars (and, of course, everyone else implicated by their name). They might even have written it after hearing “See You Again” and “Lean On Me” in church, who knows? What’s certain is that it’s pleasant, but not world-changing, exactly how it should be.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Pop is the richest soil for corn. Not schmaltz — that’s the malted version, the kind you can break off and pass around. Corn is the kind of sentiment made for one: solo drives and lipsyncing in the mirror. For whatever reasons, I have a taste for it. “Hold Each Other” has that crotchet piano/boom-blip approach I love — the production team must love it too, since the strings practically have to jump the track to meet it. The melody is fully-realized, strung out with trembling, and when the Worlds run out of words they just sigh “ohhh”. Then there’s the corniest part of all, the supertextual stuff: Chad King singing to a man, Futuristic delivering an entire verse without specifying a gender or even a body type. Even if it feels peculiar to talk about, I’m glad it’s here. 
[10]

Mo Kim: There’s one moment in the song where I think of what could have been, that bit at the end of the chorus where the duo sing “We hold each other” and their voices sound so close to cracking that the line transcends its meaning, the “holding” less a refuge than a flimsy bulwark against the brokenness of the world. Unfortunately, instead of honing in on the heartbreak of that moment, A Great Big Middle School Talent Show chose to bury it under super-twee piano plinks and the most lifeless and loud drum beat this side of Katy Perry.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The strings cushioning the “She keeps my heart from getting older” — hell, the way this Nate Ruess wannabe sings that line — are more terrifying than the gallows.
[2]

Micha Cavaseno: Yeah, that one note guitar noise that sounds like a siren in the production? That’s actually my internal alarm for just how sickly saccharine this song is, and that’s where the one point in my score is coming from. Woooooiiii…..
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: Are we sure he isn’t singing to his adenoids?
[2]