Mark Ronson ft. Katy B – Anywhere in the World
Sounds more like her than him… and yet…
[Video][Website]
[4.71]
Sabina Tang: Is this really the single, or was there a file name mixup along the way? Why does Katy sound like she’s laying down guide vocals? Why does the music cut out for several seconds where one would expect a bridge, as if someone had forgotten to flick a switch? And what happened to the track that contains the actual melody?
[3]
Kat Stevens: It’s tempting to dismiss this Olympics/Coke tie-in as a lazy gimmick (Ronson piecing together a track from the sounds of various athletes hitting hurdles/pommel horses/archery targets/whatever) but I have found two better reasons to dismiss it: a) Katy B is cruelly underused, having been given a dreary hook that is unlikely to inspire anyone to win a gold medal or get off the sofa as part of an anti-obesity drive b) Ronson doesn’t use any swimming noises which makes me VERY UNHAPPY.
[4]
Alfred Soto: The thundering backbeat shows promise, but Katy can’t pull a melody out of her hair. Both go down together.
[5]
Anthony Easton: The sound at the 2:16 mark that is half like an ignition clicking futilely and half a bongo is so fantastic and different — so seductive and new that I want to join a cult founded on that sound.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Matthew Herbert doing freestyle: that’s as best as I can describe it, and a fair bit better of a possibility than the result. Katy’s forlorn melody fairly subverts the global-village text, a lonely spirit wandering through a training facility of similarly lonely spirits. She’s the best thing about a capacity track that crowds its athletic source material with panning synths and vaguely martial drums.
[6]
Iain Mew: So much of the appeal of Katy’s album was about its specificity. “We could be anywhere in the world” comes close to being its own review of the problems here, and Mark Ronson doing something in between Timbaland and On a Mission doesn’t make up for it.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Give me “Movement,” or melodic movement; this needs some kind of improvement.
[5]