Usher – Scream
Don’t call it a comedown…
[Video][Website]
[4.38]
Iain Mew: Scream if you want to go trance-er.
[4]
Anthony Easton: I like the whoop baby whoop baby whoop and how it calms down a bit in the middle, then rises to a kind of furor. Nice work.
[4]
Alfred Soto: In this execrable pop climate Usher is better off singing luxuriant ballads like “Climax” instead of competing with The Wanted, but then again I’m never been fond of Mr. Raymond’s club thumpers either. Only the sexual hysteria that is his alone to summon plants root.
[5]
Brad Shoup: I like the (presumably) non-Western scale he’s working with, but it’s the only scale I can get a full grasp on. It’s another widescreen club-pop hit, miles away from his Confessions phase (which I’ve appreciated even more each year). He’s still a singer of remarkable emotional nuance; unfortunately, he’s painting with about 50 shades of gray. Its massiveness is pre-ordained.
[6]
Erick Bieritz: Usher describes his forthcoming record as his “artistic” album, using the term as an unqualified superlative several times. It’s… not clear what he thinks that might mean, but it’s certainly intriguing that his lead single was the Diplo-produced, Jukebox-lauded “Climax” and that one of only a few guest spots on his album is reserved for Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun. That’s intriguing. What isn’t so intriguing is “Scream,” more lite-house club filler in the same vein as last year’s Guettatized “Without You.” It’s not clear if this is or isn’t “artistic” but it’s certainly clear that it isn’t interesting, so one can only hope that his album will involve a lot more climaxing than screaming.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: “Without You” — without Guetta. Surprisingly not better for it, because Guetta’s hammy house gave Usher all the space he needed to emote, to long, to lift. Max Martin and Shellback, for all their skills, don’t work as well with that kind of club palette (this is basically a worse “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love”) and they tend to anonymize singers and gifts great and small. If “Scream” has any of the feeling that might invoke an actual scream, Usher’s gone mute at the point of expression.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: If I were naive enough to think critics got any consideration in these sorts of things, I’d call the early release (ahem) of “Climax” an act of deliberate label trolling. Here we all thought Usher’d give us more craft, more complex depictions of relationships and music that took more than a quickie’s length to compose; instead we get another fucking clapper, ripped off from “More” and subtler than “OMG” only because Usher doesn’t specify which baby-talked body parts he wants to see nude. He doesn’t croon “ooh baby baby” so much as bloop it, like he’s pressing two keys. The only thing getting fucked here is my hopes for the album.
[3]
Alex Ostroff: ‘Scream’ is a song in which Usher both imitates and brags about his ability to elicit orgasms (unlike the previous not-actually-about-orgasms single, ‘Climax’), so rather than being judged as a club banger, I’m evaluating it on the same metric as R. Kelly and The-Dream. Compared to ‘Falsetto’, which is a gentle build up to ecstasy, ‘Scream’ consists of Usher and the beat pounding away energetically with little to no variation in tempo. Plus, even though both Terius and Usher spend a lot of time talking about what they plan on doing to you, Usher doesn’t seem particularly interested in your pleasure, except insofar as it’s a demonstration of his own skill. Let’s be honest. When you’re The-Dream, you need to put in the effort; Usher’s stunning enough that he knows he doesn’t need to bother. Smug bastard.
[5]