The Singles Jukebox

“Cut Copy Me” was no fluke.

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[6.57]

Katie Gill: Wait, is the ACTUAL Petula Clark? Like, “Downtown” Petula Clark. She’s still making music? Holy shit, good on her, great job! And she’s still making good music! The vocal manipulation is expertly used to create a breathy, ethereal song that fits wonderfully. This song gets a little too mass appeal New Age at certain points but as someone who adores mass appeal New Age, I am a hundred percent behind that. Of course, I readily admit that this high score is mostly because I’m a sucker for 1960s British Invasion pop and am just so pleased that at least one person from that range of music is still making music but you guys! It’s Petula Clark with a new single in 2016!
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: Three and a half years ago it was easy, even romantic, to conceive “Cut Copy Me” as a beautiful curiosity, the confluence of veteran performer and modern technology as an involuntary meeting with mortality. The reality was never so poetic, because there were other, less fatalistic offerings on its accompanying album, but it’s only now that the illusion is completely shattered. “Cut Copy Me” itself did talk in terms of the everlasting, but here that becomes positively Swiftian: a chance of eternity at risk of severance; a lurking recklessness. There’s nothing cosy about this, it’s a paramour’s threat, literally visceral and not afraid of it. It’s ample proof that while biographical narratives are nice, that doesn’t make them autobiographical.
[8]

David Sheffieck: Even in her classic hits, Clark’s voice was mixed far forward: her clarion coo supported by a subdued backing. While her vocal is throatier and richer here than the Clark I grew up on, the production could learn a lesson from that approach. Because rather than offering a contrasting bed for Clark’s voice, the strings and percussion of “Sacrifice My Heart” swallow it up slowly as the song builds, leaving nothing but a morass of midrange.
[4]

Alfred Soto: No snide “Downtown” jokes in this blurb — I’d be living uptown and walking to the local bookstore to read Thomas Mann when I reach my AARP period too. The faint disco pulse suits a vocal that shows the degree to which Sarah Cracknell’s winsome plainspeak owes a debt to Petula Clark; “Sacrifice My Heart” would’ve fit without complaint into a St Etienne album released in 1995 — or a Marianne Faithful album in 2002. 
[7]

Edward Okulicz: “Cut Copy Me” suggested Clark’s voice had plenty of modern use. This one doesn’t work as well. Rather than being a wise swoon, I feel like Clark’s offering me some sweets while the production smothers me with a pillow.
[4]

Peter Ryan: Just in time for Northern hemisphere fall: I love this kind of overcast, lightly gothic disco, to which Clark’s windswept timbre lends itself splendidly — airy enough not to weigh things down, but with enough shadings in her delivery to give the workaday lyric resonance, to suggest that she knows a few things about yearning and sacrifice. They might be a touch too chilly for her, but it’s not too much of a leap to envision yet another incarnation of her career, should she get bored — now introducing, Client P!
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Among the great unheralded micro-genres is high-drama synth laments by older artists: Maggie Reilly’s “Break of Day,” Blackstar, what Sandra is doing now, this. “Sacrifice My Heart” is gloriously shameless: sweeping strings and that crashing percussion that shows up in gothic ballads, heart-monitor beeps and backing vox like longing robots. Clark’s resiliently human voice. Extra points for the title sounding like something Mia Thermopolis would write.
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