The Singles Jukebox

His life USED to be brilliant, anyway.

[Video]
[3.25]

Julian Axelrod: Seeing Robin Schulz and James Blunt on a song together feels like finding out two random people from your high school are dating. You stumble upon a pic of them together on Facebook and think, “How do they know each other? Weren’t they, like, three years apart?” But you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, so you look through the pictures and videos they’ve posted. And you think, “Why do they both look so awkward and uncomfortable? Is someone holding them at gunpoint and forcing them to stage hiking pics? Who would do that to them?” And you haven’t thought about either of these people in years, but now you’re looking through their profiles and details about them slowly come back to you — what they used to look like, who they used to date, a conversation you had at a party. You think, “Wow, that guy looks completely different now. What happened?” And before you know it, you’ve spent half an hour thinking about these people who you don’t even care about. They seem happy together, so who am I to judge?
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Robin Schulz has this strange desire to be the Calvin Harris of the Lite.FM crowd. All of his attempts at dancepop are barely danceable, instead feeling like a dude who specializes in making industry remixes of acoustic guitar sadsack music. Hell, if he revealed he was a generic musician and did an all-acoustic album of his hits to this point, would anyone truly notice the difference? Here with James Blunt piping along sycophantically, he goes 0-2 in trying to uplift and just managing to go through the motions; he sounds what those hunger-blocker pills feel like.
[2]

Thomas Inskeep: Oh, my fucking god. Not only has Schulz decided to up the tempo to “turbo,” he’s brought in the horrendous Blunt, responsible for one of the worst songs of the century, to spew his hideously shrill vocals all over the proceedings, singing a bunch of vapid lyrics. One of the worst singles you’ll hear this year.
[0]

Cassy Gress: James Blunt starts out this hands to the sky stomp sounding overly compressed and with a shivery, sped-up-sounding vibrato, but by the time we get to the chorus, that vocal tremor actually works for melodramatic lines about every last heart in the world breaking. Still think this could be a few bpm slower though; it’d lose some of the frenetic edge, but there’d be more confidence in the title word.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: The King of the Balearics dips his toe back in the waters of “1973” and is probably surprised when Schulz brings out his funny noises. They fit satisfactorily though, and this is in essence a “Waves”wave remix of a James Blunt song, which is exactly what “High”, “Wisemen” and the plausible Schulz inspiration “1973” itself have been long calling out for. The lesson to be learnt from this is that Schulz and Blunt should get on to a remix album now, quicksmart.
[6]

Alex Clifton: Further proof that 2017 is the Darkest Timeline: James Blunt returns with an EDM club-banger that nobody asked for. It could be worse, I guess–Autotune, a superfluous verse by Pitbull, unintelligible chipmunked vocals–but that doesn’t mean this is good, either. 
[3]

Katie Gill: I don’t know if James Blunt is actively TRYING to stage a Mike Posner style comeback as he tries to move from his 2000s drippy pop image to something more house and EDM but it sure feels like it. Problem here is, the Seeb remix of “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” was actually GOOD. This feels like a middle of the road attempt at a club banger that would have been a hit a few years back but now just sounds sadly stale.
[5]

Alfred Soto: I’ll be fucked if any sparrow-voiced strummer thinks he can gank Mike Posner, and no one, not even Reince Priebus, has a right to say “it’s gonna be OK” in 2017.
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