The Singles Jukebox

Duet Monday continues with this winsome pair…

[Video][Website]
[5.40]

Patrick St. Michel: Pleasant. 
[3]

Josh Langhoff: A Fender Rhodes noodles its lazy orbit around the two stars. A trumpet shows up, does something, wanders off. Stevie Wonder would have welcomed this melodic idea and then written it into a song.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The electric piano and trumpet evoke a supper club vibe, itself a break from the kineticism of the Asian pop acts that leak in America. The performers’ vocals intertwine like roses in a trellis though. It’s pretty — can’t resist it.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: Not sure how the smooth jazz card is going to serve in the future for other stars, but Suzy and Baekhyun do acceptably enough with this cafe ambiance track. The weird “I don’t care” bridge part is lyrically bewildering to me though, and there’s an odd feeling to the overall record that lacks the intimacy a duet like this should bring out. Give it 3/5ths of the cappuccino and wait a few days before we call them back for a second go-round.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Cute like a lunch date: the smooth jazz arrangement is holding hands or walking in the park, or at least an on-screen montage of the same. Trumpets and scat-singing push this into the realm of pastiche, yet the bumping drag of the beat pulls it back. Some romances are too thin to be real — this one is reserved for the young, the attractive, and the immaculately smart-casual — but superficiality is good enough for a passing fancy like this one.
[7]

Mo Kim: A bump-and-grind of an instrumental — and those horns, oh my! — wasted on a melody so inert you may as well have picked out two singers from your nearest church choir. When the most interesting vocal choice either singer makes is not singing (the brief half-measure pause when Baekhyun isn’t drawling all over the track), that’s not good.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Two vocal tricks complicate this Norah nothing. The periodic slip into R&B cadence is the less interesting one. The periodic distortion is the more interesting one. Alas, neither occurs that often.
[5]

David Sheffieck: The production’s just jaunty enough to avoid inducing sleep, and the vocal interplay is solid. But I wish the trumpet had been incorporated more — the moment where Suzy echoes its phrasing hints at a more interesting song, one that’s performed by a trio rather than a duet.
[6]

Brad Shoup: “Dream” has the feel of a standard without some indelible melody. But how many thousands of other songs can you say that about? Suzy and Baekhyun size each other up and find no one wanting: even pushed to the extreme front of the mix, they sound just as cozy as that electric piano.
[6]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: While i can certainly praise Suzy’s or Baekhyun’s voices, both taking interesting individual melodic routes (also in texture, sounding sultry and enticing even in their subtlety), i’m mostly in because of the guitar work in the video version. Those spellbinding harmonic gestures, and the killer solo before the second verse, give the tasteful jazzy accompaniment the dynamics it needs to sustain this charming little vocal love game. And yeah, of course this traditional pop/smooth jazz direction is cheesy as hell, but come on, isn’t it delightful?
[8]